Welcome to Mysteries over Martinis! This blog is a mix of unexplained phenomena and personal encounters served up with a mystery-themed cocktail. It’s a recipe for intrigue!
Jim Harold’s Campfire S’more
Ingredients:
1.5 oz Smirnoff Fluffed Marshmallow
1 oz chocolate liqueur
A little half & half to taste
Graham cracker crumbs to garnish the rim of the glass
Moisten the rim of a martini glass and press into crushed graham crackers. Pour the ingredients into an ice filled shaker. Shake well. Strain into the martini glass and gather around the campfire.
Happy Hour with Jim Harold (9/9/14)
Mysteries over Martinis will be featuring a new segment called, “Happy Hour.” This week, I’ll be spending Happy Hour with Jim Harold. Jim is the host of several popular podcasts, including The Paranormal Podcast and Jim Harold’s Campfire. Combining his interest in the paranormal and love of broadcasting and technology has been well received. His shows are regularly among the top podcasts in their categories on iTunes. He has attracted an impressive international fan base since beginning his endeavor 9 years ago. His success has resulted in the publication of a series of books. The third book, entitled “True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold’s Campfire 3,” has just been released and is already number 1 on Amazon Kindle’s Supernatural and Unexplained Mysteries categories.
It goes without saying that you’re incredibly involved in the paranormal field. What peaked your interest in the paranormal?
I had been interested in the paranormal since I was a young kid. I’m in my 40s now and this goes back to the 70s. I loved “In Search of,” loved reading books about the paranormal and that really extended through my whole adult life. In 2005, I heard about this thing called podcasting. I had gone to school to do kind of what I do now but in a radio station or television station. I ended up working in sales for advertising and I heard about this podcasting thing. I thought, you know, I’m never going to become a professional broadcaster. I’m in my 30s, I’ve got a wife, I’ve got 2 kids to support. It’s going to be very hard to switch careers now and become a broadcaster. But, wouldn’t it be nice if I could do a podcast just to dabble in it. I genuinely loved it for the love of doing it. Not for fiscal rewards or anything like that. Then, I thought, what am I going to do a show on? Like most people, I have a lot of different interests. I love history, sports, music but nothing was striking me. Then, I thought, I wish there was an interview show (in terms of podcasts) where people treated paranormal topics seriously. When I realized there wasn’t a show like that, I thought, I could do that! For the first 3 years, I kind of dabbled. I’d do a show in 2 months then not do a show for 4 months. I remember, I was at one of my kids’ ball games and I had been listening to this podcast every morning. The guy had sponsors and a very good podcast. You know, people are e-mailing me every week asking when we’re gonna have another show and here I am at my sales job in advertising in the media working for a radio station but I’m beating my head against the wall. Isn’t the universe trying to tell me something? I started getting consistent and within 6 months, I had my first sponsor and then it kept growing and growing. I made the decision a couple of years back, to make this a full time thing. So, it’s been quite a trip and I still have that genuine interest in the paranormal.
The Paranormal Podcast was your first endeavor in which you interview people actively involved in the field. What prompted the creation of “Campfire?”
I thought, wouldn’t it be neat to do a show where every day people tell their strange experiences? Since I was a kid, people I know would say, “You won’t believe what happened to me…” My dad had a couple of stories which were actually in my first book and I thought it’d be nice to do a special paranormal podcast with just stories. I recorded a few stories and compiled it into a show and put it on The Paranormal Podcast feed. I got a really good response from it and said, “That is a second show!” I thought, What is it like? Well, it’s like people gathered around a campfire, so what could I call it? I’m like, Okay, don’t over think this… call it “Campfire.”
For me, being someone who is open about the paranormal, I found people would come to me with their stories. Did you have a similar response once you started The Paranormal Podcast and perhaps that carried over to Campfire?
You know, I never thought about that. Maybe it did, because I know I had to have had e-mails going back 8 or 9 years. People will e-mail me all the time with stories, not even for Campfire. I gotta think you’re probably right and that did play a part in it.
Campfire has had an amazing response and now you’ve published your third book: “Campfire 3.” It contains some of the most intriguing encounters shared on your show. What qualities do you consider when you’re trying to compile these for your books?
I want something that seems genuine and for the most part, I think the people who call into the show are very sincere. Even if it is something explainable like sleep paralysis, I still believe they are telling the truth as to what they experienced. I’m sure over the years I’ve gotten a couple of people who were making stuff up. For the most part, I detect a lot of sincerity. Some people even get quite emotional when they retell their stories. I look for sincerity, I look for something that has some kind of twist or something that is unique or different. I like to have a mix of stories in the book as you might have noticed. They’re not all “Oh my God, I’m scared to death!” Some are poignant, some of them might be funny, and some might be weird. We had one in this last book where a woman as a young child, swears that a statue of the God Pan chased her through her living room. The ironic part of it was, when she came back out with her parents who were asleep, the statue was knocked over and it was moved across the house. It was 30 lbs. She was only 4 years old and couldn’t possibly have moved it. And, as she thought this statue was rummaging through her mom’s purse, the purse contents were scattered and strewn about. I also like just the strange stories, which make you say, “What was that?!”
Like you mentioned, you cover a broad spectrum of topics. Are there any in particular that you find the most fascinating?
I’m always interested in the after death stories or near death experiences. There’s a really good one in the new book about the Ides of March. It’s about a man who dies and tells his family to tell his wife that he’ll meet her again on the Ides of March. Then, 15 years later, the day after the Ides of March, she passes. I always enjoy the afterlife stories because to me that is the ultimate mystery. What happens, if anything, after we die? I tend to think there is something that happens. I’m always fascinated by those stories.
I was perusing through some of the stories in the new book. One that I really enjoyed was called “My Round Faced Angel.” It is about a woman, who as a child, had a skeletal disorder that affected her legs. She was going to have surgery to correct it but the procedure was fairly new. The family was concerned about it and wondered if it was the right decision. Her mother claims that she had a dream that her daughter’s guardian angel came to her and told her that the surgery would go well and not to worry. Not only is this a fascinating story but it made me question why the angel went to the mother rather than the daughter.
Well, I would think in that case, maybe if the angel had gone to the child and the child told the mother, the mother might say “Oh, Honey, you’re just imagining things. You’re just dreaming.” Therefore, neither one of them would have peace. By going to the mother, the mother is the adult in the relationship, so she believes it and shares is with her child and they both have peace.
The more I research and learn about the paranormal, the more I find my perception is changing. I feel like I have more questions than answers. Has that been your experience as well?
Oh Boy, you almost took a direct quote from most my interviews. Something I usually talk about in my origin story is when I started I thought, This is going to be great! I’m going to do this for six months and I’m going to talk to Stanton Friedman on UFOs, Brad Steiger on hauntings and all these great people. I’m getting these interviews with all these fascinating people I’ve heard of all my life and I’m going to have all this stuff figured out. The truth is, exactly what you said is what I say. I have more questions than answers. I’m still convinced that there is something. I think the Campfire stories are sincere but if you look at the whole of paranormal claims, probably the majority of paranormal claims are not paranormal at all. I think they could be people who are well meaning but mistaken. Unfortunately, and this is the one that angers me the most, some are hoaxes. Maybe people have mental issues. But, I believe that there is still that smaller percentage out there that represents something real. I believe there’s something to every category of this stuff. Some people put Big Foot into the paranormal. I don’t necessarily, that one I’m a little more on the fence about. These things like UFOs, ghosts and the afterlife, I think all this stuff is real and is representative of something. What it is, I’m not sure.
When I started, I thought everything was black and white. I believed ghosts were dead people. UFOs were aliens from another planet. But you start to learn that it’s far deeper than that. There seems to be so much bleed through with all the topics, which is actually what has inspired me to keep digging deeper.
To be honest with you, I think the universe is a far stranger place than any of us ever think of. We don’t realize how strange and bizarre it is. Even with ghosts you sometimes get things like trickster elements and imposters. I think exactly what you’re saying is what’s happened to me. I used to be very siloed in my thinking. UFOs were a category here and ghosts were a category there. Even researchers who’ve been doing this for a long time think it’s all connected. For example, I had Whitley Streiber on The Paranormal Podcast a couple weeks back. He said that the visitor [whom Streiber claims to have encountered] “has something to do with what we call death.” That was really mind blowing.The more I ask, the more I feel like I need to ask.
If you could choose something to experience for yourself, what would it be?
Well, this is a tough one. I’d like to experience this if I could have a do-over. Let me explain. I’m not asking for this, but I would be fascinated with a near death experience. If I could experience that but magically survive.
What would you not want to encounter?
I would not want to be in any kind of encounter with a demon. I was just talking about this today with an author I interviewed for a future show. They claim to have experienced this kind of thing. I am a firm believer there is evil. I have many guests, particularly the new age guests, who will say there’s no such thing as evil, just lesser evolved entities. The author even said, ‘if there’s good there’s probably got to be evil.’ There’s a counterbalance. I think there is evil and I don’t necessarily want to experience it. I’ve thought about this a lot and I’ve never claimed to be a paranormal investigator. I’ve never even went on a ghost hunt. The more I think about, the more I think that for me that is the right choice. I don’t want to stir something up and I don’t feel qualified. I don’t want to be in a situation where I’m kinda like a guy in a bowling shirt who says, “Instead of going bowling, I think I’ll go hunt ghosts.” I never want to say never, but I just shy away from it.
I’ve heard you talk about the experience you had after your brother passed away. Would you mind recounting it?
No. Not at all. My brother was autistic and unfortunately he died at a very young age. He would have been 27 when he passed. We had gone to the funeral. My family lived down south a little bit. Me and my wife drove down to the funeral and it was very sad, of course. We were coming back and I was flipping through the stations on the radio. I’ve always liked Frank Sinatra and music like that. I like rock and a lot of other kinds too. This station came on and we were in a rural area. I thought, “This is fine.” It was some noise in the background. Then, this instrumental comes on and I’m like, “Who is this? This sounds vaguely familiar. I should know who this is.” I tend to have a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of this music, more than the average person, at that time for my age. I was about 30. But, I couldn’t place it. Then, the DJ comes on and says, “That was Lawrence Welk with his 1960 hit “Calcutta.”” It was odd because my brother was very in tune with music. He loved music. As a kid, he would watch Soul Train in the morning and he’d watch Lawrence Welk in the afternoon. Then, he’d listen to country music the next day. He had varied taste. But one of his absolute all-time favorites, I don’t know why, was Lawrence Welk. When we were little kids in the 70s, he was still on the air. In later years, they put it on repeats and he absolutely loved it. You could have asked him who his 3 favorite artists were and Lawrence Welk would be one of them. It was significant to me. Someone who was relatively obscure on the radio in 1999 and I just happened to be driving through a rural part of the state where stations come in and out and I just happen to hear it. To me, that was him saying, “Hey brother, don’t worry about me. I’m okay.” That was my interpretation. Maybe it was hearing what I wanted to hear and feeling what I wanted to hear at that time. But it was significant to me.
You just released your third book which is a pretty big milestone, but do you have any other upcoming projects in the works?
I’ll be at the Paradigm Symposium the first week of October. You can find more information on that at www.paradigmsymposium.com. I’ll be moderating a VIP panel there. I’m honored to be doing that. The promotion has just started on “Campfire 3” and I’ll be on Coast to Coast in a little over a week. I’ll continue with The Paranormal Podcast, Campfire and The Paranormal Report. The Paranormal Report is my video podcast which I do every week with Micah Hanks. We do a video review of clips and give our thoughts on if they are fact or faked. I also have my own Roku channel which is free. We’ll see where all that leads. I have a feeling that bigger and better is coming but I don’t know in what form that might take. Or maybe, we’ll just keep doing what we’re doing. I very much enjoy that as well. We have all our Plus Club shows at www.jimharold.net but if you’re brand new I recommend you visit www.jimharold.com and listen to all the free content. If you really enjoy it, then check out www.jimharold.net where I have a show on ghosts, a show on spirituality, one on true crime, which is one of my favorite shows to do, one on conspiracies and one on UFOs. Plus, we do webinars. We did one last night with Rosemary Ellen Guiley on communicating with the dead and spirits. If folks just want to get the free stuff, go to www.jimharold.com, iTunes or anywhere fine podcasts are found.
Thank you for joining us for Happy Hour! You can purchase “True Ghost Stories: Jim Harold’s Campfire 3” for only $2.99! Just click the link below.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/digital/fiona/kcp-landing-page?ie=UTF8&ref_=kpl_mn
If you’ve had a mysterious encounter you’d like to share, please e-mail me and be sure to like the Mysteries over Martinis Facebook page. Weirdness is always welcome!