Sometimes old family homes have dark histories that even the current generation aren’t aware of. On this episode, you’ll hear a story about one of them.

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Welcome to the PEEP Podcast! I’m your host Nicolle Morock, and I’m grateful you’re here! The two big ideas behind the PEEP Podcast are to show that the paranormal is more normal than most people think and to connect the science to the psi, including ESP, hauntings, and psychokinesis! In this episode, we will be discussing a haunted homestead, and I’ll introduce a new segment.

But first, I want to give you a quick writing update: The edits of Keeper of the Mystic Moon are finalized, and I’m waiting for the cover designer to send over an initial design. Because this month, I need to add this book to The Signing Store for Reader Nation, I’m going to forego launching this one with a Kickstarter. There will be a third book in the series, hopefully next year, and I’ll probably do a Kickstarter for that one, plus an omnibus with all three books, Krayvyn’s short story, and any bonus chapters or other creative things I come up with between now and then.

After that, I’ll either write the third novel in my Rayna Smith series (she’s been waiting so patiently) or start the new alternate-earth-jumping Sci-Fi Fantasy series. If you want a taste of that one, sign up for my newsletter at nicollemorock.com, and be patient. I’ll send a link out to the short story, titled Marie, that introduces the main character and the expanded reality she suddenly finds herself pulled into. If you like stories about flawed humans with good hearts, archangels, and rules that are difficult to live by, you’ll love Marie!

Alright! To misquote Monty Python, now for something totally different:

To get back to this podcast’s first tagline, “Science + Psi,” I’m going to start including a news story about psi research near the top of the podcast whenever I can. I made this decision on my way into the office for my day job last Friday, and within just a few hours, my friend Paul randomly texted me about a breaking news story about a research study related to paranormal experiences. This is not a regular thing with us – we’re usually joking about cryptids – so I took that synchronicity as confirmation, as any good intuitive would.

Here’s the story:

An article was published on August 6, 2026 (last week, if you’re listening to this episode when it releases), titled, “Making sense of the extraordinary – An investigation of the content and prevalence of appraisals of nonordinary experiences,” in the journal PLOS One.

This article describes a study of survey responses from 5,117 Brazilians. Quoting the article, “The sample consisted of 5,117 participants and the demographic distribution in terms of age, gender and geographic region broadly aligned with the 2010 census data. However, highly educated individuals were overrepresented in the data compared to the population structure.”

The online questionnaire began with the Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences, comprising 38 experience items, including topics like another self in body, auras, awe (negative), awe (positive), déjà vu, devotion (objects), devotion (people), extrasensory perception (minds), guidance, hopelessness, joy, light, loss, love, lucid dreams, meaning in life, misfortune, near death experiences, out of body experiences, past life, presence of extraordinary forces, presence of the deceased, psychic vampirism, smells, sounds, touch, visions. The full study lists all 38, but you get the idea.

Participants responded to each experience listed with either “Yes” or “No.” If a participant selected “No,” the next experience (the next most frequent item within the item pool) was presented. If “Yes” was selected, the participant was directed to a detailed appraisal questionnaire.

The frequency question was presented first. If the participant reported having had the experience only once, subsequent appraisals focused on that single occurrence. If the participant had experienced it more than once, the appraisals referred to the most salient experience.

Here are the highlights:

• The most common context for having a non-ordinary experience was when the person was alone, at about 39%. The next most common setting was “religious or spiritual” at 10%.
• The most prevalent state of mind during the experience was “awake and alert” with 56%.
• When considering altered states of consciousness, the two main items reported were “Sleeping (dreaming)” (18.24%) and “Falling asleep, waking up or exhausted” (10.69%). Only 3% related to being under the influence of alcohol or drugs when they had their experience.
• 63% of participants said their experiences only lasted up to a few minutes or were instantaneous.
• 38% said they had their experience 2 to 3 times, while about 30% said it only happened once.
• And 67% said it happened when they were adults, as opposed to teen or adolescent years.
• An average of almost 50% of participants reported feeling some degree of joy or wellbeing during the experiences, while 25% perceived them as emotionally neutral and 25% felt some degree of suffering or discomfort.
• When looking at the long-lasting life effect of the experience, a combined 51% of participants on average perceived them as mildly or strongly positive, while 31% reported feeling neutral or no effects, and about 15% felt mild to strong negative effects.

There is a lot more data to read through in this study, so I’ll put a link in the show notes directly to it. Several news outlets covered it at a high-level last week, but I believe in reading these things for myself. Not all news reporters understand how to read scientific research and even fewer take the time to do more than summarize a press release about it.

I always recommend finding the original source or an interview with the study author when reviewing these. That way, you aren’t being editorialized to. (Actually, I recommend that with all news, when possible.)

Okay, no onto this episode’s topic – it’s one of the chapters from my book Please, don’t call me psychic: stories from my paranormal life. This one is about a family’s homestead in eastern NC, and the spirits that occasionally visit. It also includes one of the wilder ways in which I’ve had an intuitive message validated after the fact. Keep in mind that I published this book in 2019, and some things have changed since then, but I am sticking with the way I originally wrote this chapter as I read it to you.

Without further ado, let’s dive in!

10 NSPIR Story: The Homestead in eastern NC

Geographical location: rural eastern North Carolina

Location type: private residence

Claims of activity: ghost of a little girl in the house, garage, and yard, unexplained lights and sounds in the old house

Lessons learned: I need to trust myself more when intuitively receiving information.

EVP available online: no

There is a man who works for the North Carolina Department of Transportation, whose family is from eastern North Carolina. They live on what we called “the old homestead,” which, at one point, used to be a large farm that included surrounding properties. I think at this point, it's still a pretty large property with a new house near the front of it. Behind the new house sits a much older house that isn't being used, and around the older house is a pasture for longhorn cattle.

The owner of the property called us because his family was experiencing a full body apparition of a little girl, who at one point visited them inside the new house. That event scared the young son of the family. They obviously didn't want him to be afraid, so they said forcefully to the little girl, “You're not allowed inside the new house. You can stay, but not inside the house.”

 Not long after that episode, she was seen in the garage. Apparently, she knew the difference between being in the garage and being inside the house. She's also been seen on the back deck and playing throughout the yard that runs between the new house and the old house.

There have been other things that happened in the older house not associated with the little girl. At one point, the property owner’s father was in the older house, and he said it seemed like an explosion happened right next to him as he was leaving through the front door. It completely freaked him out, and he did not want to go back into that house after that.

The last person to live in that house was a great aunt. She eventually went to a nursing home, and passed away there. The homestead had been in the family for over 100 years, and at one point the property had been much bigger. Unfortunately, one of the forefathers was a gambling man who apparently made a few too many bad bets and lost a large portion of the property surrounding the homestead.

There were some other family history stories that we were told. However, those were the key points. As we walked around the property, the old house was the most interesting energetically to me. It was basically being used for storage so there were some rooms that you could hardly walk in, and almost everything in those rooms was very dusty.

There was one room that had lots of boxes and a cradle on top of a box with an old baby doll in it. At this point in our investigations, we were using video cameras regularly even though there were some locations where we seemed to always have trouble with the video equipment. There were still other locations where we didn't seem to have any technical difficulties. Thankfully, this turned out to be one of those locations. However, we still didn't really come away with any video.

Here’s an excerpt from an email in which I summarized my portion of the video review:

Just a few things of note: I saw NO orbs on my segments. That seems noteworthy considering what Carol saw on camera 1. On camera 4, I noticed a few very brief (just a few frames, not even a second) flashes in the far back right corner of the room. Upon further review and looking at camera 2 in the adjoining bedroom, it appears they were reflections of car lights coming in the other bedrooms window. (Darn it!)  Also on camera 4, the focus was lost pretty early on at 00:30:22. I also logged a couple of points with digital breakup on camera 4.

I will probably now have creepy dreams about that darn baby doll in the back room. I hate those things.

I think George purposefully gave me the room with the baby doll in it to review. We tended to split the video recordings up among the team members that investigated a location so that the video review was spread evenly. I spent about six hours, staring at a baby doll that was staring at the camera, and it messed with my mind because I think dolls are creepy – especially old baby dolls. I just kept expecting that stupid little thing’s head to twist around and smile at me. But I digress.

Anyway, during the investigation, we spent a good bit of time and each room of the house doing EVP sessions. In the second bedroom of the house, we were standing scattered about the room, and the property owner was with us. While other team members were asking questions and trying to get some sort of response, I was trying to figure out what word was attempting to form in my mind. It started with a Sh sound like Sharla or Charmaine or Charlotte. It was a shar sound for sure, and it was so persistent and insistent in my head that I finally spoke up despite the fact that I knew that if it didn't make any sense to the property owner, I might look kind of silly. I asked him, “Is there a name associated with the house that starts with a C-H-ar, or S-H-ar, but either way, Shar was the sound that it started with.” I couldn't figure out what the rest of the name was. He thought for a moment, shook his head, and gave me that baffled look that I was afraid I would get. So I said, “Never mind. It probably is nothing, just my imagination,” and backed off.

We went through the rest of the house and we heard some noises. We got an interesting EVP that sounded like a sneeze outside the house – a human sneeze – but there were no humans outside the house, only longhorn cattle. We're pretty sure their sneezes don't sound like a human sneeze.

We went back another time after the girl ghost had been active again, and did a little more poking around, but other than good conversation, we really didn't come back with much of anything. A few weeks after that initial visit, I got a message from the property owner, asking if it was okay if he called me. Normally, I'm pretty protective of my cell phone number, but he was a good guy and he said he had some interesting stuff to tell me about. So, of course, I decided he could call me.

He was pretty excited on the phone and said that he had learned a piece of family history that he thought I might be very interested in. It had to do with the family who had lived in that small house. Apparently, a couple generations back, one of the younger females in the family had been sexually assaulted and became pregnant. She bore a child from that assault, and the child mysteriously died within a couple of days of birth. The baby was buried in the family cemetery, not too far from the homestead. The property owner did not know the story until an old friend of his father's was telling him the story just a few days before he decided that he needed to share it with me.

He went to the family plot and learned that the child's name was Charla. I was both thrilled and a little freaked out when he told me because for once, I listened to my intuition and said what was coming through out loud. At that moment I thought because it made no sense to him, I must be wrong and my imagination was just getting the better of me. Then weeks later I got the validation that I didn't expect. It was great! I needed that.

Thanks again for listening.

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