Do you believe in the paranormal, the mysterious, the supernatural, the extra-ordinary? Whether you are a believer or not, I think you’ll enjoy this week’s extended BLBD episode with storyteller Orion Couling. Get ready for a ghost story, a wondrous story, and ruminations about architecture, culture, and history – not to mention a spontaneous reading of a monologue from Midnight Mass about what happens when we die.

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Transcript:

Dianne Hullet: [00:00:00] Hi, I am Diane Hullett, and you’re listening to the Best Life Best Death podcast, and this episode is going up in late October, 2025, and I’m super excited with my guest because my guest is a very special person that I just met in New Orleans. Welcome to Orion Coulings.

Orion Couling: Couling. Couling. Couling. Couling.

Singular. Yeah.

Dianne Hullet: Couling singular. Hi Orion.

Orion Couling: Hi. Hi. Glad to be here with you. It’s a nice day in New Orleans. The sun is shining, the birds are singing and there’s skeletons hanging off my front porch. New Orleans in October.

Dianne Hullet: How, how can it get any better than that? I was just down in New Orleans for the Doula Palooza conference and there were about 300 end of life doulas there and one of my wonderful colleagues there arranged for us.

To do a ghost tour of New Orleans, and Orion was our guide. And as he kept going and telling stories, you know, as you were, as you kept extolling what you had to say to this group of death, doulas, all of a sudden the light bulb went off. And I was like, oh my gosh, he should be on the podcast. And then of [00:01:00] course, Orion’s got his own podcast.

So yeah, we just, I wanna talk about all of that and more. Yeah. And maybe just start off, introduce yourself. Tell us about your podcast, and we’ll go from there.

Orion Couling: Yeah. So, hello, my name’s Orion Couling. I’m a ghost tour guide here in New Orleans. I’ve been doing tours down here for 12 years. I’m a specialist in Ghost Stories, but I do a broad spectrum of tours here in the city from the Garden District to some really obscure tours.

I do a, a queer history of the French Quarter tour. I really enjoy that one. I do a cigar whiskey tour of the French Quarter, so there’s some different topics I cover, but I’m known for my ghost work and I have a family legacy of it. My, my father was a ghost storyteller and ghost tour guide, and so is his.

Dad. And so it’s one of those things that we kinda carry this tradition as a family. Telling ghost stories. I find it to be really cool. I think it’s, I think it’s, to me it’s something very powerful. You know, if you’ve never been on a ghost tour before, ghost Tour is really, you’re walking through an historical area.

A tour guy is telling you cool spooky stories. It, it’s such a very. Basic concept, but there’s something quite magical [00:02:00] to it when it goes well and it goes well the majority of the time. So having a guided tour through Supernatural Stories is it’s a real blast. It’s a big thing down in New Orleans, but I’ve also done this in Salem.

I’ve done this in Boston, I’ve done this in Chicago, I’ve done this on the oceans, I’ve done this on Great Lakes. Telling ghost stories is an. Start form. And if it’s done properly, it should be evocative. It should be cathartic. If done properly, it should transform you and move you. It should move you from point A to point B to point C.

There should be a journey that you go on if it’s done well. And I’m blessed that here in New Orleans we have quite a few of my peers are just truly exceptional. So it’s nice to be out there. Seeing the work done well and the work hasn’t always done well. But I think that’s why you wanna make sure you’re at the right tour guide for you.

You know, I tend to try to attract an audience who is empathetic, and that was why it was so wonderful to be out with a doulas. I’ve had the. Pleasure of having a, a doula with us when my father was passing on, and I saw firsthand the power of the work [00:03:00] that was being done. And for me as a family with many different religious perspectives within the family, having somebody there who would kind of help us navigate the expectations between one sibling to one parent to another sibling to a cousin was I thought.

Particularly deft of that particular individual in the room. And I will forever be beholden to that. So when Whitney who was the individual who got ahold of meme, reached out about this tour we was thrilled to create a tour for the end of Life doulas, where I was going to do talk about the funeral culture, the burial culture, and the traditions around death we have in New Orleans.

’cause there really is an ongoing journey here where death is not separated from the living. In most places I have found across the world, we only talk about death when we have to. And here in New Orleans, it’s in your everyday lifecycle that you discuss the death, right? It is not taboo, it’s not far away.

It’s now it’s presence. It [00:04:00] continues to be present, which then. In my experience, it makes it a lot more easy to digest when it comes rolling down the hill rather than blindsided by death. You’ve walked with us the entire time, it’s been a partner with you on every Mardi Gras morning, you know? And so I’m really attracted to that and that I find that especially in the years since my father’s passing, as I’ve been living here full-time since then, for eight of the years I was doing this work.

I was split time between here and Chicago and now living here full time, I have found that death is a companion and, i’m a little ahead of the game now in our conversation, but one of the things I had a really good time recently with a, a fellow artist friend of mine is I kept having these experiences on my tour where people would come and they would bring their grief to the tour, and then the tour became an outlet for grief and they would pull me aside and tell me their special stories.

About their specific hauntings, about their paranormal experiences, about their loved ones, who would’ve loved this tour, who they wish were there. And I I was telling my friend Brianne, who’s a, a gifted artist here in New Orleans, and he helped me create a, a [00:05:00] comic book panel with a character of a grief as a grief, as a companion.

Right. And the, and the grief is on the tour with us, and the grief is there with us. The grief is there to hold us and to honor not to frightened or to loom when love becomes available through grief, and there’s that cycle that we go on, right when first we encounter death, that is hard and it’s painful and there’s anger and resistance.

But eventually down the road you see that that grief is not an enemy, it’s an ally, and it shows you a pathway of love and remembrance, you know, and, and I find that that. Can, can sometimes happen on a ghost tour. And I’m really excited about when that happens. I always feel like it’s a real blessing, you know?

Can I just do a kinda a, a, a a wham bam ghost tour? Sure. But if we can really get into the spirit of the persons and the people in the group, and that’s what I call Ghost Church. When, when, when the tour, it happened on the tour that we did together it was Ghost Church. When we have a meeting of the minds, an understanding of a [00:06:00] group of people.

Bound by these traditions and these stories, I think it’s ancient and holy.

Dianne Hullet: Ah, beautiful. So it’s like bringing grief and death as a companion to all of life in New Orleans, and then on your tours. Yeah. It’s like, Hey, you’re the tour guide slash grief therapist slash deaf conversationalist that allows people to step into that and speak of it.

Yeah, I I, it’s fascinating when, you know, when I say what I do, whether it’s, you know, on an airplane or at a party where people don’t know me well, and I, yeah. They say, well Diane, what are you up to these days? And I said, well, you know, I, I trained to be a death doula and I’m actually in the end of life field.

And people either lean back and go, oh, that’s great. And they want nothing to do with it. Or they lean in and they say, oh, well, you know, when my sister died, when my parent died, when my best friend just went through something, they, they lean in. I think we’re hungry for these touch points in these conversations.

And so I can see how someone signs up for a tour and they’re kind of like, oh yeah, I’m gonna walk around New Orleans. And they find themselves [00:07:00] really. Stirred up by the experience. And I wanna add too, there was something really beautiful about it being so connected to the architecture for me, like the houses, the doorways, the windows, the balconies, and the sidewalk.

We kind of joked as we walked that this was n New Orleans is like the non a DA compliance city of all time because there was so much to trip over. But there’s this beauty to the architecture tying to these stories that I found that really moving and a beautiful piece of it too. So. Yeah, I think you have a really wonderful job and occupation and, and you, you, I think, come from a theater background and you’re also I do a position.

Orion Couling: Yeah. And I also used, I was, you know, trained to be a youth minister before I left all religions. There’s there’s a heart, there’s a servant heart that I carry. I’m no longer part of any particular religion, but I’m very drawn to acts of service and I’m very drawn to work that has meaning. I don’t just want to do a job.

I want to do something that helps. Us. I want to help myself, help others. And so this work, [00:08:00] I, I don’t want to do a generic ghost tour. I want to do one that, that hopefully helps us process something. You mentioned the architecture. You know, there’s something to be said about a city that values its, its physical story.

They were going to destroy the French Quarter in 1930s. They were going to wrecking ball the entire French Quarter, and only by the brave work of Preservationists, who, which were largely women and queer men. Who saved the French Quarter? If, if, if you like the French Quarter, think a lady and think queer, queer men.

‘Cause they were the ones who saved the French Quarter when everyone wanted to wrecking ball it. And there you are framed by this, this terracotta, or you’re framed by these wooden panels and the, and the gas lamps and the sidewalks that are trying to murder you. And you know, and it feels old ’cause it is old.

I talk to people about this too, like. For those who visited New Orleans, it doesn’t feel like any other city in North America. There’s other aspects of certain towns that are reminiscent. Savannah has aspect of, that’s reminiscent. There’s a couple streets in Boston that are reminiscent. I used to work in Salem [00:09:00] as a, as a as an actor and as a tour guide.

There’s some reminiscent history there, but the, it’s a very different architectural style. This is that mixture of Spanish Caribbean architecture and French overlay. Right? You have a Spanish Caribbean town with French detailing. Where are you gonna find that else in the world? Nowhere. You know? And, and I’ve been around, you know, I’ve had the pleasure of living all over this world.

I’ve lived in China, I’ve lived in Japan, I’ve lived in Egypt, I’ve lived in central America. And Central America is the closest to it. If you go to Guay City in Guatemala, there’s some real parallels to New Orleans there. We have to remember that we’re for almost six decades of Spanish colony, right?

And all the infrastructures rebuilt during the Spanish colonial time period. So we think French. French. French, French, French. But. The architecture. The infrastructure, and actually a lot of the food is Spanish influenced and then enslaved influenced, right? And that’s how we get a gumbo at Tofe. Jamal is the mixtures of the Spanish meals that then people from Africa who were there largely due to enslavement.

Influence. The recipes [00:10:00] have been, voila. This incredible food is in front of you. You know? So through colonization and anger and pain, we carry these, these foods. Then we also carry the stories and the architecture comes the same way. These buildings were built by people who were enslaved. They were served by people who were enslaved, and they.

It added a great example of this is the cast iron. A lot of the cast iron was made by enslaved craftsmen who put symbols of West African gods into the cast iron beneath the noses of the European Anglos they were working for. You see what I’m saying? That kind of detail, that’s powerful magic, and that’s cross generational, cross continental magic.

And it’s, that is the kind of stuff you can’t get anywhere else. And so I think the physical framework of the city does help evoke the transition. ’cause you’re in a place and people get, locals get extremely mad when people compare it to adult Disneyland. And they, they get, I don’t, because for me.

[00:11:00] Though I’m very aware of the faults of Walt Disney, and I’m very aware of the challenges of the current of the corporation, and its, its its eth ethical boundaries or lack thereof. I also am an idea. I’m a, I’m a, I’m a servant of whimsy. I’m an agent of wonder, and I understand that when you go to Disney and you go, wow, wow.

And that in that middle of wow is an open heart. And that is powerful, right? I talk about this one of my stories. I talk about how the act pretend is powerful and how as adults we forget how to pretend and it’s pulled from us. And we don’t know where Neverland is or Narnia is anymore, but this town has.

Its foot into whimsy and wonder and play and pretend in a way that just nobody else does. And I think it’s had everything to do with Mardi Gras. I think it has everything to do with Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras opened the door to a masking and costume tradition that yielded itself to Halloween. But [00:12:00] our Halloween traditions have everything to do with just compounded layers of cultural connections through journeys of death from, again, from West Africa to the Caribbean to First Nations, to to Latin America to Irish and German and Vietnamese and Filipino folks and people from the Dominican Republic Republic.

This, this tapestry, this tapestry is, is, it’s quite a beautiful thing to see and I get to witness it every night. And I think it’s partially what makes me so jazzy. My job is that like I’m just a, a fan boy way of this town. And I’m not unaware of its challenges, I’m not unaware of its challenges. I’m very aware of all the difficulty it has as a town.

I live here and, and I love it. And I live in Central City there right now, and it’s considered to be a rough neighborhood. I know my neighbors, I know the people who are around me. I know our challenges. There’s a helicopter over my head. There’s a hospital right over here, but, i’m not, I, I have no illusions about our city, about our challenges and our struggles, but every time I walk out.

I hear [00:13:00] like that solo saxophone or the solo trumpet against the night sky and the moons over the Mississippi. I say again and again on my tour. I don’t know how you don’t fall in love with this town if you only come here for Bourbon Street. If you only come here for sports and you only come here for Bourbon Street and football.

And don’t get me wrong, I like drinking just fine and I love a good football game. You’re gonna miss the majority of the experience of this town. And if you only come here to be elitist about your food and eat at the finest, finest restaurants, you’re gonna miss a whole bunch of this town. And you have to accept that this town is all of those things.

It is the, it’s a blackout drinking epicenter, but it’s also safe for sober people who want to have zero proof journey. Mocktail lists are extreme right? Mocktails are a huge deal in town. It’s a huge thing for sports. It’s also a place for leisure. Sit beneath the live oak tree, let it sway. Just listen to the, do you know about the Singing Oak?

Do you know about the Singing Oak? Did we talk about this? Tell about the Singing Oak. Well, don’t mind if I do, Diane. The Singing Oak is a beautiful tree at City Park. The Singing Oak is a live oak tree [00:14:00] which are endemic to the southeast USA. This particular tree has 15 pentatonic. Huge deep chimes inside of it, hanging in the branches, which all harmonize with each other.

This is a memorial for the live oak trees we lost during Katrina. So you go there on a nice breezy day with a PO boy in your hands and maybe a cold drink, and you put your back to that tree and you let it sway over your head, and all of the chimes sing and harmonize with each other. Who else has that?

Where else is that? Who else understands the power of losing a tree and what that does to the spirit? Who else understands what other town understands? Losing a significant amount of tree coverage to a storm and the grief, it comes from losing the trees who also have stories to tell. You see what I’m saying?

Like this, this town man, this town understands something about grief and passing of time.

Dianne Hullet: Well, let me tell you, landing back in Denver, Denver felt awfully kind of cerebral and white bread compared

Orion Couling: like

Dianne Hullet: plain old, [00:15:00] plain old chewy wonder bread compared to Orleans. You know, I mean, it really is a city like no other.

Well, I, I think this is so beautiful and I think that as humans, you know, we are creatures of story and I think in, in kind of modern dominant culture, we’ve sort of forgotten that. Yeah, the power of storytelling and why it matters. I mean, do you have anything you wanna add about why storytelling matters before you launch into a story?

Orion Couling: Sure. It’s so strange ’cause in some ways we have forgotten it, but look at the rise of podcasting. Right there. Everybody and their mother has a podcast. Okay. It’s a massive industry now. Used to be like, you know, a little thing that’s in the very back corner of the, of the world. And now everybody has a podcast.

Huge corporations have podcasts. Tiny little people have like a five person listening audience podcast. And then the flip side is one of our favorite things that we don’t go to movie theaters too much anymore after the pandemic that’s still, you know, really struggling is movies. And then.

They’re part of the streaming services, how much content they want to create. And then you would go back to [00:16:00] musicians and the stories they’re telling. I think we’re really clearly drawn to stories. It is that one of the principle motivators of civilization is the story, right? And I think that though we don’t think of as oral traditions as being part of our active life.

You’ll look around at your daily, you get up in the morning, you put on the news. What are they telling you? Stories, you know, and then you come home at night from work and you put on your favorite show, and what are you watching? Stories, you know, so we, we don’t sit around the campfire the way we used to.

We are still engaging that campfire in a different way. I just think that we have forgot the source of it. The source of it is just that one individual. You know, it doesn’t too much matter what, what gender they are telling a story that transports you from the Ilia to Gilgamesh. Where are we going with this and how do we get here?

And I think it’s a pretty straight line to moments like this. And I guess for me, I say it was wrap my tour up. I think it’s incredible that we [00:17:00] spent two hours barely looking at our phones. I think it’s incredible. I do set the parameter out there. For my audiences, I’d rather not watch them scroll on their phones.

It becomes a default fidget for us. And then it makes us leave the space and I wanna be present. And I think when I tell my, my tour and my guest at the beginning that I would like to be present with you, that’s something that’s not said very much. We barely say that. Like at a dinner table, like think about this.

If you, I, you went to dinner with your buddies. One thing, this is like we do pretty commonly with my, my friends, I dunno if you’ve heard this before, but everybody puts their phones on a stack, right? And you stack your phones up in the middle of the table and if you reach for your phone, you have to pay for dinner.

Yeah. I’m like, hmm, let it be. Let’s be here together. I think it’s interesting.

Dianne Hullet: I’ve heard that even phones out on the table are a distraction, right? Mm-hmm. The sight of a phone makes us kind of, oh, oh, I gotta reach for it. So yeah, I’m a big fan. Put ’em away. Make ’em be gone. Yeah. Stack ’em up and that person pays for dinner.

Orion Couling: Oh, I tell you, and

Dianne Hullet: I love this idea that storytelling is alive and well. It’s just [00:18:00] sort of changed in the way. Mm-hmm. But I always find there’s still something really compelling about hearing, hearing a story, not watching it, but hearing it. Yeah. It just engages a different part of my brain. It doesn’t have subtitles, it doesn’t have people acting it out.

I’m just hearing it.

Orion Couling: I agree. And there’s the thing to me, I’m a huge audio book fan and I love audio books and I, I love for me that I can listen to a story and I’m a. I have a DHD and like my hands like to do things and so I like that I can clean and listen to a story and I can, I can, you know, do my errands, listen to a story, and I just find that to be, and meanwhile, the story is fully unfolding in my head.

I’m seeing the characters, the colors, the imagery. I actually got a hold of my storytelling companions for the podcast. There’s seven of us, six of us in the total team in our group chat. I was like, guys, is it weird that I’m currently writing a story for next season because I want. To see the costumes in my head of the characters playing it out in the story I’m watching in my mind’s eye that no one’s going to see.

But I know if we film this, the costumes would be [00:19:00] incredible. You know? So there’s these strong visualizations, even while I’m just conceiving of what the story’s gonna be for next season, you know? So, yeah. Well,

Dianne Hullet: tell us tell us tell us one of your favorite New Orleans Ghost stories, if you would.

Orion Couling: Oh, one of my favorites.

Well, that’s gonna change the one I was gonna tell. Oh, okay. Well

Dianne Hullet: then tell just a, yeah. Compelling one. Tell whatever story is on your mind today.

Orion Couling: Yeah, I but now I got, I got like four stories that just started a fist fight in my head. For, for top plus. Alright, I’m gonna do one for you. I really like this story a lot, and I don’t tell it always.

So I’m gonna do a story for you about the one thing that I’m afraid of. So I am a stunt person when I don’t do podcasting and when I’m not doing ghost tour work, I’m a stunt person. I specialize in high falls, body burns and combat. I am relatively brave. I have been doing martial arts since I was four years old.

I am ally adept. I [00:20:00] can handle myself in a conflict and I used, I bounced for years in my undergrad and, and, and college years. I was a bouncer. I’m relatively brave. I lead ghost tours. I lead ghost investigations. I walk into haunted houses with gear attached to me looking for spirits and hauntings.

I tell the stories of hauntings every night. I engage in the paranormal. I am relatively brave. There are certain things that do make me afraid. Very few, but there’s a few that really cause an instinctual fear, and one of those is old dolls. Creepy old antique dolls. I just, I’m uncomfortable around them.

Recently I was at Zack Baggins Museum in Las Vegas, which is majority creepy dolls. And I was like, Aw, nuts. And I’ve had Mr. Baggins and tours before and I. Admire his entrepreneurship, but I do not like creepy dolls. They’re just not for me. Recently we had a doll visit our town you might have heard of her before, named Annabelle.

She’s from the Conjuring universe world. And Annabelle is a raggedy and doll is what she is really. [00:21:00] And she. Of course, it’s one of the most legendary cursed dolls in the history of cursed dolls. And while she was in town just for a brief 24 hour window, a plantation on the outside of town burned to the ground.

Marie Lavos house caught on fire, and 10 folks got outta jail with very violent convictions and escaped did a, they broke out. And that is why we don’t. Cursed dolls to New Orleans because that kind of stuff is just gonna pop off here. So she was we couldn’t say goodbye to her fast enough, and unfortunately, her handler died the next week of mysterious circumstances.

So, dolls man. So there’s a, a home in the French Quarter called a bore guard Kai’s House, also known as the BK House, the beautiful Greek revival town home. And you don’t see very many of these in the French Quarter. These are more largely seen in the Garden District. This building was built in 1837.

And it’s quite evocative. There’s a lady named Kais. Kais wrote a series of books in which two featured PGT bore Guard the Confederate forces who fired the first shots against the civil War against [00:22:00] Fort Sumter and PGT Bore Guard. She wrote this story where this is his grand palatial southern home.

This is like beautiful southern estate for his family. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. He had lived there from 1866 to 1868 in squalor. He was impoverished, the war was over. They lost and he was trying to rebuild his life. He’s an enemy of Jefferson Davis. Jefferson Davis is the darling of the, of the, of the city of New Orleans.

And I. He was living the outside of society in really impoverished ways, and she wrote an idea, a story about him living there as his grand palatal southern home, and it stuck. If you are really caught onto it, they really can’t leave it alone. To this day. People come there who are obsessed with the lost cause looking for that history, and it’s just, it’s not there and it really never was.

It’s an idea that an author with an imagination put into a building, but she took this money and started revitalizing the historical home, and it’s preserved largely thanks to her Everest. Now, I couldn’t see eye to eye with her about most things that she cared [00:23:00] about, but I do respect that she put a whole bunch of money into restoring this beautiful home that we now have access to, and the garden as well.

When authors get wealthy, sometimes they become eccentric and sometimes they do strange things with their money. So I grew up reading a fella named Clive Klauser who had a character named Dirk Pitt, who was a James Bond of the Water of the Maritime. Okay. I really loved these books growing up, and then this fella takes all of his money and decides he’s going to try to physically raise the Titanic.

As you can imagine, how well that went didn’t go super great. This author Kais decides what she will do is start collecting antique dolls going back into the late 16 hundreds and these dolls, 178 of these dolls of which six are on display at the collection of her museum home. When I first arrived in town two decades ago, I’d already heard that one of the dolls had awake.

One of the dolls had shifted into some kind of existence where it was moving around of its own volition. And as we mentioned that’s [00:24:00] not my favorite thing. I was like, oh, no, but I’m a big believer in, in knowing what you’re afraid of and confronting what you’re afraid of. And so I went on a house tour and I went back to the building that Kai’s bedroom is in, which is 45 feet away from the main building.

It’s called a dependency, where enslaved folks used to be living in the kitchens There. And there next to her bed, historical bed that’s there for the authors to exhibit is indeed a collection of these glass dolls, and which one of them has a blue dress and a high collar all the way up to its chin.

Very Shakespearean in this look Now I had been told that this was the doll. I was like, yikes, this doll is terrifying. And I made a note of it. Time passes, years pass. I’ve been hearing stories now for two decades about how this dog gets off its case at night and moves her out of its own volition. And I was like, that’s not my favorite thing in the whole world.

But then my friend Mia took over the, the historical docent program and she said, come on a tour. And I said, I would love to. So I went on a tour to see what she had done to revitalize the history program. And she did so much work they’ve done, [00:25:00] they have done so much good work to reclaim the authentic history of that building and to shift loose the lost cause narrative and move forward in their history and the responsibility particularly around enslavement.

So I was like, this is great, this is great. But as I went through the old exhibit for the bedroom, I couldn’t help but notice that doll was missing from the case. So I finished the tour in the garden. The docent says to me, the docent says, Hey, do you have any questions? I said, I do have got one. And she’s, what’s that?

I said, what happened to that doll? And they go, what doll do you mean? I said, I think you know exactly what doll I mean, and they go the doll with the blue dress and the high collar. And I said, yeah, that doll. And the docent said we had to secure that doll. I said, what do you mean secure the dog? They said, I’m not allowed to tell you what I mean by secure the doll.

I wasn’t sworn to secrecy, and I said, you have got to let me know. They said, I will not. I said, tell me more about this. They said, this doll was on the move. They’ve only had the building for three years, and they kept finding the doll. It used to be it was the case locked up. They come in the next day and the dolls inside the house.[00:26:00]

They lock it back in the case, they come in the next day. The dolls is a prayer chamber in the building with a sa blue Kais was very interested in very particular slide of Spanish Catholicism. She had Spanish prayer cell in the building. The doll would be inside of the prayer cell, locked behind the mahogany door, transfixed by the cross, and then the doll would be in peach T’s bedroom and the doll would be upon the mantle.

And the day they said, they opened the front foyer door and the doll is. Standing there in its own little porcelain legs. It’s 17 inches tall. Total tippy tappy Vic right there in the hallway holding its arms out, holding his arms, like, come pick me up down the middle of the foyer, balanced by its little self.

They said that’s when they chose to secure the doll. I said, you gotta tell me what you did. And they said, I cannot. I’ve been told I can’t tell anybody. So I’m left to my own imaginations, my own devices. All I can think of is Cas Montelo, the egg I po. Story. Where somehow locked into a wall, maybe wrapped in rosary, beads in a brass casket.

It’s a doll waiting. Well, that’s not the first paranormal story of this building. The first paranormal story of this building is in 1908, a family called Theis. Were living [00:27:00] there. This little section of nowhere was called Little Palermo, and there’s a whole bunch of Italian and Sicilian families. As a dessert wine maker.

So he makes a dessert wine. He’s actually pretty successful. The garden, there was largely a vineyard for him at that point. And he has money in a neighborhood that is lacking money. So in 1908, knock, knock, knock upon his door, here comes four individuals. Now they’re working for the Black Hand. The black hand is a pre Mafia.

Mafia. All right? They knock upon the door, they run the classic mafia, shake down. You know, listen, if you know what’s good for you, you cut as a check. Once a month, we’ll take care of your business, if not bad things that happen to good people. And Gia kind of goes, absolutely not, man. I move from Italy for a reason.

We’re not doing any of this any longer. No, thank you, Neustar. New country. We’re not doing that. Plus, I know two of your moms. I knew you since you were boys. Don’t start coming to my house and intimidate me with this nonsense. Listen, tell you and your friends to come in here. You sit down on my table, you and your, I dunno this fellas but you.

Four black hand operatives. Come sit down on my table, lemme feed you. Let’s drink together. We are [00:28:00] neighbors, no need for this violent racker nonsense going on. And they sit down at the dinner table and they proceed to have dinner, and then they smoking and drinking, and then an argument ensues and the two strangers get more riled up and more angry.

But the young men who the fellow knows are also just as violent and their threats. At two in the morning, one of the black operatives puts a pistol to Gianna’s son’s head and says, you’re gonna cut us off a chunk once a month or else. And Gianna goes, listen, enough enough. Put away your gun. I understand your intentions.

I know how violent you are. I recognize your danger. I’m gonna go downstairs. I’m gonna get a bottle of my very, very best wine. I’m gonna bring it up. We drink it as men. There’s no need for violence. Put away your weapons. So he goes downstairs and just gets, does not get a bottle of wine. He gets to Winchester, he gets a Winchester in two pistols, pass the pistols to his sons, and they light up that dining room like they’re in an action movie set, right?

They light it up like they’re in Jack Reacher, or they’re Boondock Saints. There’s just an instant gunfight in which they completely. Take out [00:29:00] all four black Hannah operatives at one time. Now, there was a court case to setting whether these guys were in defense of their homes, if that was justifiable homicide.

The court case held it up. These guys were home invasion, a threat of violence, and they responded. So since then, those common paranormal activity in this building isn’t might be what you expect. It’s the reoccurring caco boom that goes off at two in the morning. The majority of this building’s history, it’s been an apartment complex, a series of rooms to rent in a shared common space.

And over those years, since this era, since 1908, the most common thing that happens at two in the morning is this boom that kicks off. That could be many things. It could be thunderstorms and transformers. We have epic storms down here. It could also, of course, be gunshots. There’s just no way around that.

It also could be the thing called exploding head syndrome, which is a neuro a neurological. Disorder similar to sleepwalking or sleep talking in which sometimes you hear a knocking in your head while you’re sleeping or somebody pounding on your door or a thunder clap or a gunshot in your [00:30:00] room. And all of this is just your neurons colliding as you work through anxiety.

Almost never is there actually a sound there when you have exploding head syndrome. It could be all of those things, but it could also be the residual gunshot all the way back from that battle in 1908 in that back dining room and only one. Little entity has stood witness to this for two full decades straight.

Only one little entity and tippy cappy porcelain feet has crawled from the back 45 feet away into that building and been in that dining room over and over again, witnessing boom, concussive boom, night after night for decades, watching it with her black painted eyes and her lap. Set a smile. And her beautiful blue dress, and she has been made secure and frankly, I hope she stays that way.

So there you go.

Dianne Hullet: Ooh.

Orion Couling: So a little ghost story about the thing that I don’t [00:31:00] like. Haunted dolls.

Dianne Hullet: Haunted dolls. I am right there with you.

Orion Couling: Yikes, man. It’s something you know for that, you know, it’s very easy. It’s the innocence transposed, right? Something that should make you secure. You should hold while you’re scared, is the thing that comes after you.

And that’s, that’s a, that’s a classic horror flip, you know? For sure. So, yeah. Yes.

Dianne Hullet: Innocence transposed. Oh, Ryan, that’s a good one. I it’s daytime and I kind of have the heebie-jeebies.

Orion Couling: Yeah. Yeah.

Dianne Hullet: Well, we also, on the tour that you took us on in New Orleans, you also told a beautiful, beautiful story about.

You know, this idea of signs from the other side, which is kind of Sure. The flip side of the creepy is the mm-hmm. And the possibility of can we be spoken to across the veil and does that happen? And do you wanna share a story from that experience?

Orion Couling: Sure, sure. And the ghost business currently, that word is called glimmer.

A positive ghost is a glimmer. Right? Something that sends something. The positive side I think it’s important to understand is that, if I’m not a religious [00:32:00] person and I don’t have a particular religion I adhere to, I call myself probably a humanist when it comes down to it. A little bit Taoism in there.

Perhaps an agnostic Tao stick humanist perhaps. But I think it’s one thing that we have to say. I tell people all this on my tour. Then I’m gonna spend two hours recognizing the supernatural negative. I might have to recognize the supernatural positive too. And though I’m no longer part of any particular religion, I have seen wondrous things in the name of positive journeys and religions.

I have seen healings and prophecies. I have seen things I can only describe as as magic and wonder, and I think about that quote from Hamlet. There’s more things than have in hell Horatio than I’ve ever dreamted In your philosophy. They said heaven in that line too, though they just had experienced a haunting of a father.

That word heaven was also used, heaven and hell. So I think that it’s foolish for us to say, if we’re going to enjoy the stories of the, of the frightening, then we have to make way for the rooms of miracles. And [00:33:00] whether these signs are supernatural, whether these signs are religious, paranormal, or just you being aware of the rhythms and patterns of the journey that you’re in, in the natural world.

I don’t think it really matters. I think it matters to you how it made you feel and how it affected your journey. So I guess for me, as somebody who does not adhere to a particular religious doctrine I find it quite wonderful to be in a secular world and aware of signs, you know, to feel encouragement by the, the rhythms and patterns of the world around us.

And I think before I tell this next story, I would like to just to just bring up real briefly, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the TV show, the Michael Flanagan TV show midnight Mass. Have you ever seen midnight mass? I have not. It certainly is not for everyone. It’s very violent. It’s the horror TV show, but the whole point of midnight mass is struggling with religious versus secular in the genre of horror.

Right. [00:34:00] And I had a guest ask me recently what. They think happens when I die. They were very clearly hoping to witness to me about their religion and they were very concerned for my mortal soul. And this happens to me I would say probably once a month where someone feels they really would like to apostatize to me and, and bring me into their particular religion and I’m not opposed to it.

’cause to me that means we’re moving. Know what I’m saying? There’s something very spiritual going on here. If someone is so spiritually affected that they feel the need to attempt to corral me towards a decision that they find salvation in, then I’m gonna take that as a blessing. I, I’m not offended by that.

I, I think that’s a, a lovely thing and I accept that. But there’s a particular monologue. In midnight mass, in which one of the main characters talks about what he thinks happens when he’s, when he dies, what he thinks is gonna happen. And he’s, and it’s basically about rejoining the cosmos and rejoining the energy of the world around.

And, and it’s [00:35:00] pseudoscientific and I’m sitting there listening to it. I got tears pouring down my face. I’m like, that’s what it is for me. And someone’s like, oh, I don’t have that monologue memorized. I’m like, okay, well, have you seen The Lion King? Like yeah, I’m like. Mufasa circle. He is like, I’m, yeah, that’s kind of where I’m at with it, man.

You know, that’s, that’s what I, how I feel about it. And for me, what I find, the reason I’m telling you all this, and for anybody who happens to be listening to our podcast as this along with us, is that’s my journey from my dad and me. So I didn’t, I don’t expect my father to visit me in supernatural form.

I don’t expect him to show up in a spectral an image and, and put a blessing upon me and heal my soul. I expect him to move into the cosmos and be joined in the great river of ever moving energy forward. And so when I had an encounter recently where he, visited as it were, it was all the more surprising to have it be so overt.

And actually, what I’d like to do real quick is I know we can edit, I’m gonna pause and pull this [00:36:00] monologue up because I’d love for you to hear it. Do it. What is his name? Let’s see. Okay. Okay. This is a spoiler for the TV show, midnight Mass. So if you do intend to watch this show this is a powerful part about one third through into the series and it reveals a lot about the character Riley.

So if you’re listening right now and you’re like, I wanna watch that, then maybe pause this, go watch it. You’ll burn through it. It is evocative and powerful work. It is a horror. TV show. So please be mindful if that’s not for you, listener. Just be mindful of that. I want you to go on a journey that you want to go on.

No surprises. So this is Riley. What happens when we die? I don’t know. I don’t trust anyone that tells me that they do. But speaking for myself, when I die, my body stops functioning, just shuts down. All at once or gradually, my breathing stops. My heart stops beating clinical death. A little bit later, five whole months later, my brain cells start dying.

But in the meantime, in between maybe my brain releases a flood of DMT. A psychedelic drug. It [00:37:00] releases when we dream. So I dream. I dream bigger than I have ever dreamed before because it’s all of it. It’s the last dump of DMT and all at once. My neurons are firing. I’m seeing this firework display of memories, imagination.

I’m just tripping, really. Tripping balls. My mind is riffing through memories. Long term and short. The dreams make for the memories, and it’s a curtain call as the dream to end. All of all dreams. One last dream as my mind empties the I’m not gonna, I don’t wanna curses in your podcast. One last dream, as my mind empties the effing missile silos, and I stop.

My brain actively sees this, and there’s nothing left in me. No pain, no memory, no awareness that I’ve ever was, that I ever hurt someone. Did I ever killed someone? Everything is as it was before me. And the electricity disperses from my brain tells just dead tissue, meat, oblivion, and all these little things that make me up.

The microbes and bacteria, the billions of other things that’ve lived in my eyelashes, in my hair, in my mouth, in my skin in my gut. Everywhere else, they just. I keep on living and eating and I’m serving a purpose and feeding life, and I’m broken apart, and all these little pieces of me are just recycled and billions of other [00:38:00] places.

My atoms are in plants and bugs and animals, and I am the stars that are in the sky. And there one moment and the next is scattered across the goddamn cosmos. By speaking for myself, that’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing. That word self, that’s not the right word. That’s not right.

That isn’t that isn’t it? How did I forget that? When did I forget that the body stops the cell at time? My brain keeps firing these neurons. Little lightning bolts like fireworks inside. I thought, I thought I’d despair or feel afraid, but I don’t feel any of that. None of that because I’m too busy. I’m too busy in this moment.

Remembering, and of course, remember. Every atom in my body was forged in a star that matter. That this matter, the body’s mostly just empty space after all solid matter. It’s just energy vibrating very slowly. There is no me, there never was. Electrons in my body mingle and dance with electrons of the ground below me and in the air.

I’m no longer breathing, and I remember there is no point where. If any of that ends and I begin, I remember that I am just energy, not memory, not self. My name, my personality, my choices all came [00:39:00] after me. I was before them. I’ll be after them and everything else is pictures picked up along the way.

Fleeting little dream lits, printing of the tissues of my dying brain. And I, I’m the lighten that jumps between I’m the, the energy fire and the neurons I am returning. Just remembering, I’m returning home as if drops of water falling back into the ocean of which has always been apart, all things apart, all of us apart.

You. Me, my little girl, my mother, my father, and everyone who’s ever been, every planet, every animal, every Adam, every star, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. And that’s what we’re talking about when we say God.

Right? That’s actually two monologues. That’s drop

Dianne Hullet: of the

Orion Couling: mic. Yeah. Michael Flanagan. Is a gifted writer and he brings such empathy to horror. And that’s what I hope to bring to my ghost stories, is empathy. I hope to bring a present, empathetic storyteller to the experience of my audience. And that’s what I hope to bring to Ghost Church.

[00:40:00] So let’s tell a story and now we’ve all gone to on a little bit longer than we hope to go. Oh, we,

Dianne Hullet: we had to go on a Townsend there and it hear this incredible monologue.

Orion Couling: Yeah. It’s truly. That show is a heck of a thing. I’d, I’d encourage anybody who can handle horror to consider watching that particular show.

Especially if you’re on a journey who’s willing to grapple with those bigger questions, which I think most of your listeners would understand that. So I am and my father’s son and in many ways, and the heritage of our Irish culture to our family matters greatly to him and to me. And, my father’s dying. He’s not making a lot of sense. He’s, he’s on the way out and he keeps asking me to go to Ennis free. Growing up with my dad was something, ’cause my dad’s a gifted storyteller. He, as I said in my time with you, he makes me look like I’m standing still. He’s a, he’s a way with words and a way with energy and a way to make you feel welcome.

He really is a gifted storyteller and so. He was given a gift. He was given a gift of a story. So my father and I [00:41:00] grew up in northern Michigan and his his peers, his friends are the elders of the Anishinabe, which some folks will call Chippewa or Ojibwa, but they call themselves Anishinabe. And the Anishinabe is a storytelling tradition culture.

They’re an oral story, tradition culture as many Native Americans in that region particularly are for First Nations folks. And they gave my dad a story of the Pine Martin. And the Pine Martin is a kind of like a coyote character. He’s a, he’s a trickster. And my father would tell this story and he became quite known for it.

And my dad would tell these stories at Native American circles. They gave him a gift of their culture that he would tell back to them. And I think that’s freaking incredible. And then my dad would do it at libraries and he would do it at social events and it was a whole thing. And the mice have voices and the fox has voices, and the wolves have voices.

And the Pine Martin is there among an all. So my father’s passing, he is asked me to go to enni free. Now, my dad loved gates, and Gates is a problematic poet. You might know that this guy is maybe not ethically the best guy in the whole world. But he [00:42:00] wrote some great poetry and my dad loved his poetry.

There’s a poem called Enni Free, I will go now to Ennis Free. And he talked about sitting in solitude among the garden and the beehive and what it meant to have this tiny little cabin, this little island out there in this lake called Lof Gill. My dad used it as a mantra as he was passing. I will go now to Enni Free.

So it’s decided that he needed to go to Enni free and you can’t actually get there. It’s privately owned. It has been for many years and it’s a very tiny island, but there’s a lake. There’s a ship that does day cruises around the lake of l Gill. So as I prepared to take my father’s cremation remains a year later to and it’s free, I bought a ticket for the boat and I I went there a couple days early.

I was gonna meet my wife in Galway the following day for a wedding renewal vows for a 10 year anniversary. So this is actually literally a year ago, pretty much to where we’re talking about right now. And so, I get to the dock, beautiful l sli. Sligo is exceptionally gorgeous. It [00:43:00] doesn’t get visited nearly as much as it should.

And I’m there looking at this ancient waterway, and there’s a real lack of boat going on here. There’s no boat. I’m like, oh no. So I go over the coffee shop right across the way, cute little cottage coffee shop there, and I say to the front desk, her name is Shelly. I said, do you know where the ship is?

And she goes, oh, I think they pulled out last week. And I said, well, that’s not good. I’ve got a ticket. And I got my dad’s cremation remains and just told a little bit about, so I was doing, and I’m not a person who was afraid of crying, so I was a little bit teared up and she said. We’re gonna get you sorted.

She hops on the phone, she calls the guys who own the boat, and she gives them a talking to about, where’s the boat? This guy bought a ticket. He’s there with ashes with his dad. Where’s the boat? They said, oh, we pulled out. We can’t do that service anymore if we’re done for the season. He’s like, but you sold the man a ticket.

And he goes, we’ll refund it. Can you come back next week? Like, no. He’s gonna be in Galway tomorrow doing his wedding vows. Was writing renewal. Of his wife. No. And she was quite forceful with him and appreciated her defensive nature. And then she picks up the phone and she calls her brother, her brother’s a fisherman here in l Gill and they together pick up their Rolodex as a fisherman and they start [00:44:00] calling through every fisherman they can find is who’s got a boat on the water who can pick this guy up, Orion and take him out to the water.

So, meanwhile, I’m sitting there having a, a, a, a coffee and a pie and a piece of pie, which is my dad loved pie. And I’m like, well, I can do this to honor my dad while we wait. And trying to work it through, and I’m reading this incredible story about Bey’s Island and Beesy was this just an amazing woman who had an island out there in Lt Gill and she lived an independent life.

In which she had her husband’s pension from World War I, and she would row to shore once a week and get her groceries and then row back and live in isolation. Didn’t wanna talk to nobody. And then she did this for years and years and years. In the 1960s, she rose to shore and she hears they’re gonna put her in a home and she escapes and she rose back to her island and she sets her cabin and herself on fire.

Goes out, she wants to go out on her terms and I’m like transfixed by the story. Then ah, [00:45:00] then finally, payday Pray dear. Keith shows up with a boat. Keith is 68. My dad was 70. Keith can’t stop chain smoking cigarettes. The boat’s called Slim Shady. What’s up Michigan reference there, right? And I’m like, perfect.

Two men fishing boat. He throws his old Carhartt on me. It’s chilly out there. So he gives me his Carhartt. He says, well, it’s, go take care of your dad. His dialect is so thick, I can barely understand what he is saying. I had to translate and I grew up among people with Irish dialects and I’m like, so so it was fun. And he’s, we’ll go to Beast’s Island. I’m like. Perfect. He is like, do you know Bees’ Island? I said, he just read about it. He goes, it’s about as close to inni free as you can get. He goes, you can’t put tree, you can’t, you can’t put tree trees on, bees on inni free, three trees on in free.

It’s too tiny. Right. I can’t take you there, but I can take you to Bees’ Island. I spent time there as a child. I’m like, well, that’s just perfect. He goes, it’s, it’d be great. It’d be grand. It just like your dad wanted. He does talking about the garden. She had a garden. Your dad’s talking about how she, the beehive.

She had a beehive. Right, but just like what YCE was talking about, as close as we can get. And I’m like, let’s, let’s freaking go. So we’re going across the chop, but boom, ba boom hitting these waves. It’s real windy out there. Little bit [00:46:00] dangerous out there, but I’ve got my captain’s license. I’m used to rough water.

I’m not a problem. And we get out there, we climb up on top of this island. It is gorgeous, and it ruins this burned out cabin or sitting there. And there’s an abbey. This left from when it was a leprosy colony on this 15, 16 hundreds broken down wall and on this broken wall down wall. A memorial for fishermen who died on lgi.

And my dad was a fisherman too. I’m like, well, this is just about as perfect as I can get. So I take out my dad’s ashes. My, his cremation remains, crem remains. And I proceed to, I, I passed the phone over to Keith to take a video from my mom and, i’m pouring my dad’s remains and there’s a noise, an alert, a sound of fear that Keith gives off.

And I look back to him and he looks at me and he’s got the camera out and he points down with his face, like look down. And I look down and on my foot is laying across to my foot. My right foot is a pine Martin. So this live [00:47:00] weasel that my dad talked about for decades. Michigan, this equivalent thereof of Ireland is laying across my foot as poring.

My dad’s cremation remains, and sometimes ghost stories are not scary, and I think that’s something that we have to grapple with, is that we live in fear and terror of the unexpected. There’s a way of living in peace and wonder of the unexpected. There’s a way of, if you’re going to allow your to live a life of fear.

Anger, which so many of us default to in our reactions and emotional interpersonal communications. We get defensive and hostile. It’s all over. Social media is the dominant of social. Social media is aggressive and hostile. What if we lived with the same wonder, [00:48:00] appreciation and kindness invested that kind of energy into that?

I think we’d see more glimmers than we might expect.

Dianne Hullet: Mm. I think there’s more mystery than we know, right? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That thing both in both sides, as you said. Yes, yes. In worker and in the lighter. And I think our, our, our, you know, dominant western culture kind of misses that. We’ve got a box that says, can you touch it?

Can you measure it? Can you count it? Can you see it with a scientific mind? Scientific mind has been critical for all kinds of reasons. But it misses a lot of the wonder, and I just so appreciate that story about your dad. What a, what a tale. And in a funny coincidence, a friend of mine a week ago had sent me a little video of a Pine Martin in Colorado.

Yeah. You know, when Orion told that story, I was like, I’ve gotta ask my friend for this Pine Martin video and send it up. Aren’t they so

Orion Couling: cute? They’re so cute. They’re just

Dianne Hullet: so beautiful. So,

Orion Couling: yeah.

Dianne Hullet: Gosh, Ryan. Well, I just appreciate your time so much, and I think listeners [00:49:00] will enjoy both the creepy story and the beautiful story and mixing that wonder on this week of Halloween.

Yeah. In October, 2025. Can you tell us you know, where can people hear more of your story? Sure, sure. And find out about your tours and your,

Orion Couling: yeah. Well it’s been a pleasure. I want to start with that. I wanna start with gratitude. I don’t know if you know this, but I, I really, the, the night before the doula tour, I had a really bad interaction.

I had to remove guests from my tour for being bullies and being hostiles. And this actually doesn’t happen very much because I’m so forceful about my rules at the beginning of my tour that usually I don’t have bullies come after me, but this, this happened. And so then I went out with you guys and I was like.

Oh dang. Why can’t every night be out with these cool people? Right. I was like, this is, oh, what a powerful thing to walk with these end of life doulas. It was, and I haven’t seen such rugged independent spirits since the unschool and homeschool community of Chicago where all these, these just absolute rockstar moms are out there [00:50:00] just killing it.

You know? It’s just, it was neat to see. So. As far as me and what we can do next with me guys, I would just love to have you check out the podcast Shadow Carriers on your podcasting Feed. Shadow Carriers is a, we call it a sonic journey through Disturbia. It’s curated it’s empathetic. I think you really dig it.

We work very hard to create a sonic scoring where you’re not just hearing two people yammer on, there’s beautiful scoring and sound effects and voice acting. Sometimes there’s full cast traumatizations. Sometimes it’s just two storytellers, but we, we really do bring our very best energy. Into it with six seasons of it.

There is all kinds of wonderful stories. Our Christmas stories, our holiday stories tend to be very touching and heartwarming. So say for apps, you, a person on this podcast who’s like really not into spooky, but you wanna hear more stories akin to what I just did. Check out the last two seasons of the holiday story.

I think you’ll find a lot of heartwarming natures in there, even though it’s slightly spooky, but wondrous, right? Shadow carriers on your podcasting feed. And while you’re at it, review us on Apple. Just like I’m sure [00:51:00] this podcast will tell you that it really helps get the algorithm to make sure more people can see our podcast.

So take a look at that shadow carriers on your podcasting feed. Six seasons. I think you’ll really dig it. As far as hearing New Orleans I have an Instagram presence that’s pretty popular. It goes nalin Crawlin, so that’s NAWL. Ns, C-R-A-W-L-I-N-S. And real quick, just so you know, no one in New Orleans calls New Orleans Nalin.

I just like the way the works looked. I thought it was fun. So keep that in mind. Nalin Collins on Instagram. And lastly, if you do wanna take a look at my tour offerings, everything from walking tourist to VIP black car service tours luxury tours. That is Orion Couling nola.com, O-R-I-O-N-C-O-U-L-I-N-G.

OL a.com and love to have you reach out and let me know if you’re gonna be in New Orleans, and I’d love to help you out. Sincerely, if I, if I can’t, if I’m not the right tour for you, I’m happy to help you find a tour that is the right one for you. For some people [00:52:00] really do want some like shock and some real like, wow.

And that’s not how I do it. So let, let me know I can serve you and I can refer you to other tours as well. So it has been just a pleasure to be with you and an honor to do anything associated with your profession, much less be a guest on a podcast. And thanks for thinking about me.

Dianne Hullet: Well, thanks so much, Orion.

I ran up to Orion at the end of the tour and I was like, Hey, hey, here’s a tip and three quick things, Michigan. You’re kidding me. I know all about Michigan. Secondly, I have a podcast. You have a podcast. Let’s talk. Third, I don’t remember what my third one was, but you know, there were three quick things and everyone was waiting to talk to you and thank you.

And

Orion Couling: I think it might have been the, the Pie Martin.

Dianne Hullet: Yeah, the, yeah. Yeah. So, you know, tib you for your great service. And you’re also in a beautiful band that plays in Chicago at least you know, for kind of court. Yeah. Do you wanna say the name of your band?

Orion Couling: They’re called Donny Brooks. There are two different bands in that Midwest region also.

They’re called Donny Brooks. We’re the ones that’s Donny Brooks Irish and Folk Rock, I think is the subtitle for the band. We are a [00:53:00] tra band, if you know Irish music, we are cross between the Dublins and Dropkick Murphy. We do. Tra aggressively. So it’s a lot of very boisterous energy. We’ll be playing actually coming up here in December at Mrs.

Murphy’s Irish Bistro on the north side of Chicago for an evening of couch Christmas music and a bit of drinking. We’d love to have you up for that. It’s called the Donny Brooks. And you can find it through my social media contacts, and it’s always a very special time to be doing that music. Again, Irish music has a lot of storytelling.

It’s a very story driven music, so there’s that too. So

Dianne Hullet: beautiful. Well, you’ve heard all the places you can find out about Orion’s work. Thanks so much for being a guest and listeners, as always, you can find out about the work I do at bestlifebestdeath.com. Thanks so much for joining us today for this special Halloween episode.