GHOST HUNTERS

I'm a huge advocate of going out there with your camera and getting example shots of things that can give you false positive's. These photos show and cold breath mist and a hair. I've done shots with sprinklers going, rain falling, duststorm, and someone patting the furniture to create dust orbs. Keep these in a file of "explainables" and refer to them when sifting through evidence. It helps in the first place to avoid the pitfalls. Remove camera straps or tape them down on hunts. Tie hair up. Avoid cold nights or hold your breath when taking a shot. Don't even consider going outdoors in rain or snow or duststorm. I thought I knew a great deal about avoiding false positives, even avoiding flashes on shiny and glass surfaces, but not so long ago I was at the Yuma Territorial Prison where I got a shot with something amazing. Some kind of streaks! I was thrilled. Then, I was skeptical. They reminded me of shots I had taken on my explainable adventures. I could te...

I won't count the time I was 10 and taped the sound of the booted footsteps in my childhood home. After all, I was immature enough to leave my father's recorder in my room where mother picked it up and put it back on his desk and he taped a lecture over top of it. This proof, I still have. In fact, it's on a 35 mm negative. It was 2003 and I had just started ghost hunting with camera in hand (no other equipment yet). There wasn't a lot of helpful info on ghost hunting at the time (this was pre-"Ghost Hunters" show), but I did know enough to nix my camera straps on all my cameras. I cut them right off because I didn't want any false positives. I also tied my hair up behind me. I avoided cold, damp, rainy, dusty, windy nights. Having done all I can to avoid false phenomenon, I decided to go with my ghost hunting buddy and my son to a beautiful cemetery in Phoenix where my son's grandmother was buried. In my unquestioning "ghosts are definitely souls...

This is shameless, but for the purposes of finding folks I grew up with, I thought I'd do a short blurb so if someone does a search, they can find a fellow Fairfax-ian. Anyone who attended Green Acres in the late 60s to mid 70s, let me know. I'll almost certainly remember you. Anyone who attended Robinson in the mid 70s, I'll probably know you too. Thought I'd just try and find fellow childhood chums.

I'm a huge advocate of science as the manner in which we tackle ghost hunting. If these things are manifested in physical ways, i.e. sounds, moving objects, closing doors, then they have to exist or interact with our physical world. That being said, the instruments for hunting ghosts just haven't made a great progress since the 90s because most folks pass on the "knowledge" of ghost hunting without any real "credence" about how reliable these tools have been. It's sad to say, but honestly the best tool in my huge arsenal is still my own body and senses. The super computer called the human brain seems to be the most reliable ghost hunting tool and perhaps that's because in a split second it takes five senses and memory and instinct and combines them to give you instantaneous response and a need for self preservation. The EMF meter is very likely, in my opinion, to go by way of the Ouija board for ghost hunting reliability. I can't tell you how man...

This photo was taken on a very auspicious night. The night I got my son and myself locked into a cemetery. We went to this particular cemetery before twilight and walked around, cataloging it on our camcorder. I had experienced a voice speaking in Latin in this Catholic Cemetery and realized I had to come back and see if it would happen again. At the time it occurred, there wasn't a soul in sight. The caretaker came and didn't see my bright red car in the driveway and proceeded to lock all the gates. We found one locked while it was still light ( they may say they close at sundown, but to them sundown is 5 pm year-round ). I was a bit frantic at first. The cemetery was in a bad neighborhood near the airport and there was no one in sight who could possibly let us out. We climbed into the car and searched the grounds to find every gate locked. This was pre-cell-phone era for us. We hadn't given in yet to the lure. This night would change that decision. We climbed the fencing...

The client contacted us with issues that ranged from electrical interruptions, footsteps, window blinds ticking, to full body apparitions and someone being hit. Normally, that’s a call that draws my attention, but this one had another element that intrigued me. The client lived in Mesa, AZ right between where the HoHoKam water canals had run centuries ago before the people vanished from the Earth. The area around their old waterway canals has always intrigued me as a source of potential spiritual flow. The reports of hauntings in this particular neighborhood are exceedingly high. The investigators were just myself and my closest hunting buddy. We both grew up in very old homes in the East Coast, both of us dealing with haunting situations in our formative years. It has given us a bond that is hard to explain. Something like living through and airplane crash and feeling like those folks on the plane with you are the only ones who can understand. We have a similar take on investigations...

Over the years, people have asked me if I could teach them to be psychic. It's not so much needing to be taught, it's trusting what you know. I usually tell them a good place to start is online at www.gotpsi.org. Every day you can go on and test your skills. I go on frequently. It benefits me because I learn just how it is I get information. If I pick the wrong card, but the right card was one I passed over and didn't choose, I figure out why I talked myself out of the right card. I found over time that my eyes tend to be drawn to the "right" card and yet my minds tell me to choose a different card and that's always the wrong one. My first instinct, always a good one. When I try to inject logic into my choices like, "they just showed the picture of the water earlier, it can't be that one again!" Then, I will surely get it wrong. Some days, I find that by running my cursor over the cards, I can feel a strange electrical tingle when I cross over...

Everyone has a theory on the universe and our place in it. Just jump on a plane some time and take off over your city. It's just an aiport, then it's a city block, then it's an entire city, then it's a region of a state... You begin to realize how very small you are. Every day in your little neighborhood you feel so important and so central to everything going on until you see all the other "worker ants" from above. It got me thinking about the universe. Scientists try to describe the size of it and its origins, but no one can possibly comprehend things that involve light years and distances that are "infinite." We can't get far enough away from it to view it as we did in the plane over our city. What if every planet we see, every star, every moon, are all nothing more than cells in size to something greater? What if we look at other planets like cells in a body might look at each other and think, "hey, we're part of the important work...

I've been so busy working on my horror novel "The Hunt: Ghosts" and the erotic horror novel "The Thicket," that I put aside a fantastic SciFi novel that I'd like to pursue again when I can find a scientific brain to pick about some of the aspects. The premise is simple: A scientist, along with a psychic medium, find the pathway by which psychic information is passed and the result is a machine that is basically a computer to the other side. With folks being able to talk to their dead ones when they pass, there is no longer any need for formal funerals. In fact, instead they have a "crossover" ceremony instead where they sit in a room with the machine awaiting their first message from the other side. With this, people don't grieve, they simply treat the dead as living across country and inaccessible, talking to them on the computer like its a telephone. Religion changes its face, as well, becoming a unified church. The government now regulates o...

I thought I'd start off this blog with an example of lifecycles. In one picture, you have my grandmother at Ellis Island (off the boat from Norway) with my father, his two older sisters (one brunette, one blonde) and baby sister. Then, there's a picture of me as a baby with my brother and two older sisters (one brunette, one blonde). Cycles of life aren't as random as they sometimes appear. The same scenarios are played over and over again. Have you ever heard someone say "oh, you're not that unique--loads of people like what you do, choose the things you choose, have the same quirks"? Nothing is really original in this world. Now, onto reincarnation. I get asked about that a lot. It's a combination of having psychic abilities and being a paranormal investigator which makes people think I might have a stand on this. And, I do. Reincarnation doesn't exist. At least, not in the form we see in movies and hear from gurus. People's spirits do not someho...

Mushroom cloud or sunset? Going off track from my usual ghost hunting observations, I'd like to discuss personal explanatory style. As a ghost hunter, counseling and helping people reframe things often gives them great relief. I can reveal this to you by discussing present times. It does appear to most that we are reaching the end-of-world times, but it's sort of a glass half full or half empty observation for most. I remember one day not long ago I was checking out at Target store and the older gentlemen ringing me up said something about a child acting up nearby and commented. "It certainly isn't like the old days anymore." I said, "Thank goodness," automatically and he looked at me strangely and then scowled. "What do you mean? In the old days a parent would have walloped a kid for that behavior." I looked him square in the eye and said, "you mean the old days when Blacks rode in the back of the bus and there was no cure for infections ...

I started out with just a camera in hand going to cemeteries. Later, I got a big purse so I could put a sketchbook inside because cemeteries inspired me and so I could carry the contents of my regular purse and only carry one bag. Well, one thing leads to another and before long I had an electronic voice recorder, divining rods, a pendulum, a laser thermometer... I moved up to a courier bag. It would have worked pretty well, except every time I fished around in the dark for something, everything felt the same. Was that the digital recorder or the digital camera? Was that my mag flashlight or my EMF meter? Where's the batteries? I need a pen and paper to take notes quickly... Darn! Okay, so I moved up finally to something that makes absolute sense. I got myself a photographer's fanny pack. I considered a fisherman's vest but I live in the desert and it's freakin' hot enough already. Yeah, I suppose it screams nerd, but my first time out using it on a hunt in an ...

Don't let the photo above fool you. The person taking the shot was an amateur and didn't know how to use my digital camera when I had removed the strap so I'd get no false positives. His finger ended up waving in front of the lense as he took the shot ( what you get with a ham-fisted football player and a tiny camera ). I'll use "Ghost Hunters" show team, TAPS, as my example to explain why our senses cannot beat any equipment. Sure, everything we process goes through the brain and all our perceptions and explanatory style so that it's no longer objective, but that's what the instruments are for, to hopefully take note of what our own computer-containing heads already discerned. TAPS as seen on their weekly SciFi show does one of the most basic necessitities of ghost hunting. They go into the room, lights out, and sit with the ambient sounds, ambient lighting, and ambient temperature. They deal with road traffic, outside lights, and refrigerators turn...

Growing up at Aspen Grove in Fairfax, Virginia, I had no idea the house was haunted. Really. It's hard to believe, but when you move in as a toddler, nothing seems strange to you. Everything is possible, including a dark shadow pacing in the bedroom and booted footsteps without a body to create them, and things flying across the room without a person to launch them. I didn't know my house was "haunted" until I was in first grade. NBC did a two-hour special on the ghosts. I think my mom set me aside and told me the house may have ghosts, but at the time I thought it was ridiculous to call it ghosts. After all, to me it was alive. The house itself seemed alive. The very walls seemed to watch you, the sense of being tagged along or even protected emanated from every open area of the house. To call it "ghosts" seemed to cheapen it. Of course, at the age of 6, I think the only ghosts I knew of were "Casper" and I could attest to it, there was nothi...

I've never really acclimated to Arizona ( even though being here 32 years ). I don't know what it is about the place, but it's extremely unsettling. At first, I was certain it was the unlimited sky and the lack of trees. You can see a car coming at you on the highway a half hour before it reaches you--really! I think it's the feeling of being exposed or the sun beating down on you relentlessly... My first road trip to California, I really felt that unease at a whole new level. If you've ever seen the movie "The Hills Have Eyes," you know that director had to have made a few forays across the Sonoran Desert to understand how an entire horror movie could be based on the most basic human fear--what if I break down here??? I grew up with thick woodlands and, yeah, you do often feel like you're being watched in the woods. It feels like woodland creatures hiding and studying you, wondering if you're friend or foe. The desert, however, feels like gia...

Just when you think your state might not be all that active for the paranormal, all it takes is a bit of digging and the craziness begins to rise to the surface. Although only officially a state for almost 97 years, Arizona carries a serious reputation as a haven for all things paranormal and unexplained. Moving here from the D.C. area, I scoffed at the concept that anything in the Southwest could possibly be weird, other than the mountains being naked and the soil being hard-baked. Admittedly, it is kind of like living on Mars, but because so much of the state is exposed to the eye ( nowhere to hide ), it reveals some truly intriguing phenomenon that can't go missed. Perhaps it’s the geology. From the Grand Canyon to the red rocks of Sedona to the mining hills of Globe and Bisbee, the state offers a scarred landscape that one could imagine giving birth to all sorts of strange energy. Sedona’s red rocks are said to give off strong magnetism and the ability to heal the body. Th...

When I started out in early 2003 with my first digital camera aiming it at anything that stood still and hoping for proof of ghosts, I didnt realize what I was asking for. I live in the desert Southwest, so you can imagine that dust is a huge issue for me and moisture a rare one. I have yet to go to any Old West town such as Globe or Bisbee and not get tons of orbs in my shots. When I first started out, I kept them in cute-named files in PhotoShop and visited them often, wondering at their meaning. Now, six years later, I promptly throw them out. I did like most people and went online and read opinions and then solicited the advice of photographers and decided that, like any good ghost hunter, I had to learn to debunk. I took my camera outside in a duststorm, in sprinklers, near a tree shaking pollen, outside on a sunny day with the sunlight able to enter the lens, in a house where I used a feather duster seconds before to clear a shelf. Once I learned what these sorts of orbs looke...

I work from home, so my days are fairly quiet, except for the sound of doctor's dictations that I'm typing up. One day, while sitting in my office, I heard a woman's voice suddenly very clearly, very loudly, as if she were in the nearby living room at the other end of the hallway. She spoke several sentences. Although I did not capture any words because I was too startled to comprehend, I did catch something at the end about "coming around again." Of course, like any homeowner, I know the sounds of my house. This was not a sound I had ever heard here and it was so ridiculously "real" that it had to be. But, how could it be? I checked the windows, walked around, waited. Looked at the clock as if it might provide information. Finally, I gave up and went back to my office to work again. I'm a skeptical person by nature and when something is that clear, I doubt seriously it's a "ghost," however, it left me feeling a bit unsettled. There wa...