GHOST HUNTERS

What a year for the blog! I changed the look of it, but the content became more defined and more vague at the same time. The definitions were things like Dale the Doll posts, quizzes and a few ongoing series. The more vague aspects have been a wider range of paranormal topics and me giving in to my demented sense of humor and creating the LAUGH series that can be found on the bottom right hand corner of this page. I had lots of movie reviews and interviews including my favorite one; the one-on-one with my TV crush, Ben Hansen from “Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files.” I went through transitions through the year and I can tell y'all that it never ever would have happened if I didn't blog. Blogging has put me in touch with people who not only were interested in what I'm doing, but took pride in my accomplishments. In my entire life, no one had ever asked me what I did with my day, what I was up to, or took any interest in my accomplishments. This gave me strength to realize jus...

Yeah, it’s true; there are bad guy characters in film that also happen to be terribly sexy. We know a lot of the typical ones that aren’t even worth mentioning, like vampires and werewolves, but here’s some of the unexpected finds: Quint, the potty-mouthed, sailor ditty singing, hunter of the shark in “Jaws” was played by Robert Shaw quite brilliantly. What did a shaggy-haired, rough-bearded, scarred, and rebellious sailor have to offer the female species? A body of expertise and experience, sparkling blue eyes, and a rolling dialect that made a woman wonder what he’d seen in the ports he stopped in during his long career. He didn’t seem to want or even like anyone, which made him even more intriguing and challenging. “The Hitcher” in the 1986 movie played by Rutger Hauer. What? A nasty killer? Well, it surprised me too, but when I confessed to friends that he turned me on (and not my usual kind of guy because he's fair-haired), they actually giggled and admitted he was sexy. We th...

The Human decided to let me have some space here on her blog. ( Oh, aren't I the lucky fellow? ) She said I could write about my take on ghosts and I have to admit that from time to time, The Human manages to have a good idea. I'm certain she was just reading my plastic head with her psychic creepiness. I also want to tell you that I intend to do a series of interviews with The Human's abandoned doll collection. I will act as an interpreter and tell you their stories. These will be dark and creepy and you better not be a bunch of pussies when you read these interviews. This will be a Thursday posting to give you something to look forward to while you big babies are waiting for "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files" to start its second season. What is a ghost? I think it's kind of like doll spirits. You haven't heard of doll spirits? Didn't you see that freaking cool episode of “Destination Truth” on that doll island in Mexico? Damn! I want to retire and liv...

Imagine living on an estate with two enormous boxwood mazes. Then, imagine having five kids in the family and parents who, no matter how well they were doing financially, didn’t buy their kids toys. They wanted them to be creative and resourceful. The land and its outbuildings alone had more than enough to work with, from building tree forts to using leftover furniture in the barn to turn it into a playhouse. One of our favorite activities was flashlight tag. It was especially fun on a hot Virginia summer’s night with lightning bugs competing for attention. The back boxwood maze was more mature in height and an ideal place for a great game of flashlight tag. The ancient birdbath with the naked cherub statue in the center was our starting point. Usually my brother wanted to manage (or is that micromanage?) the game, so he would begin by being “it.” The rest of us would scatter like buckshot throughout the winding maze of English boxwoods to find the perfect strategic point to make our w...

UFO's and ghost hunting; both paranormal focuses, but really very very similar in how we go about tackling them. The first step in dealing with UFO's is to debunk. The first step in dealing with ghosts is to debunk. Explanations for UFOs: Airplanes/military air vehicles/drones/helicopters Misinterpreted stars in the daytime sky Reflections of things on the ground Clouds Earth lights Sprites/jets in the atmosphere lightning Explanations for Ghosts: Banging pipes Poor night vision High EMF Mechanical home issues Car lights Sleep issues People who have had encounters with UFOs and ghosts are often ashamed, baffled, their logic is twisted in knot. They don't want to admit it, but they seek answers incessantly by either looking for more UFOs or ghostly encounters. Both encounters have nearly impossible to prove roadblocks. You can photograph, record or film UFOs or ghosts and these modalities can be shot down by skeptics. When pondering the origins of both UFOs and ghosts, the e...

I've been doing this blog for over 3 years now and one thing I've learned is that everyone who reads this really has a good angle on ghost hunting and hauntings in general. This is the beginning of a new series "What Would You Do?" in which I give you a hypothetical situation for a ghost hunt and you tell me how you'd approach it. The home is a 30 years old. It's been lived in by two families. One lived there for 27 of those years. A nice family with a blue-collar working father, a mother who stayed home and two perfectly healthy and happy children. Nothing unusual occurred in the home. Nothing that would warrant a haunting, but the new tenants who had been in there for just over 2 years, but things began to fall apart six months ago when their 8-year-old daughter began to have trouble sleeping. She complained that there was something in her closet, shuffling around, making noises. Her parents had gone way out of their way to try and ease her fears, use logic ...

It's not that far off the mark for me to post about time travel because a theory that runs around in the paranormal community is the possibility that what we are experiencing are not fully perceivable visits from the future or even blips from the past that cross our time period occasionally. Hence, the future might be watching us or we are watching the past. Let's talk about what most consider to be preposterous science—the design of a traveling machine. H.G. Wells aside, most scientists take newer scientific finds to explain possibilities such as the use of a wormhole created to allow someone to go from point A to point B directly instead of indirectly. This concept is the most popular of all ideas for traveling through time; as you bend space, you bend time. The question becomes the most classic one. What if you go back and kill your grandfather? Have you just in effect ended your own future existence and if you did that, how could you go back and kill grandpa? Everyone has t...

I did this in 2008 and forgot to do it in 2009. So, I'm remembering in 2010. I like to make a list of places I'd most like to do a hunt at. My tastes change over time, especially once the ghost hunting shows have picked over the usual culprits. I tend to not like to follow the crowd and go by my own motivations and not be outwardly directed. So, here's a list of places I most want to hunt at in order: 1. Aspen Grove . No duh. This is the scene of the crime, the place I grew up in, the one that started my whole venture into ghost hunting. This 250-year-old building was once a Civil War Hospital used by both sides at one time or other during The War. I don't just want to go back to figure out what happened there as a kid, but because since that time I moved away, my father, mother, sister, brother and dear family friend who lived at the end of our driveway all vowed to haunt it and have passed on. With them having known my desire to contact the other side, it's as cl...

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle defended the authenticity of the 1917 fairies photo (above). He believed it to be genuine. Houdini vowed to get a message from the other side to his wife. After 10 years of trying to contact her husband during a séance every Halloween night (the anniversary of his death), she never got the coded message they had designed before he died. Ectoplasm was touted by spiritualists and mediums to be the substance of which ghosts were made. During seances and in trances they would supposedly produce ectoplasm. This hoaxed material was often made from cheesecloth, egg whites, soap and gauze. Other methods by which spiritualists hoaxed people were seances, ouija board sessions, automatic writing, table tilting and spirit photography. As you can imagine, nowadays we haven't gotten far from this practice of looking to these methods to prove communications with ghosts. You also might notice the correlations with extreme religions that also use practices such as hands on he...

In working on my “Was That a Ghost?” book, I had to set aside a section just to discuss this phenomenon. No, it's not paranormal, but it is abnormal. It has come to my attention over the years of house calls and interactions with people contacting me about their ghost problems that there are occasions (and not that infrequent) when people use ghosts as an explanation for other more weighty issues in the home. One woman, had a bad marriage after buying a home that was way beyond their means. Her husband began working overtime, acting remote and being irritable. She didn't want to think he might be overstressed or having an affair. Instead, she started to notice noises when he left home for work. She focused on his behavior and was certain the house was haunted and somehow affecting his behavior. Another family had an angry rebellious teen but the focus on anything out of place had them all focusing together as a group on the haunting. This brought a family together in a single p...

It's quiz time again! In honor of this rosy happy day, let's make it a bad guy's quiz. Count your a's, b's and c's and see which one you letter get the most of, scroll down and find out which Xmas bad guy you relate to. 1. If I see a homeless person panhandling, I think... a. I would do that in his position. b. Get a job! c. I would rather glom off of family/friends. 2. When I'm angry, I tend to... a. Neglect them, sabotage them, passive-aggressive. b. Leave, don't talk, snub them. c. Lash out without thinking. 3. One thing that frustrates me about the world is... a. The wealthy get wealthier. b. People slack off and get away with what they can. c. It's so hard to get ahead. 4. I most admire... a. Bernie Madoff (scam artist investor) b. Donald Trump (business mogul) c. DB Cooper (hijacked plane and parachuted off) 5. The dream home would be... a. An isolated country home away from the crowds. b. A McMansion in the suburbs. c. A city ...

Okay, so I just finished the last post about facial amnesia and let's move on to another disorder that is intriguing and one that I suffer from, although it hardly alters my life in any way. In fact, like my psychic abilities, I didn't know that everyone else didn't store time in their mind in the way that I do. Now, let me explain. Synesthesia is a condition in which basically one has a neurological confusion where he puts things together that are not usually teamed up, such as seeing numbers as colors or smelling music or in my case, storing time in a three-dimensional manner outside my body, such as time of day, days of week, hours of the day, months and years. In my case, it is also how I store information when I do psychic reads and makes it possible to store a great deal of reads and types of information I can retrieve like a file cabinet of sorts. These cross sensory confusions make for intriguing things like hearing colors and tasting music. Types: (from this site )...

Yeah, I'm a freak. I was born with two left earlobes. Not so freaky, but then I'm also psychic and synesthetic (oh yes, that's for another post following this one). As well, I have a variation of the condition called prosopagnosia or “facial amnesia.” This is a condition in which the ability to recognize a face is impaired. Sufferers may use clothing and voices and postures to know who the person is. They also often suffer from the ability to understand facial cues, like emotions and expressions. Jane Goodall is actually a sufferer of this. Imagine meeting someone and not knowing you have met them before or not? What causes such a condition? Some times it has occurred to people with brain injuries and other times it appears to be genetic. My variation of this disorder is the inability to picture anyone I know's face, even my own. I don't know what I look like until I see a picture of me or see myself in the mirror, then I recognize me. Even my own dear son and loved...

( picture above from the Museum of Man in Balboa Park, San Diego taken by me on my vacation ) I wrote this post because, as I rounded the top of the stairs at the Museum of Man, I heard a kid rush to his mommy and pull on her hand saying, "look, Bigfoot!" This brought home the thoughts about the popular theory that Bigfoot is actually a descendant of Gigantopithecus blacki. I readily admit I am of that team. We know Giganto was in Asia and believed to many to be killed and eaten by homo erectus. Whether or not this creature was extinct has come to the forefront of Bigfoot/Yeti discussions. A creature with extremely similar physical features was in Asia, a place where Yeti is often reported and, as well, had the opportunity to cross the land bridge long ago with man into the Americas where higher elevations and colder climates would be more his preference; just like Scandinavians tended to settle in Minnesota and Asians along the Pacific waterfront. How would Giganto have evo...

This is the last of my trip stuff to share with y'all. I thought you'd enjoy seeing what it was like to drive through the mountainous pass into San Diego from Phoenix and then some video of Balboa Park in San Diego, a huge area filled with more museums than you can imagine and the most beautiful mission style buildings in all the world. Okay, now back to more paranormal-related postings. Even I needed a bit of a break to reset my button for more intense posting about the world of the unexplained.

The past several days I've put up pics and vids to make you wonder what's up. Just got back from my vacation as a single person. Had to go to San Diego during the entire huge storm that hit there. Howling winds, flooding rains, icy cold and generally the opposite of the desert. Except for harrowing driving conditions, it was wicked awesome and I'm compiling a video of the drive so you can see the drive from Phoenix to San Diego in one of the biggest storms in ages.

I went through a phase several years ago where I was obsessed with finding all the most obscure 70s horror I could find, especially British and made-for-tv horror. I wanted to find any title I hadn’t heard of to work on extending my collection. A lot of finds were total clinkers and buying them without seeing them was probably stupid, but enlightening. Some of the really awful ones became beloved movies. Let me tell you something about horror movies, they’re a lot like food. How is that? We don’t look for the great food on every intersection corner at every big franchise restaurant like Burger King and Chili’s. We go off the beaten track and see where locals are going, perhaps try something new we didn’t know about before. It’s only one restaurant, not a franchise, but the food is made with mama’s recipes or by a fine chef. Yeah, it’s not fast and easily available, but it’s sure something we haven’t had before. Well, movies are just like that. If we go to the big box office movies, we ...

(My son created this, bless his talented and humorous heart)

It's that time again for me to give you a great big mind fuck concept. Today's concept is regarding the soul. The soul, as most are in agreement with, is the spiritual content of you and not the physical content. When one dies, the soul leaves the body. Many people report NDEs (near death experiences) where their soul leaves the body and hovers to see the scene. Here's the mind fuck--when you go under anesthesia, why is your soul not alert? If it isn't conscious, then it's mortal and susceptible to anesthesia like the brain. Does this mean there is no soul?

My son made this film for his senior year at ASU. His themes in art are all about memories and abandoned places and the blight on old boomtowns. This was taken at Desert Center in California and he used some interesting techniques to get the look. He wanted to do it with his 8mm camera but developing would take too long, so he found out something you often find in art, if you run into a roadblock it can take you to wonderful places. He filmed, edited, and made the sounds for the video. The idea is sort of an old home movie feel of visiting what was supposed to be a huge boomtown and visiting it like a tourist even though it's all dead. It's very haunting and at times I wish I could put my eye to the eyepiece and see it all, but that's part of the charm--it leaves you feeling like you had a strange dream... p.s. He's always fantastic at naming projects. He looked it up and during the dustbowl era, they planted a plant call the tamarisk because it held up to the dustbowl,...

Go here and enjoy the sketchy santas!

My last post had you wondering. Maybe this one will keep you wondering...

So, what do you think? How did she make it? Answers coming soon...

There’s a lot of ways to go about doing a study in a graveyard. Why even bother? That’s a good question. I admit to being chronically open-minded about testing anything and everything. I’m always “game” for whatever. Sometimes, it’s like word association. What you’re trying may not have any value or efficacy, but it may trigger another thought that puts you on the right path, so I treat ghost hunting as a series of serendipitous growth and expansion. I have done studies in graveyards with some very exciting results. After much observation and interaction, I’ve come to the conclusion that recent grieving and visitations at the cemetery makes things more active. As well, the longer you’re there, the more it gets “used” to you. The more frequently you go there, the more reactive it becomes. It might simply be, if you are there—they will come. The first declaimer has to be that you’re not supposed to be in cemeteries after dark. If you are, you better have some obvious good intentions. A r...

This post is a combination of the four main types of fledgling psychics and how to know which one you might be. With practice and focus, one can go from fledgling to full-fledged. That is one of the books I’m working on right now and I hope to shed more light onto this for everyone. For now, look over these types, see if you identify. “Soul Seer" They tend to be serendipitous. They end up in the right place and the right time—even if it’s something dramatic like walking past a burning building or standing next to a person about to faint. They get gut instincts about people but can’t tell you why they feel that way. They just either trust them implicitly or don’t. They sense a person is important in their life but they don’t know why, so they pursue a friendship even if the other person is reticent. They listen closely for words that ring true and focus on that. If someone tells them a story, certain words, phrases and ways they tell the story makes that soul seer’s senses sharpen ...

It's Lonely on a Friday Night. Join us and comment back and forth. Any subject is open, chit chat, flirt, kid around, talk about Ghost Adventures. It's all good. Now, you may begin!

In my post “ Watch Your Wallet: Flim-Flam Ghost Communications ” I discussed finding a psychic in a room full of psychics, but suppose you want to go to psychic’s strip mall shop or one inside a new-age store or even one your friend goes to that works from home? Friends: Should you take the friend into the room with you? A good psychic will tell you that it’s not a good idea because it will interfere with the reading. If they don’t tell you that, then be suspicious. A good psychic would let you record the session so you can play it back later because ideally during the session you will offer nothing but a poker face—no eyes widening, no head bobbing, no signs of reassurance. This is a very hard part of a reading but if you give even a slight recognition, the psychic will repeat what they said in several different ways to reaffirm they hit the nail on the head. This is a cold reading technique and a great parlor trick used by sham artists. See this old post about whether your psychic i...