GHOST HUNTERS

I'm curious by nature and even more easily amused by social trends. I did not buy a pet rock or a mood ring when they were "in." I did not rush out to buy my Calvin Klein jeans even with a thick-eyebrowed, underaged Brooke Shields telling us nothing came between her and her Calvins. No, I still don't own a cell phone. I feel like I will have finally become part of the Borg collective when that occurs. So, for my own perverse pleasure, a year ago, I put myself up on a dating site. Oh, don't worry, it was quite anonymous. Still, I wanted to see what the reaction would be and what the dreadful come-on's would be. Oh, they definitely satisfied my need for cheese, total hot oozing cheese. Here's my favorite message that came my way within the first hour I was on the site ( oh, and sorry this didn't come with antinausea medicine ): My Sweet Angel, Thank you for the wonderful evening in my dream's what a romantic night as we strolled along the beach line,...

Last night was a 2-hour special from Australia in search of the Yowie, the Aussie equivalent to BF.  They found a good witness who is an expert on biology. Not a bad person to have witnessing a Yowie, but Ranae wasn't sold. Since it was the size of Bobo and the encounter wasn't all that clear, she said she thought the witness was awesome, but the encounter isn't necessarily a Yowie. BEST LINES Bobo:  Basically he was my size and my height, so you're saying he was built like a Greek god? Bobo:  I'm not sure what the Yowie was doing, but I'm pretty sure he was doing something to get some grub. Cliff:   I'm practically playing patty cake with two of them! Ranae:  I'm right here you big hairy fella. Matt: So you and me, birdie, we're camping here tonight. Bobo:  Ranae's horse is as a Prince fan, purple reins. Cliff:  This is a Yowie buffet. Ranae: This is a Yowie bite-sized portion. They did some nighttime wood knocking. They got a thump back. ...

I'm stoked! The team is going to Australia in a 2-hour special looking for the Yowie. Expect my review tomorrow on here and all the best lines from the show - my hilarious favorite part of the review!

I have always been fascinated with the idea of going into the Earth and finding another Earth. The original movie, "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was one of my ultimate favorites, but luckily other moviemakers decided to go for the same concept and gave us a bunch of movies for us Hollow Earth nuts to enjoy! Journey to the Center of the Earth  There are a lot of versions of "Journey to the Center of the Earth" but because I like y'all, I'll only mention the one worth mentioning--the 1959 version with James Mason and Pat Boone. "An Edinburgh professor and assorted colleagues follow an explorer's trail down an extinct Icelandic volcano to the earth's center." One of my favorites of all time! (STEAMPUNK DELIGHT) Nazis At the Center of the Earth "Nazis At the Center of The Earth" 2012 - "Researchers in Antarctica are abducted by a team of masked storm troopers. They are dragged deep underground to a hidden continent in...

You don't think of odd things when you think of Maryland but they are known for a few odd "creatures" like the Goat Man and the Snallygaster. What is a snallygaster? Reported in a 1909 newspaper article, a man supposedly was picked up by a winged creature that sucked his blood and dropped him off a cliff.  This area when it was settled was riddled with tales of all kinds of monsters and weird creatures. This Snallygaster was described as, ". ..sporting a razor-like beak, lethal claws and a single eye in the middle of its forehead, the creature also, for added effect, emitted a screech like “a locomotive whistle. ” Lots of legends of the monster's antics grew with the telling including a giant egg being laid and a railroad man being carried away.  What interests me the most is the winged-appearance/blood-drinking aspects that sound a bit like reports of the Jersey Devil, interestingly reported in the neighboring state of New Jersey. Over the decades, the stories...

( Are you seeing Jesus? No, you're actually looking at a photo of a couple holding their new baby who is wearing a bonnet - -looks like Jesus's forehead ) Grant calls it matrixing, but honestly the technical term is: Pareidolia (Wikipedia) It is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse. How does this apply to ghost hunting? You ever listen to the weird shit Zak comes up with on his EVP replays??? He is so out there in left field with hearing all kinds of language on his garbled recording flubs that he's kind of starting to worry me. How about the tons of orbs with faces people send in? It is in human nature to either relate things to faces--a reflection of our own reference as humans and the importance of human faces in recogniz...

"Brothers on a Hotel Bed" by Death Cab For Cutie Tonight's episode is entitled "Do Not Disturb" and it's all about horrible histories in haunted hotels. This is going to include a lot of Zak Baggy Pants trying to bait the ghost chicks, no doubt. I'm up for it. It'll be a cold night and I'm ready to hunker down. Drinking Game Rules: 1.  Stay home. 2.  Have a sip for every "bro," "dude," "man," every time Zak thinks a ghost touched him, and every time Aaron's mouth drops open in horror. Tonight's drink? Kahlua and chocolate milk. Brings back hotel stay memories of making do with what was on hand. *** Another wonderful option for this evening is to turn on a radio show while you're busy working on the computer. There will be a fantastic interview on the Paranormal and the Sacred at 8 pm Central time. Char and Jim are interviewing Philip Booth, the documentary maker, discussing the Watseka Wonder, a fantast...

Gather around, my follower friends and listen to what Dale the Doll is going to tell you about hauntings and antique shops and especially clowns. My last home was an antique shop in Chandler, Arizona. It had some pretty freaky things happen at nighttime. You really don't want to know what it's like in an antique shop after hours. It ain't pretty. The Human is always traipsing around Arizona and other states in search of ghosts. I have to try not to roll my eyes and sigh. If The Human wants ghosts, she could find them in the very store she bought me in. The first night there, the man whose booth I graced, set me in a kid's rocking chair and then shoved a bunch of baby strollers and old radios around me in some kind of creepy homage to the 50s. I wasn't digging it, but I saw a potential for escape, so I shut my trap and waited. There was a line of dolls to the left me and I was keeping my eyes on those babes. There was one really hot one wearing a puffy little dress ...

When my son and his fiancee got me this poster for Christmas, I fell madly in love with the art. Then, I went online and found Madam Talbot's Victorian Lowbrow site and fell madly in love all over again! I have never ever seen a site like this and I bookmarked it immediately for items for me and for my friends. There are tons of buttons that take you to everything from sideshow carnival themes to tattoos, mourning dolls to curios. If you like the show "Oddities," this makes it possible to have that stuff yourself! This is serious art and a serious artist - Madame Talbot is a purist when it comes to creating her Framed Curio Exhibits in that she makes certain to utilize items that are not gaffs or reproductions i.e. a real human heart, a real human brain, a real human skull, etc. She sews everything by hand using only a needle and thread. Madame Talbot has created many different types of framed curios over the years, using vintage velvets, brocades, lace and antiq...

This is another in my series describing being alone in places people don’t usually like to be alone.  You can find the whole collection of them in my huge short story book, "Don't Go There! A Flash Horror Anthology" in paperback and Kindle on Amazon. Of course, I was happy that my mother and father went on a trip to England. But, then, it meant my older siblings saw it as an opportunity to leave their 12-year-old sister and go party. I was left to stay home alone. Home alone at nighttime? I liked to think I was brave, but that situation had never presented itself. A memory flashed into my mind at the time: I was 4 years old and went to bed. I woke up during the night and my sister was not there. I got up and wandered to my parents’ room. They weren’t there. I went to the other three bedrooms. No one was there! I got very scared as I wandered in my flannel nightgown down the stairs. I looked into the kitchen. No one was there. I turned and went into the dining room. I n...

I understand the hairless ones believe they are on the cusp of "proving" that my kind exists. Some have called us figments of the imagination or mistaken bears and humans, some form of ape, a caveman, and even an alien. They assume that we are stupid because we do not carry our tools everywhere in a vehicle that drives us from one place to another. They pity our lifestyle of foraging for food and sleeping in the cold. They relegate us to the category of ignorant animal because we do not wish to live in concrete forests and sleep inside a brick box. When the humans creep into our territory, we want to laugh. They are so unaware of where they are, what is around them, and how to survive. Perhaps we would not fit into their noisy, dirty, crowded world, but we are masters of ours. We will respect their space and technology if they respect our forests and talents within. I would ask this; how stupid can we be if it is the year 2012 and the hairless ones are only now getting aroun...

According to Wikipedia, a cold reading is “ a series of techniques used by mentalists, illusionists, fortune tellers, psychics, and mediums to determine or express details about another person, often in order to convince them that the reader knows much more about a subject than they actually do. Without prior knowledge of a person, a practiced cold reader can still quickly obtain a great deal of information about the subject by analyzing the person's body language, age, clothing or fashion, hairstyle, gender, sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, level of education, manner of speech, place of origin, etc. Cold readers commonly employ high probability guesses about the subject, quickly picking up on signals from their subjects as to whether their guesses are in the right direction or not, and then emphasizing and reinforcing any chance connections the subjects acknowledge while quickly moving on from missed guesses .” Techniques to watch for ( you’ve easily seen TV psych...

I have always been obsessed with near-death experiences, but this one is perhaps one of the best documented and most amazing ones ever -

You can’t talk about famous ghosts without mentioning the most beloved one in America; Abraham Lincoln. The haunting of the White House by Lincoln is a favorite story amongst historians and romantics in America. After all, when you have a parent that you trust and you believe is a good and honest person, then who replaces them? We have yet to have a president we regard in quite the same one as the man responsible for stitching America back together again. His early loss makes him an likely suspect to malinger ( think of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe ). Perhaps we're not ready to get rid of the ideals that put America on the map. But then, again, perhaps we sense that he really is still amongst us... ( From Wikipedia ) President Theodore Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman have all claimed to have heard unexplained knockings on their bedroom doors. What made them think it was Lincoln is unknown. Calvin Coolidge's wife reported seeing on several occasions the ghost of Lincoln...

BEST LINES OF THE SHOW Bobo: "(squatch language) uses Native American with, I don't know, some monkey jibberish mixed in." Bobo:  "Having some crazy chick in the woods isn't as absurd as it sounds." Bobo:   "Squatches appreciate music and musicians." (see my meme below) Cliff:  "This place is super squatchy." Bobo:   "I saw piles of fresh elk scat all over the place. I'm stoked!" The team went to Northern New Mexico where some thermal of supposed squatch does not impress Ranae who says it could be a person. Bobo mentions his best squatch sighting was there and that it said a word the Native Americans said meant "I am here." Ranae was the lady pied piper, walking the road and making girlie ramblings.  When nothing really happens, Bobo plans to stay the night while the rest go to a town hall meeting. They pursued a man's story of seeing two tall ones at a guardrail Moneymaker thinks was twins, then a young cou...

Tonight the F'ing Bigfoot gang heads to New Mexico and the Valles Caldera National Preserve. Just the name "Preserve" alone tells me, it's gonna be pretty "squatchy." They entitled this episode "Bobo Marks His Turf" and I do believe I need to make a special meme just for this one if it means what it sounds like - - Expect to read my review tomorrow morning and the best lines of the show highlighted - 

Did you know the City of Detroit has a harbinger of doom? His name is Nain Rouge.  A small, child-like creature with red or black fur boots and red eyes and rotten teeth according to one witness.  He was said to attack his first settler in 1701. When he shows up, bad things happen from killings to loss of fortune to battles. ( Wikipedia )  Famous multiple sighting occurred in the days before the 1805 fire which destroyed most of Detroit. General William Hull reported a "dwarf attack" in the fog just before his surrender of Detroit in the War of 1812.  A woman claimed to have been attacked in 1884, and described the creature as resembling, "a baboon with a horned head...brilliant restless eyes and a devilish leer on its face." Another attack was reported in 1964. Other sightings include the day before the 12th Street Riot in 1967 and before a huge snow/ice storm of March 1976, when two utility workers are said to have seen what they thought was a child climbing...

By now, the long-term readers of GHT have experienced my excitement about all things paranormal from encouraging you to go on adventures and paranormal vacations to publishing the book Paranormal Geeks (on Amazon) with Julie Ferguson. Well, expect 2013 to add something new to the mix. Julie and I are going to go on some amazing paranormal adventures covering all the paranormal realms. We are doing to do videos called Chasing Legends in which we show how we decide on a paranormal legend, research it and go in the field in search of it. We are hoping to ignite curiosity in the readers of our blogs and spark y'all to go find a legend and chase it. Life is about seeking knowledge and adventure, so GO FOR IT! We really want you to go from arm chair paranormal geeks to having these crazy adventures to tell your grandkids about some day. We will share the ones we go on and believe me, we will be chasing the rather mundane legends to some of the most insane ones! Hang on!

I do have a lot of books on Kindle (Amazon). I find people afraid to read electronic versions of books, but oh, they are a delight! Kindle makes it easy. At the purchase button on the right hand side of the book cover they have a download to your PC option. You can have your books on your Droid, your IPad, your PC, or your Kindle. It's just so easy nowadays. For free, they load the software onto your PC and there you have a wonderful Kindle Reader button. You can purchase Kindle books on your Amazon account and then you pull them up on that Reader button any time, any where. It remembers what you own. There are even free Kindle books all over the Amazon site, so there's no excuse not to be reading. I have my Kindle book I'm reading minimized while I do my writing and work and pop it up when I take a break and read it. I lot it because every time I open the Kindle Reader back up, it remembers what book and page I was on the last time. You can find my list of books...

Y'all know I adore indie artists of all kinds, whether they are musicians, oil painters, authors, craftspeople. I truly believe that when you don't have to sell out to what an industry wants of you, you can live to your potential. I found another indie artist I want to promote with an adorable idea; adopt a zombie . Check out the adorable tale of Ghoulina and learn about the unique and individual baby zombies. Adorable!

I'll be on the Paranormal and the Sacred radio show tonight for end-of-the-world craziness. It begins at 9 pm EST/8 pm Central.

My newest book "Growing Up With Ghosts," the childhood accounts of myself and my family members in the haunted home I grew up in, is out in print and Kindle on Amazon. Don't forget Julie Ferguson and I's newly released books too - Zombie Housewives of the 1960s This fun book comes in Kindle, black and white print and full color collectible print on Amazon. We took the 1960s and turned them upside down by injected them with a zombie theme and women's roles, social uprising, and political turmoil.  This one won the 2012 Crow Award ! You can also find amazingly hilarious logo items in our zombie housewives shop AND Paranormal Geeks This book is our pride and joy. We paid an homage to all things paranormal geeks from the rock stars in the paranormal world to the types of paranormal geeks, degrees, and how they got to be there, with a quiz to find out what kind of geek you are and a geek certificate. Endorsed by Cliff Barackman from "Finding Bigfoot" and B...

"He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody" . (suicide note, woman above) The Empire State Building is personally my favorite building in America, the most beloved to me; more so than the White House, Washington Monument or any other significantly recognizable structure. At 102 stories and 1,454 feet tall it is seriously impressive. My first time to the observation deck, all I could think about was whether a penny would kill someone. I was terrified one might fall out of my pockets, so I stood back ( even though it’s not possibly for one to spill out a pocket to the crowd below ). Movies like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “King Kong” romanticized this beautiful art deco styled edifice even more. It possesses what I consider to be the observation deck for America. The next thing one thinks of up where the winds are howling is how freaking far down it is and what kind of state of mind people would have to be in to choose that way to die. Not only a...

Ever since I saw the movie "In Dreams" ( awesome scary movie with Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr) with a scene of divers diving in a lake where a town was underneath, swimming amongst headstones and a church, I have been fascinated with the idea of abandoned sunken ghost towns. Smith Island Chesapeake: This island in the Chesapeake is lost to time. It is 3 miles long and 1 mile wide and at sea level. It's lost a good deal of its citizens to poor crabbing and fishing conditions. The graves are topped by heavy stones so when there's a high tide or flooding rains, the bodies don't wash away to sea. At the rate of shrinkage, the island will be gone by the end of this century. Sharps Island: Around the beginning of the 19th century, Sharps Island was a roughly 600-acre (240-hectare) farming and fishing community at the mouth of Maryland's Choptank River. At one time it boasted schools, a post office and a popular resort hotel, where vacationers from Baltimore...