GHOST HUNTERS

Well, I am exhausted and exhilarated. It was cold. It was pine-y. It was rustic. We stayed in a log cabin at about 8000 feet in Northern AZ. Being a woman who would like to spend her entire life in an autumn forest, I was in my bliss. The purpose of the hunt this time was really to acclimate ourselves, giving Bigfoot hunting a reference. We learned from our tracker some things about good locations and tracks. He did a lot of reconnaissance, finding us a good location for our nighttime vigil. Here's the lodge at the cabin place we stayed at. Very rustic and western, huh? We got to learn a lot about studying the trees and watching for movement between them, about cattle paths, game paths, ideal locations, trying some wood knocking and whooping and using the FLIR. Here's video of our daytime practice and studying the woods for a good place. Oh, and me wood knocking and Bigfoot whooping too! When we came back at sunset and hiked deep into the woods up the mountainside, we found an ...

(Our Jack Links Sasquatch!) I'm back from the Bigfoot hunt and have much to report about it. Tomorrow, I will cover the actual hunt, but for today, I'm just sharing the funny stuff as I sort through the rest. You didn't think I'd go on a hunt without some antics, did you? As I left for the trip, Dale had been acting up the night before and I think he sensed I was leaving without him. So, I thought I'd put him in his place. This October is all about me turning the tables on the booger. Here is how he was doing as I left the apartment-- At a mountain overlook above Sedona, AZ, I found this interesting sign. It made me wonder what incident occurred that made them put these two warnings together-- BF got video proof that humans exist-- A team member tries a BF call -- Years of drought left most the lake empty. So, one team member goes to check it out and I, well, pester him-- You knew I couldn't go somewhere and not run into weirdness ( I mean other weirdness, not s...

Do you think I do anything normal when I have time off? Since time off is precious and rare for me, I take full advantage of it and do something insane so the rest of the boring time I'm typing medical reports or writing books, I can daydream about the fun and goofy things I've done. Life is really just about experiences. I'm tired of saying I want to hunt BF and now I'm going to finally do it! I hope this is the beginning of something big. I really want to move to Oregon and if I do some day, no one will ever see me again, I'll be in the woods getting into, well, mischief . So, the end of this month, my POE team and I are going on a BF hunt up in Northern AZ. Yes, he's been seen up in that 8000 foot area with thick forests. We can try out our skills and perhaps some day plan a trip to extreme Northern CA, Oregon or Washington. I have some absolutely ridiculous videos planned to share with you and some photo shoots of Autumnforest in a, well, autumn forest . The...

( I was a bit giddy to stand in front of the window air-conditioner. It was about 107 and humid that day! ) The first part of our ghost hunt at the Noftsger Hill Inn was in our room that we rented. The second night, we did the hunt at the jail and stayed in our room at the end afterwards. This inn I wanted to go back to with my team because it has a funky set of vibes that leads to some mischievous child's play. The last time I stayed there, during the night several times I heard chalk moving in the chalk tray below the chalkboard near my bed and also heard a little girl near my bed speaking a full sentence several times throughout the night in a regular speaking voice. I put out a devil's box ( a 6-sided cube with mirrors facing inward ) and we placed a recording device inside and a control recording device outside of the box. We went out to supper and left it there. There are claims such a thing creates demon growling and voices. We will see once the evidence is reviewed. We ...

( Me, Julie in our dorky ghost hunting vests, every pocket brimming with tools and necessary items ) It was a crazy weekend. I will have a great deal to report on here in coming days. Our team, POE (Paranormal Observation & Experimentation), did a 2-night hunt. The first night, we hunted in a huge schoolroom we rented in a B&B. The second night, we got an abandoned jail to ourselves. I still need to sort through all the audio and video to see what evidence we accrued, but suffice to say that both places proved to be more active than we imagined and in ways we hadn't imagined. I'm going to be showing pics and videos from the hunt at the jail in coming days, but I figured I'd break it up and tell you in this post about what happened at the prison. The four of us had the prison for 3 hours alone. It was a 3-story narrow building. The bottom floor housed the maximum security which was a bit submarine-feeling. The second floor was divided between men's on one side, w...

POE team

( **Admittedly, a fun parlor game and perhaps someone can have some luck and get something out of it that they can apply** ) According to the speaker that I listened to recently from the WindBridge Institute, one does not need to go to a haunted place to speak to spirits, you can make the spirits come to you. How do you think seances and mediums have been doing this for centuries? There's some interesting and free software online that makes it possible to work on your skills at speaking to the other side. Have fun with these and report back any results. I'm curious. EVP maker program Geist Chat : Well, seriously a program that supposedly allows you to text with ghosts... This program is interesting. You can ask a question and listen for a minute or a minute and a half, writing down every word you make out and then look and see if those words line up with the question you asked. Now, for fun, check this out.

Here's the concept of the devil's box in paranormal circles: You take six mirrors of equal size and make a cube with them. Now, you sit back and wait for strange voices and growls to emanate. So, being the curious and skeptical creature, I made one for our next hunt at the end of the month. I'm willing to try such a device and see if it has some strange merit. To their credit, whoever thought this up had an interesting concept. I am intrigued by the what I see to be firm correlations between feng shui ( passage of energy through a room determined by the placement of objects, orientation of the room and windows, doors, fireplaces, et cetera ) with activity. Mirrors are hell for bouncing around energy and a mirrored box turned mirror side out in the center of the room technically should make everyone in the room unable to relax because at all points in which you sit, energy is reflected back on you. Now, you take these mirrors and turn them against each other inward and you h...

What did I ever do to earn such a moniker? It probably began in Sunday school when I told the teacher that women did not come from men, men came from women. I explained that men had milk ducts and externalized their genitals with the right hormones in utero. In fact, if a man played with his nipples regularly enough, he could lactate. I might not have said it that tactfully. It could have been in high school when a really uptight anthropology teacher gave my group the Mayans as the subject for a nice dry oral report filled with facts. I tore up the instructions, told my partners that we're baking a cake the shape of a Mayan temple. We arrived to class and instead of standing up in front with papers in hand, we sat at a table with the cake and one girl was the emcee as the other girl was my interviewer. You see, I was an anthropologist who traveled back in time and stayed with a Mayan family for a few weeks to study them. I gave them all the information in the interview that they n...

Carl Sagan ( one of my heroes along with da Vinci and Tesla ) does a fine job of explaining something that makes me ponder...is the afterlife the fourth dimension? If the 2nd dimension is what we use to conceptualize things we will make, like drawing a picture of a machine before building it, then are we in third dimension a conceptual piece for a reality in the fourth dimension? Something to ponder.

If someone were to come into your house with a group of noisy people, set up equipment in all your rooms and then promptly start to question you right and left, wouldn't you be put off? I can't imagine wanting to answer questions and follow their instructions. I'd be telling them to get the hell out of my house! In an ideal situation, equipment is set up quietly and with as little speaking as possible. Leave the site and have some supper. Come back later. There is a resting period for disruption that is important. I've learned that after a recent hunt at BirdCage when the place had a public ghost hunt and then the minute the folks left, we set up our equipment to question the ghosts that had just endured a day of visitors and an evening of people sitting around a table asking questions. There are better ways to coax any intelligence that might be in a location and it involves the general niceties that pay off amongst the living. Ideally, I would let one person at a time...

Do you remember the seances and ectoplasm, Ouija and table tipping of the old spiritualist's movement in terms of talking to the other side? Guess what? We have a new springing culture of pseudoscience spiritualism within the ghost hunting community still. We see it a lot with people like Ryan Buell who plant magical coins around properties and bring in religious figures to perform exorcisms. The use of Frank's Ghost Box is just the same as turn-of-the-century spiritualists communications methods without the cheesy ectoplasm extrusion, but with all the bells and whistles of cone and table tipping used as communications with the spirit world. How does a Frank's Ghost Box work? Well, I think this person best described it on his site : Frank's spirit receiver starts off with a standard white noise generator which is fed through a random voltage circuit of Frank's own design. The random voltage is linked to an AM radio receiver which reacts to the voltage by tuning to a...

I am asked all the time, " hey, this thing happened to me, was it paranormal? " I've helped numerous people through the process of determination. No matter what the case, I took them through the same 3-point system to come out the other side with a "probably" or "probably not" result. This 3-point system I named "Trinity of Relevance" and it involves context, belief system and explanatory style. Those three components determine what might have colored your experience and perceptions or shown it to be strikingly authentically paranormal. I decided to put the process in a book with quizzes and lots of real life examples to help people through the Trinity of Relevance and into other realms such as haunted objects, haunted homes, those with latent psychic abilities and other paranormal oddities. I am proud of my book. I do not profess to know everything about how the paranormal world works. Anyone who tells you what a ghost is, how it works, why ...

EVP: Electronic voice phenomena. This is when a voice shows up on a recording device that was not heard by those nearby. These can be explained by many means: Holding the recording device and shifting in the hand Moving about the room while recording device in hand Sounds not tagged (announced) by those in the room, such as stomach growls, coughs. Sounds in the room ignored by others such as a furnace groaning Created by a paranormal source Disembodied voice: This is a voice heard by the people in the room as if someone spoke to them. Occupants will gasp and and ask “what was that?” This will also show up on recording devices, as it is audible within the room as any other noise is. The source of this could be: Something in the room that no one paid attention to such as a cat Someone outside being heard through vents or windows Trickery Something paranormal in nature Basics about the recording process: A microphone works like a human ear. Sound waves travel through the air and are pic...

Well, at least we know that gambling whoring cowboys were polite. I have yet to find a good way to put this online. I'm the queen of finding a backdoor into something. I videotaped the Audacity screen while putting the EVP on the soundtrack. Background: We were in the BirdCage Theater in Tombstone in May 2011. The team went in pairs to walk around and introduce themselves to this gaming place/whore house. So, I made the split second decision to be the new redheaded gal as part of the entertainment. I introduced myself as a good time gal and said I was ready to sex them up. At the halfway point (9-10 seconds), you hear what almost sounds like a cat meow or "naw" and directly after it a man with a drawl saying "thank you." Conditions: We had 16 recorders set up around the three rooms of the building. When this was taken, the group was in the upper loft room where the hearse is located. I was in the main gaming room. A recorder down below in the center of the hig...

(Humvee Vest $27.95 Amazon ( Laptop bag $39.99) ($34.24 V ivitar Pocket IR/night vision camera ) (give your team some gifts--you get 40 of these finger flashlights that make it very convenient to leave your hands free. $8.39) Laser grid with keychain clip (great on the vest) Amazon for $12.99 Portable barometer/clock/thermometer/compass/altimeter with clip (great on the vest) at Amazon for $25.99 I am packing all these things. I thought I'd share my secrets!

"If you're lucky, you get audio and that is like what the plaster casts of footprints are to Bigfoot, some of the only "tangible" evidence we gather." Getting EVPs is very rewarding and also not all that easy. In an ideal setting, you cover yourself as best as possible like our Sound Man. If he gets an EVP, I get chills. Why? Because of his methods. He is not an "everything is a ghost!" kind of guy, nor would he put out a Class C and say it's a ghost. He also is willing to put down almost 2 dozen recorders to cover a site. Let's review the common classifications: Class A: Obviously language, and everyone who hears it, hears the same thing without being prompted. Class B: People might hear differing things, but it does sound like language. Class C: Noises, not necessarily language. Some do's and don'ts: Do not do an EVP session holding the recorder or holding the recorder while walking around. Set the recorder down, preferably with e...

This hunt was the beginning of POE. We hadn't formed yet, but when we came together for a hunt, we realized something; four of us in this group of 7 were adept, serious, intelligent and focused, as well as hoping to do hunts without clients and counseling, simply focusing on research, experiments, gathering information and coming to conclusions about paranormal activity. So, this hunt at the BirdCage was not only a highly anticipated hunt in a place we had all wanted to go for a very long time, but it brought us together in conversation and speculation. The members of our group, I will keep anonymous. There are four of us. I will refer to the senior male as "sound guy," the junior male as "science guy," and the other female as "photography girl." We had a group of 7 of us that night and I tend to like to go with the feeling of the building, the way it's laid out and the personal energy of the people involved. The actual attack for the evening was p...

This team was formed after years of ghost hunting and realizing that we desired something more of a research nature. Proving a haunting, counseling, dealing with clients were muddying the waters and making it difficult to figure out phenomena; how it works, what causes it, and how to enhance and lengthen interactions. We can all agree that since humans are experiencing this with their senses, whether this is of a spiritual nature of not, it launched itself into our physical world. That point of entry is the place to begin to understand how it manifests and why. It is our hope that we can go to historic and haunted locations, taking each one separately and planning experiments and methods based on the phenomena reported, the construction and geology, history and other characteristics, and perhaps narrow the field of possibilities closer and closer to that reliable and repeatable element. As we go and perform experiments, not only will findings and methods be reported here, but videos wi...