Finding Bigfoot Season Finale Tonight!

Tonight's season ender of Finding Bigfoot on Animal Planet will be an episode where they go to Vietnam in search of a BF equivalent. I find this interesting because I'm doing extensive studying of ancient giant skeletons and some of the tallest ones found were in China and the South Pacific, up to 25 feet tall!

Tomorrow morning, I will be having the recap of the show including the best lines of the show. No doubt, they will be awesome in foreign country with Bobo being excited and Matt putting on airs. It should be quite entertaining.

**Don't forget, this week is urban exploration and abandoned places week including tips and tricks on how to photograph and urban explore safely, as well as amazing sites you didn't know about**

Abandoned Water Sites

This week begin my abandoned places/urban exploration theme week. Today, we explore abandoned sites associated with water.

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 and other locations would arrive by boat to while away the lazy summer days. But between 1850 and 1900, the island lost 80 percent of its land mass, and by 1960 it had been reduced to a shoal. Today it is entirely underwater, marked only by a partly submerged lighthouse.



Remember the movie "Deliverance?" Here's a dive to that town, Lake Jocassee, SC (go ahead and run the slider to closer to the end so you can see the dive if you don't want to hear the interview, but it is a nice story).



(Here's the cemetery on a dive...)




(Above: Loyston, TN, photographed before being sunk by a lake created from a dam)

Loyston (Wikipedia) was a community in Union County, Tennessee, USA, that was inundated by the waters of Norris Lake after the completion of Norris Dam in 1935.[1] Established in the early 19th century around a foundry built by its namesake, John Loy, over subsequent decades the community's location along State Highway 61 helped it grow into a trading center for local farmers. By the time the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) began making plans to build Norris Dam in the early 1930s, Loyston had a population of approximately 70 residents, and consisted of a post office and several small businesses. Prior to inundation, TVA conducted extensive sociological surveys of Loyston's residents, and the community was documented by photographer Lewis Hine. Most of Loyston's residents relocated elsewhere in the area, with many forming the community of New Loyston in the hills to the south.

Movies About Death and Afterlife

I am finishing up this week's theme of death/dying/afterlife with some awesome movies to provoke your imagination about the process. Let's begin with this documentary found on streaming Netflix.




Flatliners - a very interesting and tense movie about med students taking each other to the edge to peek at the other side before being brought back to life again.


Ghost - a romantic look at lovers separated by death.


Heaven Can Wait - death, regrets, and reincarnation.



Meet Joe Black - what if death took a holiday in the human realm?





Constantine - He takes down the bad demons, but is he dancing with the afterlife?

Why I Took Up Investigating Ghosts

Sure, I grew up in a notoriously haunted house. I witnessed a lot of phenomena, much of it I assumed as a kid growing up was perfectly normal. Some of it, like poltergeist activity, made me wonder how in the hell such a thing could occur. One time, when I was 10 years old, I stole my father's tape recorder he practiced his speeches on and sat on the stairs all night waiting for those booted footsteps and I captured them on tape only to have the sounds shot down by others saying I simply wore my father's boots and recorded it.

I realized at a young age, you cannot disprove a haunting, but you also can't prove it!

Jump ahead a few decades, living in a modern and not-haunted home, I had left the ghosts behind me, right?

It all changed when my ex (husband at the time) was asked to a work friend's girlfriend's party. He wanted to go so he could play drums during the open mic all evening. I went along, but wasn't thrilled. I hated attending parties of people I didn't know, but luckily a few people I knew showed up. I hadn't known it, but the woman (my ex's friend's girlfriend who owned the house) had just bought the home and was having some "haunting" issues. She told someone who told her that I was a psychic.

The woman eagerly grabbed me up and along with her friend, she took me aside and told me of hearing someone in the hallway and a woman crying in the master bath. I did my walk through, touching the place, envisioning another family that had lived there. I told her what I found as I walked but told her not to respond.

I don't like feedback or it distracts me down the wrong path.

I told her about an elderly woman in the first bedroom who was a bit demented in an OCD way and would walk the hall and recheck and recheck the front door several times each night. There was a corner bedroom I didn't like at all. A man did something in there that was shady. The master suite, I saw a man, a woman and about an 5-year-old boy who slept between them, partly to protect his mother from his father and partly to feel safer by being near his mom for protection. In the master shower, a woman sat on the tile floor, bleeding into the drain from her arm.

The friend with the homeowner shook her head in shock. She had lived next door for 25 years. Yes, there was a man, woman, and a boy living there with the grandmother. She was a demented old lady and did sleep in that bedroom. The man sold drugs from the house and the corner room was where he ran his business. The woman did try to kill herself in the shower.

Feeling the usual relief that I had followed the right trace of residual information, I was ready to rejoin the party when the neighbor said, "I just don't understand it. They're not ghosts. They live across town. All of them are still alive."

My world tilted on its axis. As a child, I had a sense of residual energy (scenes replaying mindlessly in a space) but having read what haunted this woman's house and realizing that there were no actual ghosts, I wanted answers. Were all hauntings residual?

So, I began avidly ghost hunting in search of answers. Every hunter has different influences but mine were based on an inability to accept blindly and with religious faith the explanations for what a ghost is and how it works. I started this blog several years ago which was several years into my hunting and the premise was to explore theories, test them, search for testing methods, trying to get some answers.

I still search, still theorize, still experiment and hope to have more "aha!" moments where it all makes sense. Right now, it's a marvelous and interesting mystery and I am ever a curious child.

Ghost Adventures Drinking Game

The Mamas and the Papas "California Dreamin" 

Tonight, Zak and the Boyz go to Glen Tavern Inn in California and they will get a tarot card reading and a seance in this hotel.

Drinking game rules: 
1. Stay home
2. Have a sip for every "bro," "dude," and every time Zak thinks a ghost touched him.

The drink tonight?
I'm thinking a good California wine. I personally like Pinot Grigio. How about Mirassou Winery's Pinot Grigio?

Unusual Alternative Burial Options

I can't help it. I have an evil sense of humor, so try and stick with me as we discuss the "grave" business (pun intended) of what to do with your carcass when you're gone. Some of the alternatives had me laughing and cringing as I discovered these really weird and interesting things to do with a dead body. There is no other approach to this bizarre subject than tongue in cheek...


MUMMIFICATION: Summum Mummification of Transference says, “Gifted artisans design each Mummiform to exact specifications. The Mummiform and "life mask" can be designed to incorporate the symbology of any religious or philosophical belief that you may hold. Everything is created in exact accordance with your wishes, as set forth in your pre-need arrangement." The casket can then be put in the ground deep enough that the cold won’t bother your remains or triple casketed. The price, you ask? The current costs for Mummification services are $67,000* within the continental United States." (Personally, I'll only do this if my servants are buried with me).

VIKING FUNERAL: Of course, I’m frustrated that Viking funerals are outside the law. One woman wrote online asking about them since her husband wanted one. I laughed for a good 15 minutes when I read one person’s response in the chatroom, “you mean put in a raft and set afire? I think that can be done…” (somehow I envision this dude with a canister of kerosene and one of those Bic fireplace lighters waiting at the edge of a lake with a Walmart pool raft exchanging some crisp bills to “do the deed” while he downs a Budweiser).

GREEN FUNERAL: The rage nowadays and actually not a bad idea. Nixing the embalming and burying in bamboo and cardboard in a green hillside where the only markers are trees or bushes and no one would guess it’s a cemetery. (I just have one word for these places, "Poltergeist." I do recall a wonderful gem of a movie based on the idea of a subdivision being built where a cemetery was. Some Superstore is going to eye that plot of land and no one's going to remember it was a cemetery. What an excavation that'll be!)

FAMILY BURIAL: No, not burying your family with you! I wrote about this recently and it’s a creepy and not often talked about thing most often in rural areas (God, I hope so!) Folks are opting to design their own casket with their family members working on the artwork and having a solemn, quiet, peaceful send off with just the loved ones on a happy corner of the yard. You know, that place the family dog likes to bury his bones. (It's going to be Christmas for him every day!)

SPACE: Yeah, it’s the final frontier, but for some folks it’s the final resting place. I had to wonder (and thankfully the site for Celestis tells us) if we become space debris that falls to earth, because it would seriously suck if I were launched and then came back to kill my offspring. What really happens is not that you necessarily go into deep space and land on some happy planet and are revived like Spock in “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.” This involves being in a rocket that orbits the earth until it finally fails and burns on reentry into a blazing glory. (Well, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s one fucking expensive and delayed cremation plan. You'd save money catapulting your urn into the night sky and hiring fireworks to be launched simultaneously.)

CRYOGENICS: Have your head lopped off and frozen indefinitely. Of course, that ain’t gonna get you a new body to attach to later on. (nor will it guarantee that in 2090, someone isn't going to throw the breakers on the old building before tear down and let you spoil...)

WAYS TO USE YOUR BODY AFTER DEATH

ART: What if I want to donate my body to something worthy or even beautiful? Body Worlds (photo above) is a traveling show with real human displays. Your body fluids are replaced with a hardening polymer. (Jeez, aren't actresses in Hollywood already into this craze while alive?) Believe it or not, the waiting list is long, 6500 people wanting to donate themselves. Algordanza is a Swiss company that will make you into a diamond from your ashes. (I think I'm a "piece of work," but not necessarily a "work of art." Besides, as much of an exhibitionist as I am, I don't see myself wanting to display my innerds, just my outards...)

RESEARCH: Donate your body through a local university. There’s no telling if you’re going to be used to understand disease or as a practical dissect for incoming med students, but you will be helping someone learn something and if you never did that in your lifetime, this may be your chance. (However, there's no telling what affectionate name the students will give you, so if that produces chills just thinking about it, move down the list to the next one...)

ORGANS: As well, you can donate your organs and honestly really should! My brother donated his organs and a woman in Greece was able to see again! Another person underwent heart valve surgery and survived. I am on the list and hope to keep myself healthy throughout life so they can still be salvageable when I'm say, 110 and decide to finally let go of them!

REEF: You couldn’t live underwater while alive, but when you die, you can join the building of a reef for sea life. At Great Burial Reef they turn you into a part of the reef (photo above): "Living ocean reef burials are performed individually and privately. After a brief dedication ceremony, the sealed burial reef is carefully lowered to the ocean floor by our crew. The precise GPS coordinates of the burial reef are recorded and provided to the family on a Certificate of Living Ocean Reef Burial." I actually really dig this idea—might consider it, (but if your family was a bunch of leaches, you might just be sick of others living off you, so perhaps not an ideal resting spot).

No matter how they discard of your carcass, what really matters is what you do while you’re here. No one will remember you for your send-off unless they were joyously awaiting it (in which case you need to work on your social skills).

It truly does come down to ashes to ashes, dust to dust (well, unless you go mummy and then that's more like plump to dehydrated...)

How To Do Seances

I have performed many seances over the years and what I can tell you is this; there is no perfect saying or ritual, but there are some basics that should be adhered to -

That being said, the elements of seances are similar, no matter how you word them or pace them.

MEDIUM:  You do not need a trained medium, but you should have someone who is psychically sensitive. I would prefer to not use a empathic psychic, but someone who is more in control of the emotions that might bombard him/her, so I'd choose a psychic who has either precognition abilities, physical abilities like PK or psychometry, or someone who is very good at reading people by any means, whether it's tarot or palm reading, tea leaves, or whatever. 

GROUP: You will want a group. I have found a group should consist of 4 people but no more than 8. That seems to be ideal. Too few bodies and there is not enough energy. Too many bodies and it's intrusive and too much energy.

Whether they are male or female does not seem to show a difference, but I have found over decades of doing this that having men on one side, women on the other is helpful. My guess is that one side of the table will attract a spirit energy because of its very sex and having them united on one side of the table makes that energy and safe harbor more apparent.

Whether or not the group members are believers seems to do nothing to the results of the seance. Some folks like to blame a dud seance on the nonbelievers, but honestly dud seances are as common as dud ghost hunts. It's a rare thing to have a good hit on a seance, believers or not.

BEGIN:  In an ideal situation, I prefer to use rose scented candles or gardenia or lilac, some sort of heirloom flower scent. Some mediums do not use this because they want to be able to tell if a spirit arrives by its scent, but that is rare and I'd rather have the group in the right mindset. The olfactory sense is the most immediate one. Any time you ever were hit with the smell of Coppertone lotion and immediately felt nostalgic, you know how powerful it is. When it comes to being in the right place in one's head to attract spirit interaction, having the group collectively feeling open is more important than worrying about masking scents.  As well, if you have photos or items of the dead, place them on the table.  If you wish to record, put the recording devices on the table and around the room.

Now that you have placed women on one side of the table, men on the other, I suggest that all participants put their hands on the table, palms up. There is no need to touch each other. Each person will be their own beacon. I often during ghost hunts turn my palms upward to let my own energy (aura) outward like a beacon. If you put your hands down on the table, you are stifling the most powerful outlet of energy in your body, your hands. I know that traditionally, mediums have liked to use hand holding as a way to link the energies into a protective circle, but that is not necessarily productive. Like a chain, you are only as strong as your weakest link. Someone in the group invariably is thinking about tomorrow's supper plans or simply believing there is no way anything can happen. If each individual allows their own energy to emanate from their hands upwards, it is like a dozen fire lights flickering in a forest.  As well, the individuals' intent and emotional content, spirituality and latent psychic abilities will produce their own unique signature of outward energy that can attract.

So, palms up, seated comfortably. Candles lit, and I suggest participants look above and beyond the person across from them. This way, all parts of the room are being watched by someone who has over time gotten to know the usual look of that part of the room and can discern changes as well as have a glimpse at anything that might come to that person across the table from them.

CEREMONY:  Ceremonies begin and end always with a protection blessing. This can be done any manner of way, so long as the participants are comfortable with it. Some teams use Christian prayer, but a member who is not Christian may be uncomfortable with this. My advice to that person is that they participate in so much as forming silence and allowing the members to be comfortable with their own protection blessing and if that person wishes to, they can word a protection silently for himself.  The basic wording should include these aspects; we are gathered here in hopes of reaching those in the spirit world, as we seek answers to questions. The members here are of of the living plane. When this ceremony is occurring and when it is over, these physical beings are to be allowed protection from any harm or associations. Our intentions are pure and we expect the intentions of the spirit world to be, as well.

The medium can ask a question and I find that ideally, it's best if after she has asked the question, you wait about 20 seconds before the person to her/his right asks a question with the same wait time, and then the next person, around the table until the medium's turn. Now, that the medium is in charge again, it is time for her to request more information. She is free to reveal any names, images, or other things that come to her as she is "channeling." If there are great pauses and silence in her giving information, it is fine to have the person to her right begin a question again and do this around the table until the medium's turn again. If she has no more information to add, it is time to close the circle.

CLOSING:  Closing should begin with a thank you to the spirits and a dismissal, to the effect of, "we appreciate your visit and your communication. Thank you for your cooperation. We wish to release you back to your spiritual realm and these members to their physical realms, free to continue our experiences as before."

As I talked about in my book "Was That a Ghost?" about the "Trinity of Relevance," The same 3 elements are at play in how people react to seances. Context-if one knows he is entering a seance, there is expectation of the theatrical responses seen on TV. Just because he is in a seance, he might believe everything that happens is spirit-related. Belief-if he has a belief system that includes demons, possession, and an evil spirit world, his explanations of what's happening will be colored by this. Explanatory style-how that participant explains the situation to himself can create either peace or unrest.

WARNINGS:  Followup with the participants is important. Latent psychics can show very strong reactions, even signs of possession, if they don't realize how highly suggestible they are and how open they are to be a conduit. So, if signs of a "possession" do occur and a member suddenly starts being out of touch with what's happening, it is best to break the circle, have the medium come over to the person, place her hands upon the person's back and give a very gentle shove and say "disperse." This is usually enough to bring the person back to baseline. It is hard to tell whether such a thing as possession is possible, but we do know that in the fervor and belief of religious ceremony, people can speak in tongues and dance with snakes, so it is entirely possible that a suggestible person can get caught up in a feeling or an image and run with it until it's out of control. It's very comparable to a person acting as if they are going to die if they get into a airplane. The mind psyches up the body to react with threat.

For those who have strong religious beliefs that make seances an unacceptable form of communication with the dead, that is fine. I will also remind people that any time you do an EVP session and ask the spirits to knock on the wall or answer your questions, or any time you visit a family member's grave and talk to them, you are having a form of seance.

Death Becomes What?

Popularly termed NDEs, near-death experiences have been with us for as long as man has recorded his history for others to read. The moment of death and what occurs when the heart stops beating has been one of the major focuses of man since he had the ability to realize he was mortal.

Many religions have been born with the promise to fearful mortals that there are rewards after their hard lives. Whether or not there is an actual “other side” will not be known until one passes and even then the answer may not be provided if the end is nothing more than darkness and loss of consciousness. But, we do have an interesting advantage with modern medicine, the ability to yank someone from the other side and back again to tell of his experiences. This occurs much more nowadays with our understanding and practice of resuscitation methods.


("Flatliners" Intriguing movie!)

People’s experiences with near-death have given us some insight into what visual and sensory experiences might occur when we ourselves pass. There are strong commonalities in the stories told by people who passed on and were revived by CPR. These include; traveling through a tunnel, seeing lights, encountering beings (most often deceased relatives), gaining insight and retrospection on one’s life, leaving one’s body and looking down upon it, and being told to return to one’s body and finish his earthly mission.

Dr. Raymond Moody was perhaps the first to popularize the terminology and talk about this phenomenon openly in his first book “Life After Life.” I read this interesting book in the mid 70s, not realizing that my father would be dying very soon before my very eyes. After four minutes of trying to revive him with the paddles, the paramedics rolled him from the house. He smiled at me and said, "I was on a fiord (he was from Norway), my family was there, my parents, and there were flowers that don't exist and colors that don't exist here." When he died a few days later, his contentment with the other side made it easier for me.


I was comforted to know that, even if perhaps there is no “other side,” those moments of death provide a wonderful vision that is comforting. The emotions and visualizations are bliss. But, if this is purely a function of a dying brain as some scientists believe, then why not random firings and confusing images? Why a complete storyline from an oxygen-deprived brain? And more importantly, how?

When my father passed, I had plenty of time to consider NDEs. I wondered why in the moment of complete and utter shutdown of all systems in the body, people experienced the same thing. Why see dead relatives? Why not see the live ones you have to live for? Why not see the beach in Hawaii from your honeymoon when you had the happiest day of your life? Why not see a lottery windfall? It was that bit of wonder that kept me intrigued by NDEs as potentially legitimate examples of afterlife.

I, myself, was born pulseless and breathless and was revived at four minutes from birth. Some say that’s why I’m psychic. I wonder if that is what made me feel different than others in my family and everyone else I came across. There was something not entirely of this world about me. I always had a way of looking at things from a universally bigger picture and was not concerned with the details. When others fussed over the hem of their dress or the way their car was parallel parked, I was feeling a part of a bigger picture, a massive machine, a universe in which I was the butterfly flapping its wings and changing the world just by getting up that morning. I’ve always felt I extend past my body and the human experience in a mortal body is awkward and strange. Did I gain this perspective from my newborn NDE?

This site offers a good deal of information on the subject if you’re interested. There are some great examples of what people have experienced. Some of them even describing their own operation from the perspective of the ceiling!

People who underwent this sort of event report huge changes in their goals, their personalities, their lack of fear of death, and their connections to other human beings that are permanent.

If you knew this was your fate upon crossing over, how would you live your life now, if you didn’t fear death but embraced living? What goals would you go for? What would you not put off until tomorrow?

It’s definitely worth contemplating.


 ("Through the Wormhole" Is There Life After Death?)

I'm on Midnight Walker's Radio Show Tonight

Tonight at 9 pm EST, I'll be on Midnight Walker's radio show. Please come and listen!

Psychomanteum: Theater For the Dead?

The psychomantium is a gazing mirror used for making contact with those who have passed on. Dr. Raymond Moody (of the book "Life After Life" fame) made this ancient technique popular with his book "Reunions: Visionary Encounters With Departed Loved Ones."

The best description I’ve found of this technique comes from this website’s description:

“The initial setup is a little more complex and costly than that of a scrying mirror. A large mirror (4' high by 3-1\2' wide) is attached to a wall with the bottom edge about 3' from the floor. A comfortable, high backed chair is placed about 3' from the mirror. The top of the backrest of the chair should be below the bottom of the mirror. The feet of the chair should be trimmed to allow the chair to slant farther back than is normal.

The person sitting in the chair should not be able to see his/her reflection in the mirror. The area around the chair and mirror is surrounded by a black velvet curtain. This black void should be all that is reflected in the mirror. A lamp with a 15 watt bulb is placed behind the chair. This is the only illumination in the room.

This procedure is usually performed after dark to alleviate the problem of light entering the room through the windows. Thick, dark curtains or a room without windows would allow you to use the psychomantium even during the day. 

Proper mental preparation is essential for this procedure to work. Dr. Moody starts his participants at 10:00 AM. They are requested to bring personal items from the deceased person that is to be contacted. Throughout the day they discuss the deceased. At dusk the participant enters the psychomantium. He/she is told to stay as long as they like. They were also told to blank their mind except for thoughts of the deceased and to gaze into the mirror. “

Although my own experience with using a psychomantium is minimal (two sessions), I can attest to the fact that at one point a dark man’s shape appeared in the mirror and he stood there for some time before stepping back and out of sight. Whether that was an actual spirit or not is, of course, impossible to prove or that he might have been my eyes trying to see something in the dark and interpreting in the setting of expecting to see a spirit.

This experiment has two things working against it. One thing is that the participant must immerse herself in items of the deceased, go there with the intention of reaching that loved one, and all the emotional feelings that the desire to talk to the dead produces. The other issue is that a mirror and low lighting are use to see things and as anyone who was brave enough as a kid to call on “Blood Mary” or “Esmerelda come to me” knows, you can see all kinds of things by virtue of the lighting, reflectivity, and matrixing (or finding shapes in inanimate objects).

I would never advise people using this during periods of grief or those seeking a kind of resolution with souls of the departed. This is purely for experimental purposes and best used by people who have no existing emotional issues that might cloud the experience or leave them frightened. I would also want to exclude those of a highly religious background, as they might be more likely to fight against the taboo notions and hysteria that goes with trying to communicate with the dead. A lot of people, even as grownups, do not like gazing into mirrors in dim lighting. Highly suggestible people are most susceptible to ill effects and bad reactions.

If you decide to experience a psychomantium encounter, do not do so alone. Whether you realize it or not, just the active trying to create a portal to the dead can make feelings erupt and having someone there to sort it through with is helpful.

I do not see anything about the psychomantium to suggest it actually will help speak with spirits, but I do believe that such experiments might help to bring the mind into a place where it can receive information, somewhat like meditation or psychic trances. It is, however, an intriguing thought. I personally think it would be interesting in my writer’s office to have a psychomantium in the corner of the room like some folks keep stationary bicycles. It is a unique way to open the mind to what is beyond our realm in a way that encourages you to be sort of deprived of distractions, a kind of focusing tool.

Whether you believe in the phenomenon of psychomantiums or not, they have been with man for a very long time (ancient Greeks) and will continue to be a curiosity for the living.

Stuck In the Grief Process?

There are mental, emotional and spiritual ways of recovering from grief. At first, dreams can be stuck in the death moments. You might repeatedly have these dreams of the death or the process.  If you cannot talk about the deceased without getting choked up or sobbing, the mental and emotional grief process are not over yet. When you can talk about the person and smile and feel warm inside, you are fully through the grief process because you think of them fondly and without the guilt, loneliness, or confusion.

Mental and emotional ways of recovering include telling the story of the death to a loved one or writing about it in a journal, recalling every detail. You will have to do this same thing every day for a week to two weeks. It’s exhausting, but you will finally assimilate what happened and find it easier to talk about each time. This is the same process as recovering from PTSD. Dreams will begin to shift and when you speak the story or write the story each day, it is less and less emotionally draining. 

This is an assimilation process. 

The spiritual aspect involves where we place the spirit of our loved one in a new framework.  When the dying body takes the last breath, the spirit gloriously gets to be set free from the prison of pain and disability and the confines of the body. It is a joy beyond belief and a meeting of those loved ones who have passed on; a reunion. Celebrate your loved one's reunion and freedom in a symbolic way; hang a set of windchime outdoors (ideally, a southwest corner of the porch or garden). Choose one that somehow reminds you of your loved one in theme or sound.

Every time the wind moves it, it chimes. This is the breath of the spirit life. In Feng Shui, windchimes attract spirits. Every time that chime sounds, recall that your loved one continues on with eternal breath and every now and then reminds you of their freedom and bliss by chiming. 

I hope this helps someone. I have experienced the loss of nearly everyone I love over my lifetime and it has helped me to find the most constructive ways to get through the process and set a new framework in my mind that includes the eternal rhythms of life including wind and breath and music.

Tonight On Paranormal Geeks Radio: Sylvia Shults

Sylvia Shults is a talented author of horror and romance. Tonight, Jim Heater, will be interviewing her. Expect Julie and I in the chatroom too.

Paranormal Geeks Radio
9 pm EST/8 pm Central

Mind Fuck Tuesday: Ancient Giants! Amazing Realizations

Ready for today's theory about ancient giants? 

I spent my Sunday off doing what a paranormal geek does, studying. I took all the accounts I could find of ancient giant skeleton finds and made a chart to find similarities, correlations, make some assumptions about migration or culture, time range, anything. While doing this, I thought about this - 

Ancient giant skeletons have been found around the entire world - a race of exceedingly tall (7-12 feet tall) people with receding foreheads, double rows of teeth and technology (fire/tools/writing) advanced from other modern man/Neanderthal/Denisovans that were on the earth then. Ancient Indians said that they came to America and found the giants here with technology they didn't know. They had battles and the Indians say they killed off the giants. But, what if they simply drove them into hiding? What if for thousands of years, they remained hidden, and in that time became feral--loss of cloth-making/fire-making technology and over time grew hair on their bodies in their feral rough environment? What if Bigfoot is the Alhegewi (ancient giant tribe)?

Enjoy this chart and see if it doesn't give you chills - 

Equador 1928	8-9 feet (bodies lost in shipping to university?)	Stone coffins
Phillipines 1928	17- feet tall and other 13-foot tall ones
India 1960	11-foot man – assumed large ape—not ape-like bones	Stones, charcoal bits, flints, metal bowl
Rome 1969	Each occupant 6-1/2 to 8 feet tall.	50 tiled coffins
Crittendon, AZ 1891	12 feet tall, long hair	Clay sarcophagus, bird-shaped hat, bones crumbled to dust.
Winslow, AZ 1891	Giant skull (a Stetson set atop of it made the hat look like a tiny party hat)
Nevada, 1911 , cave	6-1/2 to 9 feet tall, red hair
Nevada 1931 cave	8-10 feet tall,	Wrapped in gum covered cloth like a mummy,
Nevada 1939	7 feet 7 inches tall
Indiana 1879 mound	Lots of skeletons, one was 9 feet 8 inches. Lost in flood	A necklace of mica, a small human figure of fired clay with flint embedded, flints and axes not like natives work.
Ohio 1897  mound		22-inch copper axe, weighed 38 pounds
Indiana 1925 mound	8 skeletons, 8-9 feet tall, (scattered and lost)	Wearing heavy copper armor.
New York 1880s	5 skeletons – 1 was 11 feet tall
Pennsylvania mound	68 men, none less than 7 feet tall. Sent to museum promptly “lost.”
New York 1886	8-foot tall skeleton
Minnesota 1885 mounds	Six skeletons 7-8 feet tall, receding foreheads, buried upside down, bones crumbled when in contact with air.
Minnesota 1885 mounds	More giant skeletons found with receding foreheads and buried upside down.
Minnesota mound	Titan-sized bones,	Huge, flat cooking pans, stone axe head – 28 inches long, 14 inches wide, 11 inches thick, 300 pounds!
Minnesota mound 1896	9 foot skeleton
Minnesota mound	Bones of 7-foot tall men
Minnesota Mound 1888	Seven gigantic skeletons 7-8 feet tall
Minnesota mound 1882	Ten giant skeletons	Horses of bones and animals thought to not be in America before Europeans arrived.
California 1833, bones given to tribe	Skeleton over 12 feet tall inside coffin, double rows of teeth	Stone coffin, surrounded by carved shells, massive stone axe, flint spear tips, tablets covered in unknown script . Medicine man said these were the alhegewi, an ancient giant tribe here before the Indians that the Indians fought and killed off.
China	12-15 feet tall	Arrow that was 6-1/2 feet long
China	Ancient Japanese came upon a Chinese shore and a tribe over 11 feet tall
Tennessee 1821	Skeletons 7 feet tall.
Ohio mound 1879	9-feet 8-inch tall
Utah mound	6-feet 6-inches
Ohio mound	Enormous proportions	Clay coffin, sandstone slab, heiroglyphs
Minnesota 1883	10 skeletons gigantic size
West Virginia 1884	7-feet 6-inches	Massive stone temple chamber
Pennyslvania 1885	7-feet 2-inches	Vault with carvings on it
California 1885 cave	Mummified woman 6-feet 8-inches holding an infant
Ohio 1895	20 skeletons seated, facing east, jaws and faces twice the size modern man	Beside each body, a bowl with hieroglyphs
Kentucky 1965	8-feet 9-inches
Nevada 1877	Bone found from leg showed modern man but 12 feet tall. Rock it was found in was of the Jurassic Dinosaur era!
Australia	Footprints prove race of ancient 12-foot tall giants	Clubs and hammers over 300 pounds.
Utah cave	2 mummies of large stature	45 stone stacked boxes wrapped in juniper bark and pine pitch to keep waterproof, swords, tools, copper, metal plates,
Utah 1930s, Univ of Utah and Brigham Young skeletons	12 skeletons 8-feet to 10-feet., hand and finger bones nearly reached the kneecaps.	Stone roof covered in pitch, stone chest with 12 bodies in spoke like fashion around it, inside chest metallic records recording their 12 lives.
New York 1871	200 giants found in cemetery, most 7-9 feet tall. Most skulls broken or dented as if in battle.	String of beads around each neck. Axes and skimmers made of stone, stone pipes in some jaws, tomahawks and axes, pipes with dog heads carved into them.
Ohio 1872 mound	3 skeletons over 8 feet, double rows of teeth, crumbled when exposed to air.
Minnesota  1885	The remains are completely petrified, and are of gigantic dimensions. The head is massive, measures 31-1/2 inches in circumference. but low in the os frontis, and very flat on the top. The femur measures 26-1/4 inches. and the fibula 25-1/2 inches, while the body is equally long in proportion. From the crown of the head to the sole of the foot. the length is 10-feet 9-1/2 inches. The measure around the chest is 59-1/2 inches. This giant must have weighed at least nine hundred
California 1898	Female 7-feet 6-inches Tail-like appendage
Texas 1974 (chalk mountain) Sealed in cave	7-foot woman
California 1810	6-toed giant
Montana 1924	Huge human molar found in strata that was between 30 and 75 million years old.
California	Skull with massive jaw and double rows of teeth all around
Shemya-island in the Aleutians 1943	Huge human bones found next to mastodon and mammoth bones. Skulls were 22” to 24” long, the skeletons 24-feet tall. Skulls had 2-inch holes in them.
Australia	10-12 feet and over	Clubs, pounders, chisels, knives, weighing up to 25 pounds
Australia	25- feet tall
Australia	20-feet tall
Australia	Footprints of 17-foot tall man
Iowa	Mummified giants 10-feet tall, sitting cross legged, arms crossed over legs. Distinctly red hair	Stone slabs, massive archway and capstone
Arizona	50 giant skeletons 10-14 feet tall
West Virginia 1856	10-foot 9-inch skeleton
Turkey 1950s tomb Sent to creationist museum Texas	Femurs measured 47.24 inches – making them 14-16 feet tall

Aborigines in Australia, interestingly, have tales of the giants being there when they arrived, much like the Native Americans have.

Repeatedly, American tribes have reported the giants were here first and had tools and abilities that the early natives did not. They fought the giants and killed them off. They were reported as white skinned, very tall, blond/red hair.

Book of Mormon

In the Book of Ether – Jaredites were guided by God through the wilderness and across the see in barges. At one time, said to be 2,000,000 in population before their destruction. This occurred about the time the other refugees from Jerusalem arrived in America (Nephites, Lamanites, Mulekites), scattering the remaining Jaredites upon the arrival of these people who inherited the land (Paleo-Indians?).

Another thing about those ancient giants - wielding 300-pound axes worked pretty well against mastadons and mammoths. Why else would you fashion something that would be overkill for any other creature on the land? They went extinct about 10,000 years ago (the animals--apparently not the giants).

There was a story in a paper in the early 1900s about an explorer finding a cave in the Grand Canyon and inside was what looked like an Egyptian tomb. Might it have been a giant's tomb? They supposedly possessed statues, heiroglyphs, smelted ores, stonework, and stored seeds. It was said the Smithsonian took away the items, closed off the area, and the secrets were kept from the public. Is it possible that institutions and governments know about this civilized ancient people but find it impossible to explain to citizens without throwing everything we think we know into chaos? 

Also, if you include that these were leaps and bounds above early modern humans in technology, language, building skills with large stones, etc., then it goes to assume that perhaps early man learned much from them and made leaps in his brain capabilities. But, should a giant have remained on the earth, with an evolutionary jump on man, what might his mind's potential be now if you pulled him from his feral setting and taught him the basics as a child to an adult? Einstein? Tesla? Hmm.... Might his descendents be brilliant and hiding and mimicking, outsmarting and surviving?

In looking at the ancient giants information, I sometimes find myself thinking it is preposterous that a being could be 24 feet tall! I can almost imagine 10 feet, but 24??? Then, I realize I'm looking at this with a frame of reference to modern humans. I am like a Chihuahua finding the concept of a Great Dane ridiculous.

Perspective - my head size 22 inches on the left and the head size of a giant found in Minnesota with a 31-1/2 inch head (also had 26-1/4 inch femur -- mine is 15 inches).
My height 5'8"
His height 10'9-1/2".

I can see where religions and universities are threatened by this potential kink in the creation/evolution ways of thinking, but honestly how can we explain a very large intelligent man before modern man arrived? It doesn't exactly line up, now, does it?

I gave you a GIANT amount of mind fuck material for today, but my hope is to get discussions going about what religious and educational institutions have told us about Earth's history and man's place in the time line. Hope this has you looking for more info -and expect me to write a lot about this in the coming future, it is a new obsession.