Having grown up in a very actively haunted, Civil War hospital, estate in Fairfax, Virginia, I know something as a ghost investigator that is absolutely true - you gotta live in the setting, not visit it to study for a weekend.
That being said, having lived in the Greater Phoenix Area for many decades, I was amazed to find myself living in a haunted house again.
I moved in and had only a sofa to sleep on at first, so I slept in the Arizona Room that was open to the kitchen area.
Right on the first night there, I woke up to the sound of cabinet doors closing 12 feet away. A drawer opened and slid shut. I squinted my eyes in the semi-darkness, as a bank of windows beside me picked up a distant streetlight.
A slight figure about my height walked from the kitchen opening past the row of cabinets toward the door that led to the garage.
I sat up on my elbows and considered the very empty house with no weapons yet. I held my breath awaiting the sound of the door opening to the garage when the figure walked through the garage door.
As my consciousness got a grip on being awake, I sifted through my knowledge of the house. It was in a retirement community. And, it was bought from an estate, which meant the last owner had passed.
Not easily frightened by the unknown, I went about the next several days purchasing furnishings and getting the house livable for my disabled best friend who I was going to caregive for.
But, until the bed arrived, I had a nightly kitchen visitor making noise, footfalls, and a walk to the garage.
Finally able to sleep in my bedroom with a new mattress, I slept like the dead. The only problem was, the dead weren't sleeping.
I began hearing shuffling in my closet and footfalls. The closet had an attic door on the ceiling and I heard something up there too, but in the desert we don't have raccoons.
Months went on and I got my bedroom in order, personalized it with my things. One object was a wooden tiny statuette of an alien grey holding an amethyst. A friend gave it to me, as he knew I was a researcher.
The oddest things began to happen. I'd wake up every morning to find the alien turned around, facing the wall. It made no sense, as I forgot it was even there and never touched it. Then, as if escalating the dislike, something was knocking it to the ground at night, sometimes clear across the room!
This was also the Muertes Village area of the HoHoKam, an ancient tribe that went missing. The cremations and burials were in this area. Sounds like the basis for something like "Poltergeist," eh?
As I enjoyed the cooler nights, I couldn't help staring up at the mountain only blocks away. It was a preserve and on this aspect of the mountain I viewed, not a single roadway. But, at night I couldn't help noticing that while watching the mountain, a light would suddenly go on halfway up the mountain. It wasn't on prior, just suddenly there. It also had some odd qualities, like occasionally spinning colorfully or splitting into a few colored balls of light. Soon, I was photographing, studying it on Google Earth, trying to determine why the light went on and why it suddenly went off too. If someone were crazy to hike the bare desert mountain at night, a light climbing up and down would be necessary.
In my research, I found many odd things about this mountain of the missing tribe. It had a history and gold mining, potential visit from a Spanish explorer, the Phoenix Lights, and many murmurings of hidden tunnels and portals.
One day, while outside getting the mail, an elderly neighbor across the street waved me over. She introduced herself. A lonely, well-off woman with an interest in some new age studies. When I showed her my card for Ghost Hunting Theories, she said I must come over for tea and discussion some time. Well, sometime came soon. One night with lots of lights up on the mountain, I went to sleep to footfalls and shuffles, and the wooden alien on the floor again. I decided that since this neighbor, Sandy, had lived there many years, she might enlighten me about the previous owner of my home.
Sipping some tea in her fancy parlor, Sandy told me, "oh you should have been here when they had the estate sale, all of Joe's new age books about healing and aliens, crystals and such! You'd have a library for your blog!"
I blinked. "So, what was Joe like?"
She smiled wistfully. "He was a kind man. Engineer. He spent a lot of time in the garage working on his motorcycle. A very practical and logical man before."
"Before?"
"He changed quite suddenly. He began to be more of a hermit, started chasing mysteries of the universe like you do. He had cancer and was wasting away to a slender little thing."
As the woman went silent, I thought I'd start a new subject.
"Have you ever seen lights on the mountain? Strange lights?"
Sandy blinked and set down her cup, shaking her head.
"No, don't look. Just don't look at them."
Now, I had to set down my cup as my hand was shaking. I am psychically attuned, but this was hitting an intangible nerve.
"Why?"
"Joe. Joe's change was because of those damn lights!"
I raised a brow.
"He kept seeing them. The view from your yard is quite clear. Curious, he decided one night to go chase them. He went up the greenbelt into the park and - "
When her voice trailed off, Sandy crossed her hands on her lap and look off in the distance out the window.
"He said he had seen a very bright light overhead and was...abducted. He was never the same after that."
Sandy leaned in and patted my hands.
"Please, just don't be curious."
I nodded.
Heading back to my house across the street, I gazed up at the mountain. A single blue light blinked. I unlocked the door and looked back and it was gone. As I entered my bedroom, my eyes went to the alien statuette and I realized why it was so repugnant to Joe.
But, these things would have been missed by a weekend ghost hunter. It takes living in an environment to understand the milieu and to have your psychological state of mind affecting the comings and goings and uncovering mysteries of habits and reactions by the spirits.
So, I happily worked on renovations to make accommodations for my friend's wheelchair. My eyes kept going out the window to Sandy's house. Her very strict routine wasn't being adhered to. She wasn't getting her trash can or her mail. I knew she had been very frail lately as she went out to get her mail.
Finally, after a few days a neighbor and I spoke and decided to call for a welfare check. The police left after no answer. But, I just knew the house was death. I called yet again and this time I met the policeman and told him to please check the mailbox. It was stuffed to the brim. The trash can had been sitting 10 days.
They broke open the door and found her dead body inside. This is a hazard of living in a retirement community. If you don't hear ambulances daily in God's waiting room, you know that a house only goes up for sale for one reason - death.
A couple months later, my mail gathering experiences were bittersweet as I saw the house sitting there, unattended. I knew only a few things she'd mentioned about family - that she had no kids, was divorced long ago, and didn't talk to her family of origin for a long time.
Then, one day as I was busy painting walls, the doorbell rang. I swung it open to find a young man in his 20s.
"Hi, I'm Josh, Sandy's nephew."
I looked over to see Sandy's garage open and her dusty Mercedes sitting there. She had only taken it out on Sundays to go to church. The front door was open, and a man was carrying a clipboard inside.
"My dad and I wanted to thank Joe for calling and letting us know Aunt Sandy had passed."
I blinked.
"Joe?"
"Yeah. The young man backed up to see the large house numbers I had nailed to the post. "Yes, this is the right address. He said he lived here. Please let him know we're taking care of it and her ashes are being mailed back home to the East Coast."
I silently nodded as he walked off.
This wasn't the end of Joe's presence, but the mystery of his lingering and his possessiveness of the home and the dear neighbor were admirable.
The thing about hauntings is that people let the media and movies, churches, and fireside stories explain what they can do and what they intend. A loud sound is just that, a surprise. Being startled is not being threatened. It's what one does with fear that causes the harm - running, assuming something is after you, attributing it with following you home or possibly possessing or cursing you.
That's when you fulfill your own manifestation and a ghost becomes a threat - though it's a ghost of your own design.
I've long said that the best ghost hunting show would involve a wide variety of experts such as a detective, a priest, a ghost investigator, a skeptic, a psychic, etc. They would live like "Big Brother" in a haunted home for at least a month with cameras set up and microphones and eat, sleep, and live isolated there, reacting to ghostly activity and arguing at the breakfast table about the night before.
Like the show "Expedition Bigfoot," being embedded there would help the house to show itself, as well as react to emotions such as fear, anger, and the like.
My very first time as a kid considering a future in ghost investigations, it was ignited by studying the house's activity and what had changed - time of year? Arguments? People leaving? People arriving? Etc. I had already begun the seed of curiosity by realizing that even what we consider a lifeless location, such as a building, actually has an electromagnetic chemistry and it is affected very much by and interacts with the occupants inside.
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