Top 5 Places to Run Into a Ghost

   

Back in 2009 I developed a haunted formula to judge how likely a location is to be haunted. There were certain characteristics that were in common in the 50 very reportedly haunted locations. 

Methods For Keeping Your House Haunt-Free

 

Even a perfectly fine suburban tract home and suddenly seem like the Munster's house of weird when unexplained things begin to happen, like cabinets opening and closing on their own, shadows walking the hallways, or voices whispering in an empty room. 

Methods for getting rid of such energy vary greatly and most depend a great deal on what you personally believe would be efficacious because your very confidence manifests results. 

Here's some things to try - 

The Enfield Poltergeist: Was This a Real Event?

"11-year-old London girl levitates!"

The reported Enfield Poltergeist case is one of the top most discussed and disputed poltergeist cases of all time. 

Kansas Mystery: The Blue Light Lady

Hays, Kansas; an idyllic slice of America, but like most of the country's land, it has seen some tragedies. One of those involves a woman named Elizabeth Polly who has come to be referred to as the "Blue Light Lady."

Joe Ghost: Joe the Ghost Calls the Neighbors' Relative

(LINK TO PRIOR INSTALLMENT) 


I have another chilling update on Joe the Ghost - the kind and helpful ghost here in the house. 

Joe Ghost: Do We Psychically Tag Places?

We are reviewing some interesting evidence accrued during our team, Arizona Paranormal Research, did an investigation in the house I'm living in. The prior resident had died and he had an unusual background of interest and teachings in healing, spirituality, and also believed himself to be an alien abductee. Since moving into the home, we've had lots of signs that Joe is still among us, so my team set out to do an investigation and I started it off with a seance. 

Spirit Vessels: Why Are Some Buildings Haunted?

Back in the summer of 2009, I decided to choose 50 places that are commonly reported haunted, all across the US. I took those 50 places and looked for common features. Then, I started the agonizing part of making sense of all that I found. From this, I created a first version of a haunted formula that took 5 aspects and checked the sites to find out how many of the features they possessed to give it a haunted score. I thought that knowing the features most commonly found, I could identify potentially haunted locations by giving them a rating before even going to check them out. I am going to share the findings of that study below and then discuss some other features that have come to light since then -

The Funhouse Effect in Some Haunted Homes

"Anyway, all the angles are slightly off. There isn't a square corner in the place. 

No wonder it's impossible to find your way around. 

Add up all these wrong angles... and you get one big distortion in the house as a whole."

"The Haunting" 

Some houses just feel "wrong" when you move about in them and at times even "off kilter." How much does the "haunted house effect" influence those living in a home or those investigators studying the home? 

Transient Ghosts

They come and go like it's a bus station.

I hear people often talk about issues with transient hauntings. They might have lived there a long time and never run into problems, then BOOM! Or, they had some haunting problems in the kitchen with a little girl's voice and then later in the bedroom felt a male presence who came and then went after a week's time. The types and locations, as well as time periods shift. Let's look at some possible types and explanations - 

Most Haunted Places: We Have It All Backwards

I get asked a lot - what is the most haunted place you know? 

Answer: Everywhere is haunted.

How To Live With Ghosts From Someone Who Grew Up With Ghosts

I began "Ghost Hunting Theories" to try and find others who were open-minded and receptive to examining ghosts in the context of "we can't prove that they exist, and we certainly can't prove how they work," so let's start expanding the possibilities, look for instigators, repeatability, and factors involved. Why is one home haunted and another not? I went on to perform investigations in the field, read about it, write about it, and even developed my own haunted formula based on commonalities between haunted locations.

It all began in 1963 when my family moved into an estate in Fairfax, Virginia. Aspen Grove was built in the mid 1700s as a fort against Indians. In the 1800s, it was taken over by the North to be used as a field hospital and during the war, wrestled back as the same thing for the South. Both sides of the war agonized and died in that home. In fact, the wood floors were still stained with their blood, and the earth littered with bullets, guns, bayonets and the like.

(The Sagar Family that fled during Civil War, this pic was take in the 1860s when they reclaimed the estate after the war)

My parents bought the house for us five kids with the best of intentions. Dad worked in DC and mom stayed home, teaching art classes in the beautiful window-lined art room (a latter addition to the home from the original construction). We kids enjoyed lots of acreage, barn, stables, orchards, creek, two cottages, and two of the largest English boxwood mazes in the country.

I was a baby when we moved in, but my siblings were much older, old enough to know the house was doing things other houses didn't, i.e. it was haunted. 

My parents had a great attitude. They sat us down and said, "You know, kids, lots of soldiers put up a fight to stay alive in this home and some lost that fight. They didn't get home to their families. If you hear them stomping the stairs, catch a glimpse of them in the hallway, hear them talking in the bedroom, just know that these soldiers are proud to watch over you five children. And, who better to protect you than soldiers?" 

I remember being surprised to hear my parents speak of ghosts. At my young age, ghosts were "Casper" from the cartoons in a white sheet. What I had seen, felt, heard, and smelled since I was a baby was an unquestionable force of nature.

When you are baby growing up in a haunted home, the physics of it are no different than gravity, sunrise, or magnetism - just a part of nature.

I was never taught anything could harm us or meant us ill. What I did know was that I couldn't predict what, where or when, though I developed good senses for it over time. One thing about living in a house with the "others" is that you develop some keen psychic senses. In fact, today I am a top scoring psychic on PSI testing and a psychometrist (touches objects to read their past and those who handled them). I grew up digging up relics and using a metal detector, filling the display case with all kinds of items. I handled them and read them. I didn't know that wasn't a normal part of the sense of touch until I was well into my 20s.

There are some amazing benefits to growing up in a home and skills acquired, from deductive reasoning, to handling surprise and the unknown, to asking question of the universe, appreciating history, and having a deep compassion for those who have passed, but that all depends on handling these three influences:

Past religious training
Parental explanations and anxiety
Cultural influences like TV and movies

Religions, parents, and TV/movies teach us by example and if they tell us it's possible to be hurt, killed or possessed, that there are forces that are evil, that unexpected sounds or having your hair touched are signs of an Evil influence, then we are susceptible to that influential dogma/explanatory style.

I remind people living in active homes to keep things in perspective - was anyone actually physically hurt? If they were, are you certain that wasn't simply someone tripping and blaming it on the unseen or even rushing away in fear and being hurt by their own internal terror? If things are of a startling nature, like seeing a figure, a shadow, something moving on its own, a door opening and closing, a voice, a smell, those are things that aren't hurting us.

Differentiate personal threat from being startled or surprised.

There are no two given ways to feel when something happens. Feelings are the result of how we explain events. Three people can have a flat tire. One person might think "My boss is going to be so mad I'm late," and he will feel anxious. Another person might think, "why does this always happen to me?" And he feels angry. Yet another person might think "this is not a good part of town for this." And he may be scared. (I highly suggest the book "The Feeling Good Handbook" by David Burns for more on how to have healthy cognitive hygiene).

And, so it is with living in an active home - depending on your explanatory style (how you explain things to yourself), you will have many different feelings about the activity.

While I lived in the house, we experienced shadow people, disembodied voices, banging, smoke with no scent, footsteps, doors opening and closing, electrical issues, full-body apparitions, objects moving on their own, and feelings of being watched or touched. At no time did we experience any threat to our person except any terror we built up in our own minds about what ghosts could do.

This is simple - if ghosts could really hurt us, we would all be in great trouble. It would be like a scene out of the ending of "Ghostbusters," total chaos.

Instead, they are a murky phantom that comes and goes, often does not see us there, does not interact (or we don't notice when they do), and are fleeting activity, at best. Anyone that lives in an active home knows that the minute someone moves in or out, changes are made, someone is physically sick or mentally unwell, things act up or quiet down. Just know that is perfectly normal and to be expected. The very emotional milieu of the living affects activity!

If you still have questions, I would advise my books "Growing Up With Ghosts" (Kindle and paperback) about my family's experience, "Vacationing With Ghosts," (Kindle and paperback) about my childhood experiences and observances as a psychic child at our summer home, and "Was That a Ghost?" a Kindle book I wrote to help people find examples of whether they are having haunting issues or not.

This post also shows up on my team's blog on our helpful website  - Arizona Paranormal Investigators

Expect future posts about methods used for handling these situations, from feng shui and energy centers, to blessings and ultimatums.

Life Lessons: Living with Ghostly Chaos

This is a new series. In my book "Was That a Ghost?" I discuss a good deal about how, with the right life skills tools, we can deal with the unknown and how we can use those tools for our everyday life and relationships. I'm going to apply some of those in this series.

Today's lesson is how to live with chaos from the spirit world and the living world.

At any given time, a person living in a haunted house is going to be dealing with the unpredictable. In fact, every single moment he lives in a haunted house, he will be dealing with a degree of uncertainty. Shit happens, but in a haunted house, shit happens any time of the day, day of the week, week of the month, month of the year... In fact, part of what I'm striving for on my team, POE, is to figure out what might trigger it to activate and conversely, what might quiet it down. For now, there are little, if any patterns, we can discern.

So, you live in a home in which a dish can break, a painting can fall, a door can slam, a voice can moan, a chair can creak from the weight of a body that isn't visible. When living in a place where it's unpredictable, it's easy to become keyed up all the time, edgy, nervous, anxious because your world seems to have no rhyme or reason.

If we look at your life amongst humans, it can be much the same. Humans are like ghosts (wonder why? hee hee) and living with them you discover that you don't know what mood or drama they bring to the table on any given day. They do things when you don't expect it, they blow up when you weren't seeing it coming, they create drama by becoming demanding or controlling or even manipulatively weepy.

Now, we use the same principles with these incidents (ghostly and human) to decide how to proceed. If you are living with ghostly activity that has not shown a tendency to be harmful to you and you have been in a living relationship that is not abusive, then you make a decision to not add to the drama. You don't feed the human's rants by getting angry back and pushing and pressing and demanding and escalating the emotions. The same goes with ghostly phenomena. You don't respond with anger, demands, and high emotion. Both instances call for old-fashioned assertion skills. The process goes like this: No name calling. You simply say "when you do (this) it makes me feel (this) and so I would like it if you would do (this) instead."

Here's how you might approach the ghostly phenomena:

"I understand that you feel the need to remain in my home, but my husband and I are living here and this is where we are raising our children. When you slam doors and tug at our blankets, you frighten us. We would like it if you would move on and find your own family, then we can all be happier."

In a living relationship, it might go like this:

"When you come at me with accusations, it makes me feel like you don't trust me. I'd like it if next time you feel I'm doing something wrong, you let me know. It's difficult for me to clear up the thoughts in your head if you don't express them out loud."

Ghosts and the living are unpredictable elements in our world. I grew up as the youngest of five children and my elders were quite difficult growing up. I learned early on that people create their own drama. I was not a drama creator, but those around me spun out of control. I could do nothing to stop their own process, but I did have to share their space. This not only taught me compassion for how others must learn life's lessons, but also made me thankful that I didn't need to make the mistakes I saw them making. The secret to my survival was to not get sucked into the drama. It was about their own issues and not mine, but they would have become my issues if I jumped into the fray and demanded they do things the way I want them done.

The key here is that there is no "right" way to do things or "smart way." There is only the way that people with certain personalities and life experiences, egos and issues do things and that is not always the "sensible" way. When you give up expecting everyone doing things the "right" way and let the do it "their" way, you no longer get sucked into the drama.

Lastly, it goes without saying that a relationship that is downright abusive, whether ghostly or living, is a deal breaker.

My favorite local ghost team wrote a fantastic post about what it takes to be a good paranormal investigator--very insightful!

**On a happy note, apparently my blog is #9 on top paranormal sites. Very cool! Thanks y'all for being such a supportive family.

How To Live in a Haunted House

Of course, establishing one has a haunted house is the most important step and that will involve bringing in a team. I'd honestly suggest a team that was established pre-TAPS era (2004). Really look over the team's website. You want to know what their take is on the paranormal. Many teams are like TAPS and go in to disprove a haunting and then up occasion find conditions that leave them with the "haunted" option, but don't offer much for homeowners except to have a little discussion with the invisible occupants and tell them basically that their lease is up. There's nothing wrong with that approach, but if you have a religious background or are a very spiritual person, this process is one that should involve some symbolic ritual for cleansing or blessing. If this is the case, ask the team if they offer such services.

I'm very rational/logical person, so when I'm stuck in a situation that I can't do anything about, I learn to reframe it in such a way that I can make it easier to live with. We do this every day that we go to a job with a boss who's real asshole. We learn to say, "They pay me to be in the same building with him for 8 hours, but when I leave here, he can go to back to hell where he resides the other 16 hours of the day."

First, you ask yourself if anything that has happened is threatening to your or others. We're talking about physical, not mental. Mental is a whole different issue we will deal with next. If there is something that has been physically threatening, then it is time to consider a spiritual ceremony, however, you also want to take into account the potential religious background of whomever might be haunting the place. It needs to be something that would sing to a Catholic or Native American or whoever else might be the culprit. If you truly believe it might be demonic, your best bet is probably someone with a Catholic background or even Lutheran or Episcopal.

If there are no physical threats, but you personally feel threatened, it's time to have a look at your own internal process. If the sense of being watched gives you the willies, it's probably because your internal dialogue is going something like this, "Something is here with me. I can feel it watching me. What does it want? Why is it watching me?" Paranoia ensues. Another person might enter the same place and think, "Wow, this old building has a really creepy feel," and then they would look at the antique moldings or the antique furnishings and attribute it to the way the place visually appears. Two people having the same feeling and two completely different takes on it.

The key is to stop your inner dialogue and how you describe things because terms like "I can't take this," and "it's after me," are going to produce a new interpretation on anything that occurs. I knew one woman who was tormented by her toilet's leaky valve and certain that it was a ghost trying to communicate ever time she came into the bathroom. She made assumptions that someone died in the bathroom and that every time she entered, it wanted to make its presence known. It wasn't until a friend visited her and used the restroom and came back to announce he'd fixed her leaking valve that the ghost magically disappeared, but the woman had spent the past four months certain she was in constant threat. It may seem funny, but when you look for evidence of something, you can usually find it, so definitely check out your explanatory story. I discuss this a lot in my book, Was That a Ghost?

When I was growing up, my parents had a good attitude. "The soldiers died here during the Civil War. They just keep walking the halls guarding our family since they no longer are with their families."

I had one client who was in a situation in which there was no option of moving and the spouse was not cooperative about accepting the haunting. My suggestion was to keep in mind that there was nothing threatening occurring, simply sounds and cold breezes and doors opening and closing. It was random, but hardly an actual threat. So, I suggested keeping a diary of events to look for correlations with who was in the house, the emotional content of the people inside the home, the areas of the home, the times of the day, looking for patterns and information. When you can't do anything but be a victim, instead become a researcher. That shift in knowing this person could contribute to the field and research, made it actually an exciting thing whenever events occurred just to be able to record them. This is taking back your power in any way that you can. It's sort of like the neighbor with the barking dog. You can whine and complain, but if you start recording the events, you might have a case against them and feel justified in your annoyance once you see it written down. You take back a bit more of your power by making the event accountable.

The final chapter in my book does discuss this issue and what also what you can do when you have experienced the paranormal, the potential changes that could occur in your life as a result from research to creative outlets. Haunted homes happen, but wise people learn to coexist with the unexpected as much as the unexpected patterns of the living people within a home.

I Saw a Ghost!

My book "Was That a Ghost" on Kindle and Nook helps those who believe they've had a ghostly encounter. One of the first questions is, "was that a ghost?" Then, the bigger question, "what do I do now that my life has been changed?" I not only cover these questions, but help you through the stages I take a client through to determine if you had a paranormal encounter and what type of encounter it might have been. Using my "Trinity of Relevance," I take you through context, belief system and explanatory style to determine what you've experienced. There are quizzes and lots of real life examples, explanations of types of hauntings and what you might want to do once your life has been changed by the encounter. I go through this process with people every day and I am thrilled to share it with others.

Mind Fuck Tuesday: Creating a Haunted Room

Bless their hearts! I love this one! Researchers at London's Goldsmith College decided to create a haunted room to test some theories about infrasound and EMF. Now, we're talking!

We've long been talking in the field about EMF and infrasound (levels with frequencies so low our ears can't hear it, but our body can--kind of like that bass sound in surround sound systems that you feel in your body).

So, they set out to design a room where people would be, in certain areas, bombarded with EMF and infrasound and other areas would be clean.

After an hour in the room, three quarters of them reported at least three of these symptoms; dizziness, tingling, disembodiment, dream-remembrance and “a presence.” Several felt sexually aroused.

Here's the catch: None of these symptoms had anything to do with where they were standing in the room! It only showed a slightly higher chance that those who experience transcendental experiences(like those with temporal lobe epilepsy and unstable temporal lobes) scored higher at having these feelings in the predetermined areas.

So, what does this study show us? That some people are more susceptible or suggestible? That perhaps the conditions cannot be replicated that are found in the real world, such as variances in frequencies that we might be noting and not long periods of the same frequency that we might become tolerant of?

Where do we go from here? More lab studies? More field studies? Once and for all, perhaps we should put to rest the theories of EMF and infrasound as possibilities or perhaps prove that they might have an influence instead of making assumptions on what the "big guys" are saying without anything to back them up.

Ghosts: What Do You Tell the Children?

This is a hairy and upsetting question. If I have a house call and I know the people have children, I request that they have the spouse take the children out while I’m there. There’s no need to bring children into an investigation and interview them.

With the recent onslaught of popularity in ghost hunting by every Joe and Jane on the street, there have been some very questionable methods. I’ve heard of some teams using children as bait for activity. It makes my stomach turn.

If strange occurrences happen around the house, it should be a lot like your sex life. You don’t sit down at the table and start talking about your bedroom antics in front of the children, nor should you be talking about strange unexplained noises and sights, fears and concerns. There are times and places and age-appropriate circumstances for handling the paranormal in your own home.

We begin with the first concern; have the children unprompted approached the parents with issues?

The explanation of the paranormal to a small child will fall on deaf ears. Children under 6 really have no concept of death and spirits, ghosts and the paranormal. They don’t even have a basis for physics to understand if these things are possible or impossible. A door slamming itself to a small child could be a normal part of the natural world. Instead of explaining an invisible entity might have done it, give the child a way to stop the "silly door" from closing when he doesn't want it closed by showing him how to prop a chair in front of it. “Bad door! Don’t do that again!” (scold)

Children a bit older, perhaps 6-10 are likely to be very inquisitive about strange things happening around the house. They check the hall when they hear footsteps but there’s no one in sight. This is the peak of the “monster” age where things are explained make-believe creatures and nighttime monsters. You can have a “monster” case of afraid-to-go-to-bed-alone syndrome if you don’t handle this well.

Every situation is different. If a child mentions something strange once, be sure and listen carefully. It’s important they know you’re giving what they say true consideration. Then, it’s a good idea to break it down into a list of explanations for what it could be. Let the child help you list some of the reasons. “We left a window open,” “the house was cooling off after a warm day,” “Susie is playing tricks on you,” et cetera. Listen to the explanations your child comes up with. You will find out the way he explains things to himself and the things that go on inside his head. Does your child bring up the “G” word? If not, good.

If it does occur to the child that the house might have a ghost, ask the child if he believes in ghosts. A child who believes in ghosts (like children who believe in monsters) are not going to believe you if you say there are no such things. Instead, ask why a ghost might haunt a house. Explain that your house has none of the factors that would make it haunted. It would, in fact, be one of the last places a ghost would want to visit, as it's too warm, or too bright, or too new, or too happy. Bring the explanations back to the real world. You can even make an experiment. One child with a noisy closet “ghost,” I suggested remove everything from her closet. My idea was prove that the overstuffed closet had items shifting around because it’s a mess. When the closet was empty, it was quiet. When she re-packed her closet, she removed a lot of things and hung things up, making it neat and clean. No more sounds. I helped the child to bring her explanation away from the notion of a ghost to the very real-world explanation of a messy nook.

Some parents like to incorporate their religious beliefs at this time. If the child is bringing up the ghost word and you cannot convince him you have a happy new house that isn’t haunted, you might explain that heaven has a place for everyone and no one wanders around the earth. Explain that people like the idea of ghosts because it sounds like a fun idea to have those who passed on nearby, but there is no such thing. Reinforce it once again with real-world explanations for the occurrences.

The fact is that ghosts are something a parent or parents should be dealing with, not the children. Never appear scared or afraid to go into the basement or any other situation that your child might witness. Do not talk about ghosts with other family members in the child’s presence. Keep everything in the “world that exists here and now” realm. If the house is kind of dark or cluttered, light it up, straighten it. Make it feel as if there’s nothing lurking.

If the house tends to get noisy at night, you can mask it with a fan in the child’s room or you can simply sit down one evening with the child and ask “what is it you hear at night?” Then, make the sounds of the house at night a kind of symphony. Sit together in the hallways and listen. Name each sound “there’s the bell,” “there’s the high hat,” “there’s the harp.” Have the child tell you which instrument he’s hearing. Laugh with him. Recreate sounds by stomping on floorboards, swinging doors open and closed and work with him to come up with new instrument names for the sounds you produce. It can be your inside joke. Whenever you two hear a sound, you can say "is that the high hat or the bell?"

A child’s world is a truly magical place. Work to maintain that. These skills will help your child as he grows, as well, because he will look for real-world reasons for the unexplained and 98% of the time, they will be real-world reasons.

Haunted Arizona Land

When I moved from the east to the west, one of the things I learned over time is that, although many buildings are haunted in the east, the land in the west is very haunted. You feel it especially standing in places like South Mountain Park and Sedona, but even on a recent excursion with Julie to the Congress Pioneer Cemetery in the middle of the high desert, you could feel it in the hills all around, as if eyes were studying you everywhere you go.

There are some awesome ghostly legends involving the land in Arizona. Here's just a few of them:

La Llorona: The most famous haunting in the west is a repeated story of La Llorona, the “weeping woman.” This legend varies depending on where you are in the west, but the premise is the same; a woman drowned her children because her new lover didn't want them. When she killed them, he was repulsed by what she did and she realized she had killed her children for nothing. Now, she is a crying/screaming banshee figure in the washes and basins in the desert. Both the Gila and San Pedro rivers claim her existence. Pretty much most of the washes and rivers of the desert, the Hispanic community whispers of her existence nearby.

Grand Canyon National Park: A worker was putting up railings in the 1930s and fell into the canyon. He is said to be seen at sundown as a black misty figure near the railings and scraping and digging sounds are heard, as well.

Casa Grande Mountain: Here people report that if you are walking near the mountain, a black mist will follow you.

Anthem: In this area just outside of town, people reportedly see and hear Native American warring parties on horseback. Even a man with a lantern is seen.

Cochise State Park: A man is said to play the flute on the boulders overlooking campsites.

Kingman: In the canyons a woman supposedly killed some children and is still wandering around the canyon and wailing.

East Mesa Campgrounds: A place here was the site of satanic worshippers where people were supposedly murdered. Folks report demonic laughter, dark figures and strange noises.

Picacho: A ghostly man is seen riding a horse from peak to peak.

Desert: "The Red Ghost" The army corp of engineers at one time long ago used camels in the AZ desert. A smart idea, actually for the 1800s. When the program ended, they released the camels. Some say that a ghostly one called the Red Camel is still wandering the desert with a ghostly rider atop it.

Casa Grande National Monument: Native Americans performing ceremonies have been seen, as well as black mists. This is the site of many astronomical observations and ceremonial rituals by an ancient tribe.

Chinle: A woman's glowing apparition is seen hovering over the rock outcroppings.

Speaking Rock: Hopi legend of an old woman here who tells the giant spider rock who in her tribe is misbehaving.

London Bridge/Lake Havasu: This was reassembled from London to the AZ desert at Lake Havasu. Since then, a woman's ghost and a British Bobby's ghost are seen walking it.

Nearly every mine has had cave-ins and killings and nearly every site of battles during the time of settlers versus Native Americans are reportedly haunted. As well, ancient tribes that came and went extinct left behind sacred rock sites that are filled with amazing energy. Many legends come from our insightful Native American citizens. They have explanations for rock formations and how man might have come from the belly of the Grand Canyon originally as if it were the birthing place for the world. Their beliefs are for a reason and based on observations made while living here in this harsh land. Sometimes, you can hear ancient tribes chanting in the wind.

The very rock here seems to sing to you when you are in the desert. It is a weird thing to stand where you can see 180-degrees of sky and can see mountains 40 or 60 miles away, hear unrelenting winds with nothing to stop them from gathering spirit energy and carrying sounds to your ear that might have originated miles away.

Could it be the geology and the spirituality mixing together to create a kind of magical combination for eternal hauntings? One never knows what is at work here and why the lands seem to be so haunted, but from UFOs in our daytime sky to black mists in the desert at night, it's always an unsettling and curious place.

What Would You Do? The Haunted Closet

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 on her, inspect the closet and even let her sleep in their room, but they realized they couldn't continue that forever.

They learned something about the land and that a prior home was on the lot somewhere, perhaps not precisely where the house sat now, but it had been the site of arson, being burned down by an enraged husband who came back from war and found his wife was cohabitating with someone else. They also found out the wife died later of smoke inhalation from the event, though she did not die on site.

This made the parents even more concerned that perhaps the house was haunted. Their daughter was beginning to talk of a ghost in the closet and the mother was getting spooked by the whole thing. They call you in to investigate.

Where do you begin and how to you deal with their daughter's fears?

Isolation: Why Do Ghosts Pick on One Family Member?

I’ve been asked this question quite a few times. Why does only one person in a family experience haunting issues while others don’t?

Logic tells us there are a number of reasons which can include;

Location issues—only their room is troubled

Qualities—something particular about him/her, his/her sex, age, or sensitivity that is attractive to a spirit

Latent psychic qualities coming forth—an emerging psychic medium

Purposeful isolation—to keep him/her separated from the others in the family

Poor explanatory style—attributing explainable things to ghostly events

Mental illness—from paranoia to schizophrenia

Attention-seeking behavior—finding a way to get help by having something wrong

A great deal of haunting experiences occur when a person is alone. However, in a typical “haunted” house, several members of a family have experienced similar things at different times, on rare occasions together. The case of an isolated haunting particular to one family member is a difficult one to tackle. You have only one witness, but you do have some very important clues when interviewing the victim.

Here’s a list of some important questions to ask:

1. Does this occur when you are in bed, preparing for bed, sleeping, or awakening?
2. Does this happen in other parts of the home others have access to regularly?
3. Is there any “aura” before the occurrence; hair standing on end, chills, a feeling of being watched, or other warning sign of what is impending?
4. Are these occurrences only involved in one sense? Hearing? Seeing? Smelling? Touching?
5. Has this kind of thing happened in any other residence?
6. Why do you think it presents itself to you?

Some of these questions can really mete out what’s really happening. The first question is crucial because I generally dismiss anything witnessed in bed. There is no way to know the state of wake and sleep a person is in. We hear very often of ghosts coming to people at night and probably 90% of that or more is purely the sleep state issues.

If this occurs only in one’s bedroom and nowhere else in the house, then this could be site-specific and my suggestion would be to switch bedrooms with another family member and see if that person begins to experience such things. If it seems to follow the occupant to the new room, it might be person-specific. In that case, we have to mete out if there might be attention-seeking problems, mental illness, or perhaps something about that person that is different than the others and perhaps attractive to a spirit. Going through the rest of the questioning, might help clarify this.

If there is an aura occurring before an incidence, what we might be dealing with is a sensitive person who can sense changes in the atmosphere. Learning more about their capabilities and noting them in other places will help the person understand how natural it is and how these things come and go quickly and the human body can be a wonderful ghost hunting tool with its own onboard barometer.

I’m curious about whether the person is experiencing a haunting with one sense and not the others. It’s entirely possibly this person is a sensitive and this might be the only sense with which they can “feel” the other side. Knowing that they tend to be auditory or visual can help them in many parts of their life. For instance, an auditory-oriented sensitive might do better testing in school if he/she listens to an audio recording of the lecture to study.

If this has happened in another residence for the person, this is something inherent about the person. At this point, it’s important to discern if there are any family issues unaddressed or perhaps underlying mental illness. Most times, however, it’s a person who is more keyed into occurrences but has no skills or knowledge to understand the input. This could be a latent psychic ability in mediumship talent that has not been diagnosed or encouraged. Some people are simply more naturally tuned to phenomenon. These people have several ways they can deal with it; ignore it and accept that sometimes they’ll get strange occurrences and sensations and that they’re no different than being sensitive to loud sounds or disliking the cold, or they can learn more about their abilities and how to develop them by finding a psychic mentor.

The most telling question to ask is the last one. Why is this thing presenting itself just to her/him?

A person’s personal explanatory style will come into play in answering this one. You might need to sit there quietly for a while and wait for the person to spill their guts, but they will eventually toss an idea onto the table and from their response, you can know which way to help counsel him/her.

Example:

“Maybe the ghost is lonely?” or “Maybe the ghost thinks I’m nice?” This shows a healthy amount of self-esteem. This person believes that he/she is a good listener, a kind heart, a warm person to be drawn to. That same explanatory style will help the person deal with future events. He/she can either offer assistance in moving on to find their family members and find peace elsewhere or enjoy a sense of pride in knowing spirits are drawn to her/his aura and personality.

“The ghost is angry I’m here?” or “He wants his home back?” or “He wants to possess me?” This is not a healthy explanatory style and shows some wavering self-esteem. The assumption is that the ghost means no good because what it’s doing is scaring the occupant. This not only gives the power to the “unseen,” but it shows a person who tends to project others’ feelings as being created by their very presence. If something goes wrong, “it must be me.”

This advice I’m going to give works for friends and yourself when they’re/you're being negative. You find proof that what they/you believe isn’t the only assumption. You have to put their statement on the stand and prove it flimsy and false.

Start here:

You: “You think the ghost doesn’t like you, right?”
Client: “Yeah.”
You: “Have you ever had someone mad at you before?”
Client: “Sure.”
You: “When was the last time someone was mad at you?”
Client: “I don’t know, a couple days ago. My mom came home and was all grumpy and mad I didn’t start supper.”
You: “Could there have been other things making her mad that day?”
Client: “I suppose.”
You: “Can you name three reasons she might have been mad that had nothing to do with you?”
Client: “She hates her job. The traffic was bad. She got home later than usual.”
You: “But you think it was you she was mad at?”
Client: “I guess it could have been a lot of things.”
You: “Is it possible if there is a spirit spending time in this location, it could be many things making the spirit unsettled? Can you name three reasons other than you?”
Client: “He can’t find heaven? He’s missing his family? He doesn’t want to be here but can’t figure out how to leave?”
(Immediate relief)

Reframing a haunting for a client is the very most important aspect of it. If you are quick to tell someone they have a haunted house or they have spirits wandering their halls, you have already left him/her with a large burden of worry. You can’t truly prove one way or the other if there are spirits in their house or if spirits even exist in the first place, but haunting features are unsettling – wherever they originate from.

Helping the client be able to reframe how they see they explain to themselves the sights and sounds can change the very tone of their home and their reaction to it. When you bring in priests and prayers and holy water and talk of possession and angry spirits and such (“Paranormal State” or as I like to call it, “Paranoid State” show), you’ve just made the person feel worried about the unknown, fearful, and helpless.

The fact is, these sounds and appearances will continue to occur. There is no way to “stop” a haunting, but you can change the way you interpret what’s happening. It’s possible to debunk many sounds in the house, many doors slamming, and other features so that people can live comfortably in their home.

Mind Fuck Tuesday: Stone Tapes

"The Stone Tape" was a 1972 BBC television play about an electronics research group that sets up in an old manor home to come up with a new recording medium to beat the Japanese's growing market. One of the researchers in this fictional play, a computer programmer, sees an image of a woman running up the steps in the room and falling, apparently to her death. Inquiring with the local villagers, they learn that a young maid died in that room during Victorian times. They realize that somehow the stone in the room has preserved an image of the girl's death – this “stone tape” may be the key to the new recording medium that the team is trying to develop.

Since that time, the stone tape theory has been one that involves residual hauntings being recordings held by natural causes. I felt this ever since I was a child where I grew up and noted places that were haunted and common features. I had never heard of the BBC series until I was already into ghost hunting and was pleasantly surprised to hear others mentioning this. During the time I looked for commonalities in hauntings in 2008 and devised my ghost hunting formula, I did notice a high incidence of hauntings in rich geology and mining towns. Coincidental? It could be incidental, as man tends to build towns near natural resources so some of our oldest most historic and turbulent towns would be in resource-rich areas. Does the construction of the building play a role? So far in my research, it does. Stone buildings have a high rate of hauntings and yet, once again, man tended to build stone houses long ago, hence our most historic homes are stone constructed and most likely to house ghosts by virtue of history and occupation over long periods of time.

Have a look at this clip and tell me what you think. Oh, and once again, thank you for letting me fuck with your brain this pleasant Tuesday.