Simple Ghost Detector: Bells

Investigators like the Ghost Hunter teams use a lot of expensive, specialized equipment in their investigations.  But you can hunt ghosts on your own without blowing the budget!

Bells are an inexpensive method of detecting the presence of a ghost.  The use of bells as an interface with the spirit world goes back hundreds of years. 

"Bell, book, and candle" is a phrase that has been in use since medieval times to indicate travel to the spirit world, banishing a spirit to Hell, or calling a spirit forth from the darkness. 

The medieval church believed that the ringing of bells would frighten away evil spirits.  This belief gave rise to the tradition of the "dead bell," a large hand-held bell which was rung at funerals in Britain through the 19th century.  Ringing a bell to scare off the evil spirits gave the soul of the deceased a head start on its way to Heaven, lest the evil spirits grab it and drag it down to Hell.

The clear ringing sound of a bell is believed to be purifying or granting good luck in many cultures.  For example, the "singing bowl" of Buddhist traditions  - an upside-down bell that is rung to grant health or good fortune.

From a modern ghost hunter's perspective, ghosts are said to either jingle bells by accident, or to ring them on purpose out of curiosity.  To create a ghost catcher, just hang a lightweight jingle bell by a length of string, ideally in a doorway or at the head or foot of a set of stairs.  You may also want to hang them anywhere that a ghost has been reported.  For example, sometimes ghosts are said to pass across the middle of a hallway, where a doorway once stood - this would be an excellent place to hang a bell. 

With the homeowners permission you can either use a thumbtack to secure the string, or tape the string to the ceiling (ideally with Blue Tape, masking tape, or some other non-damaging tape).  If there is a door which often opens or closes on its own, you can hang a bell from the doorknob.  This will alert you to any movement of the door, even if you are in a remote part of the house.

If you believe you are dealing with an intelligent spirit, you can ask aloud for it to ring the hanging bell.  This is an easy way to communicate with ghosts, in the absence of expensive equipment like an EMF detector.

Bells can also be part of a more elaborate system of signaling. I found instructions for this DIY UFO detector which could also be quite useful for ghost hunting. 

One caution about the use of bells to hunt ghosts: they can be very susceptible to breezes, and even drafts.  Be sure that all exterior windows and doors are tightly shut before you begin your investigation.  Even so, you may want to use a small flame (like a disposable lighter) to ensure that there isn't a draft before you hang the bell. 

Photo credit: Flickr/~K~

Throw Your Voice From Beyond the Grave

What if “Go Put Your Records On” had a whole new meaning? What if instead of just playing music, it meant hanging out with your dead grandparents?

That’s the idea behind the UK company And Vinyly’s latest product. People can leave their ashes behind to be pressed into a vinyl record, with a complete recording of their voice, will, or favorite song.

Yeah, it’s weird. And with a slogan like “From beyond the groove,” you know they’re really into their product.

Would you want your ashes left for your loved ones in the form of a vinyl record? I’m not sure if that’s even a good idea. Firstly, it’s kind of arrogant to assume people will want to listen to you on a record, isn’t it? What if, by the time you die, there’s not even anyone left who cares to do so? (A depressing thought, sure, but there you have it!) What if, by the time you die, there are no record players left on Earth? That’s always possible.

Personally, I wouldn’t want to do this, but I’m sure plenty of people—especially music lovers—will pay to have this done. People have paid for crazier things, of course; here are some other favorite options for dealing with your remains once you’ve left this mortal coil:

  • Be made into jewelry, such as diamonds or other precious gemstones, by pressing them or mixing them in with gold and glass (then you can wear your dead loved ones, literally keeping them close to your heart)
  • Have your ashes sent into the atmosphere—staying close to home by being shot off with fireworks, or going where most people have never gone before, into space
  • Be crushed into a coral reef, helping restore other coral reefs (I’d absolutely love to do this myself, actually, but it starts at a whopping $4,000; of course, if you get mixed up in a “co-op” type of reef—which can include pets!—it’s lest costly)
  • Get yourself made into a bunch of pencils—the human body can be made into about 200 of them—and have them distributed amongst your family and friends for some macabre inspiration while writing or sketching
  • A sculpture, painting, blown-glass figurine, or other piece of art can be made by mixing your dusty ashes into the medium
  • Get stuffed into a teddy bear, leaving yourself behind for all of the future progeny of your children and theirs

Do you have any strange, exotic, or simply “different” plans for your remains? What are they? What are the strangest ones you’ve heart about?

Tanzanian Albino Murders

There are many fascinating mysteries of Tanzania; among them, its surprisingly high level of albinism.  Albinism afflicts roughly 1 in every 3,000 Tanzanians, a far higher rate than in the rest of the world.  (For example, in the United States roughly 1 in every 20,000 people is born with albinism.)

Unfortunately, Tanzania is also the heart of albino murders.  Folk medicine has it that albinos A) are not human, and B) possess magical powers.  This has led to the murder of approximately 25 albino Tanzanians a year.  Their limbs, their bones, their hair, and their organs are sold on the black market for a shockingly high price.

Albinism is a genetic disorder which prevents the formation of pigment cells.  Pigment is what colors our skin, our hair, and our eyes.  In addition to feeling ostracized and different because of their appearance, albinos suffer from skin cancer and diminished eyesight.  Life isn't easy for albinos anywhere, but it's worst in Tanzania.

The trade in human body parts is universally condemned, and yet it continues to happen.  Albinos in Tanzania feel threatened, paranoid, as well they should be.  Albino "hunters" will observe their targets, befriending them in order to gain their trust, before leading them off into the brush to be murdered and butchered.

Children are killed more often than young adults or adults.  Perhaps because they are easier to overpower, or more naturally trusting of adults.  

The New York Times broke the story of albino murders in 2008, reporting that 19 Tanzanians had been murdered in the past year.  The National Geographic channel is running a more recent special which reports that over 50 Tanzanians have been murdered.  

Unfortunately the rate of murders is increasing, and spreading to neighboring countries.  A four month old girl was killed in Kenya last week.  The week before in Swaziland, an 11 year old girl was "beheaded in broad daylight as over 20 other children watched."

This increase is driven by the economic reality of Tanzania as much as by ridiculous superstitions.  Life is extremely difficult in Tanzania, where the average person earns $1,200 per year - with many earning far less.  The albino superstitions are strongest among professional fishermen, who have to scrape together a living on approximately a dollar a day.  

By comparison, the Red Cross reports that " a complete set of albino body parts" can command the equivalent of up to $200,000 USD.  That's 166 times the GDP per capita, the equivalence in the United States of almost $8 million.

Weaving the hair of albinos into your fishing nets is said to increase your catch.  Smearing your nets with the blood of albinos is said to attract more fish.  Bones and organs act as all-purpose good luck charms.  In a life so desperate, perhaps it's not surprising that people would turn to rank superstition.

Many rural Tanzanians believe that albinos are the ghosts of "real people."  Or that they are something other than human; similar to a golem or a zombie.  They believe that albinos do not feel pain, and that they do not die when killed - they simply disappear.

A convenient belief for those who purchase human body parts for good luck, surely.

Photo credit: Flickr/IFRC

Ghost Hunters: Haunted Hotel

Ghost Hunters is finally back from their mid-season break, with a great episode set in a giant hundred year-old haunted hotel.  In their season premiere, the team investigates the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, New York. 

Like almost every old hotel, the Otesaga has accumulated tons of reports of hauntings, from the sound of running feet to people's names being called from thin air.

The hotel was built in 1909, giving it over a hundred years of history.  One question I always have is, why hotels?  Granted a lot of people die in hotels, that's just natural for any place that has played host to as many people as a hotel will.  

Still, though, it doesn't seem like many guests will have an emotional attachment to a hotel.  And most authorities on hauntings believe that an emotional attachment to a place is one key element in what causes a haunting after someone dies.  That, and repeated actions - the "battery" theory, which is that each time you perform an action, you leave behind a very faint recording of yourself doing that action.  This is said to be the source of most hauntings where an apparition performs a certain set of actions at a certain time, like a chef walking through a kitchen every night at midnight.

Occasionally you get a report of a ghost former employee in a hotel, which makes sense.  (I'm reminded of the hotel said to be haunted by the ghost of a long-time caretaker who committed suicide in the cupola.)  But most guests won't spend enough time in a hotel to leave that kind of an impression, I should think.

And there's always a haunted room, isn't there?  No explanation is given for these, either.  It seems like every hotel in the world has a particular room that is the source of a ton of ghostly activity.  Occasionally it's a room where a guest is known to have died.  But in many cases, as with the Otesaga's rooms 307 and 585, it's just a room like any other.

Ballrooms also seem to attract a lot of ghostly activity.  The acoustics of a ballroom, and the many reflective surfaces (Jason and Grant point out all the mirrors, gilded chandeliers, windows, etc) make me instantly suspicious of any accounts of hauntings there.  

And finally, in a commercial building like a hotel, you're going to hear a lot of unfamiliar sounds.  Ice machines, elevator equipment, televisions and radios in distant rooms, various fans and HVAC units - all of these will be kicking on and off in the middle of the night.  In a big building like the Otesaga, they can echo around in strange ways.

In this investigation, the team brings in the "laser grid."  Is this new equipment, or have I just not been paying attention?  The laser grid paints a whole bunch of light dots on the wall.  Not really sure how it's meant to be sensing movement, although it certainly looks festive.  Amusingly, the laser grid only "works" in the sense that twice, the lights were turned off in conjunction with some unusual activity.

I guess ghosts don't like a good disco!

What's Killing Seals With A Corkscrew Wound?

Periodically, batches of seals start washing ashore with strange corkscrew wounds.  No one has ever conclusively proven what causes these wounds, or why, although there are many theories.

The first notable cases of this "corkscrew seal attack" happened at Sable Island, a tiny fingernail clipping of an island in the Atlantic Ocean, 180 miles east of Halifax, Nova Scotia.  The uninhabited island is a wildlife preserve protected by the Canadian government.

Shark predation on Sable Island seals is nothing new - after all, wherever there are seals, there will be sharks.  But in the late 1990s, researchers noticed that a lot of seals were turning up with particularly strange wounds.    The clean-edged cut is a corkscrew-shaped slash, which is not characteristic of any known shark attack.

Deepening the mystery, the corkscrew attacks happened most often in winter, when the sharks which prey on seals were not likely to be around.

Seal and shark researchers across the globe were enlisted to help solve the mystery.  Circumstantial evidence implicated the Greenland shark, although this theory has never been confirmed, and many people remain skeptical.

The Greenland shark is a large, sluggish shark which is uniquely blind.  Each Greenland shark is eventually colonized by a parasitic copepod which attaches itself to the shark's eye, and eats its cornea.  To compensate for the blindness it causes its host, the copepod is bioluminescent, which allows it to act as a lure.  The copepod lures the fish near, and the Greenland shark snaps at them.

Greenland sharks are coldwater sharks, and habitual dwellers of the deep ocean.  To be fair, you don't really need eyes to see down there, since it's so very dark.

However, in winter with the colder surface temperatures, the Greenland shark ventures closer to the surface.  According to the "Greenland shark attack theory," the seals are attracted by the glowing parasitic copepod lure, but manage to twist out of the shark's jaws before it can properly eat them.

Another batch of seals is turning up dead with this spiral cut, this time in the UK.  British tabloid The Sun reports that "Horrified scientists have found around 60 carcasses so far."  

The cuts look so clean and uniform that many people assume that the cause is mechanical.  Except that with the direction of the cuts, the seals would have to be swimming into a set of blades or a turbine head-first, which seems unlikely to say the least.

Lorne Coleman of Cryptomundo posits that this might be the work of Megalodon, the gigantic shark long thought to be extinct, rising from the seas only in a series of bad made-for-cable movies on the Syfy channel.  I think Coleman is being tongue-in-cheek, but one still has to point out the obvious: Megalodon would likely swallow a tiny seal whole, the way we would eat a single peanut.

Saddest of all, this strange plague is hitting a seal population which is already on the ropes.  Seals on the north coast of the UK were hit hard by a distemper outbreak which killed up to 60% of the population in some places.

Photo credit: Flickr/Tambako the Jaguar

America Wakes: Part Thirteen- Home

Chapters

1       2

3       4

5       6

7        8

9        10

11      12

 

Just four months into the making of this film, the funding for our first year of research and photography ran out. Part of that was my fault. I had been a bit too optimistic about how far we could stretch each Euro because I wanted so badly to get this project off the ground. The rest of the extraneous spending came from unexpected costs. Pricey hotel rooms, exorbitant taxi cab fares, unmarked tolls, bribes, taxes, equipment registration. Key lime pie. Even with my tiny crew the idea of taking on the entire former United States in one go seems, well, naive. Reluctantly, we packed up all the footage and equipment we hadn't already mailed back to England and boarded a plane for home.

It would be another seven months before I could secure enough resource for a second trip. In the meantime I busied myself with reviewing the raw content, making notes for the eventual editing process and even recording a bit of the voice work for the final product. It felt so strange to do all that work when there was so much we hadn't seen, so many questions we still needed to answer. I'm not going to go so far as to say we spent four months in North America and hadn't even scratched the surface. To be honest, we got more information than has ever been captured by other journalistic endeavors. It was rather like leaving a meal after only finishing the first course. I was still unsatisfied. I was still hungry.

In retrospect, there was at least one blessing to being called home earlier than expected. In reviewing the interview footage we had gathered on the trip I began to notice what one might call "tics" and inconsistencies. I wasn't so foolish as to believe we would be told the absolute truth wherever we went, but I was surprised at the places in which I noticed the signs of dishonesty. People who seemed to have no reason to lie had told us things that simply weren't true. This was not restricted to the halls of power. Some of the people who seemed the most humble turned out to be the most dubious. Bold as it may seem to say it before proffering the evidence, there are lies in America, great lies that threaten to swallow what I am convinced is the most important political development of the century. That in mind, my mission for this project changed, however slightly. I set out to unearth the true history of the American Transition. After the first trip ended, I resolved to do just that, but also to reveal the way certain individuals attempted to smudge the records of history before they were even written. Along the way we ended up making friends, and enemies, in strange places.

 

 

End of Segment I: America Wakes. Coming soon, Segment II: Lies in America

Community Meteor Watching

If one needs proof of the existence of Heaven, one only needs to look to the Internet. If the gods did not invent the net, then who did? I am talking of the web and all that comes with it: Chat and video file sharing, email and of course Twitter. Does one need specifics? Well -- last night (Aug 12th), the annual Perseid meteor shower, which as the AP video shows lit up the sky and Twitter.

"Meteor watchers logged on to tweet as the annual Perseid meteor shower reached its peak," sharing the communal experience. NASA astronomers calculated that at least 80 meteors per hour were visible during the peak display. Twitter had what? 80 zillion meteor watchers tweets?!

The web -- the almost instant connection that it provides to watchers, gazing from thousands of points under the night sky, giving a wide community of watchers the opportunity to share, not only what they see, but what they missed, and what to watch for, is to borrow the phrase, "truly priceless."

And the sleepy heads, and the ones who have to get up and go to work this morning, and the ones who peered through cloud covers, can watch the spectacular light show on web video.

MonsterQuest, "Vampires in America"

Although our proud nation is currently being rent asunder by the rift between Team Jacob and Team Edward, America actually has a long history of vampire history. 

In this episode, MonsterQuest investigates vampires in two time periods: modern vampires who also wear too much makeup and a lot of black clothing, and historical vampires who were just hapless sick people surrounded by pre-scientific idiots.

Author, folklorist, and vampire researcher Michael Bell lends a surprising (for MonsterQuest) amount of dignity to this endeavor.  Bell is clearly knowledgeable on the subject, and is able to discuss the topic like a rational human being, without being breathlessly kooky (like most MonsterQuest investigators).

In the olden days, colonial New England suffered a plague of vampires.  You know what's odd?  This episode never once mentions that at the same time, colonial New England was having kind of a witch problem, too.  Or, to be more precise, a "have a crazy-ass panic attack, probably due to ergot poisoning, accuse your neighbor of witchcraft, and then burn them to death" problem.

Frankly when placed in the proper historical and geographical context, two reports of vampirism in people dying (or dead) of consumption is hardly even noteworthy.  But "noteworthiness" has never been an issue for MonsterQuest, and so we forge on.

In the first incident, a girl named Mercy Brown died of consumption in Willington, Connecticut in the late 1700s.  Her brother soon took ill - no great surprise, for a communicable disease - and the townspeople blamed the deceased Mercy.  Not understanding the least thing about bacterial disease, they made the natural assumption that Mercy must be digging herself out of her own grave every night and tramping across town to suck the life force from her brother.

They were insane, is what I'm saying.  

A hundred years later someone writes a letter to the editor complaining about a quack doctor who's proposing a cure for vampirism.  But here's the thing: just because it's a letter to the editor, that doesn't make it real.

In modern-day America, the show unearths two women who claim to be practicing vampires.  The first woman literally drinks the blood (of consenting adult victims).  

I have to love this show for bringing this woman to a hematologist to be tested for hematological disorders like anemia and porphyria.  With a dramatic flourish worthy of a Maury Povich paternity test, the doctor delivers the test results: she is medically normal.

The second woman claims to be a psychic vampire, who feeds off the psychic energy (of consenting adult victims).  Sort of like Reiki in reverse, from what I gather.  It's worth noting that the symptoms she reports as being indicative of needing to feed on psychic energy (shortness of breath, dizziness, heart palpitations) are also classic symptoms of a panic attack.

We also take a quick tour through the usual suspects: Countess Bathory, Vlad Tsepes, a few barmy cults and serial killers, and of course Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Interesting to note that after Stoker's death, MonsterQuest claims that people found newspaper clippings about Mercy Brown (who died not long before Stoker wrote Dracula) in Stoker's files.

Psychic Power, Or Intuition?

I'm reading a book about psychic powers, and it seems to me that the author frequently blurs the distinction between psychic powers and intuition.  Actually, a lot of so-called psychic events can probably be explained by intuition.

"Intuition" in this sense is defined as "picking up on subliminal, but real, information."  One fascinating aspect of Gavin de Becker's seminal book The Gift of Fear is when he drills down through a victim's experience to pinpoint what they really picked up on.  

For example, I remember that a woman was sitting in her car when suddenly "something felt wrong."  When de Becker ran back through the incident with her carefully, she eventually remembered that she had spotted a flash of denim in the outside rear view mirror.  Just a flicker on her peripheral vision, of her attacker's clothing as he approached her car from the side.

The Gift of Fear isn't just the book that every woman should read.  Guys can get a lot out of it, too!  Gavin de Becker breaks down what fear is, and how you should always listen to that little voice inside you.  And it's all about developing your intuition, which is that subconscious ability to collect and collate flashes of information that might otherwise go unnoticed.

One example of a psychic power that seems more like intuition is the business of reading auras.  Auras can tell you if people are happy, or sad, or even nursing an unseen injury.  Do you really need to see a bright red haze around someone to know that they're angry?  

This is almost more of a metaphorical way of seeing and thinking.  Like, when we say "you seem blue," we don't REALLY mean that someone seems literally to have a bluish cast.  But for some people, maybe that metaphor is a little more real.

Pattern recognition can also account for a lot of psychic experiences.  We don't realize it, but our brains are pattern recognition machines.  This works at both a conscious and subconscious level.  When you expect something to happen, and then it does, there isn't necessarily anything magic about that.  Your mind has probably just internalized the relevant pattern.

One example I hear frequently is, "I thought about person X, and that very instant they called me!"  If you drill down on these stories, you can often find an underlying pattern.  Maybe person X always phones in the middle of the afternoon on rainy days late in the week.  Maybe you just heard a story on the news that touched on a joke you share with Person X, and they saw it too.  

The next time you have an experience like this, don't just stop at the level of "Wow, that's spooky!"  Don't be afraid to dig a little farther, and see what you can find!  Replay everything that lead up to that moment carefully.  What were you doing?  Watching television, washing the dishes, staring out the window?  Replay it in all five senses.  What did you smell?  What sounds could you hear?  

Look closely, and you might learn something interesting.  And never disrespect the power of intuition!

Photo credit: Flickr/ecstaticist

David Icke's Reptilians

 David Icke is a fascinating figure.  He began his career as a sports commentator for the BBC, and a Green Party spokesman.  Then after a fateful encounter with a psychic, Icke had a spiritual awakening.

In an interview that was ostensibly to be about something sports-related, Icke announced to the world that "he was the son of God, and predicted that the world would soon be devastated by tidal waves and earthquakes.  From this rapid turnabout, David Icke became one of the most prolific and disturbing futurists in the movement which he dubbed "New Age conspiracism."

One of the touchstones of Icke's theories is that, in the words of Wikipedia, "a secret group of reptilian humanoids called the Babylonian Brotherhood controls humanity."  It is Icke's assertion that many world leaders, including George W. Bush and Queen Elizabeth II, are actually reptilians.

(Icke also believes that Kris Kristofferson and Boxcar Willie are reptilians.  Although certainly less successful ones than their political heads-of-state brethren.)

Icke has fleshed out a remarkably detailed explanation and world view regarding these reptilians in his extensive self-published repertoire.  The reptilians drink blood, are able to change their shape at will (so as to appear human, or whatever George W. Bush is), are from the Alpha Draconis star system (a perfectly nice star which served as the pole star during the time of the Ancient Egyptians), and live inside the Hollow Earth.  

The reptilians are the masters of all conspiracies.  The puppetmasters of the world, in essence.  The reptilians feed on negative emotions, which is why they are constantly manufacturing wars and other sources of strife.  (You may recognize this as being the plot of a Star Trek: The Original Series episode titled "Day of the Dove.")

I can totally understand why someone would want to believe that the entire world is being controlled by shape-changing reptilian humanoids who drink negative emotions.  In a way, odd as it sounds, it's a lot more comforting than the reigning consensual explanation.  Which is that humans are either too lazy, inattentive, or actively malevolent to allow peace to prevail.  

Can't we all just get along?  Of course not - and it's all the fault of those darned reptilians!

9/11?  Reptilians.  Auschwitz?  Reptilians.  Civil War?  Reptilians.

Eight years after David Icke started revealing the truth about the reptilians, he obviously watched The Matrix and it clearly blew.  His.  Mind.  Icke believes we are all immersed in what he calls "the five-sense illusion."  In other words, The Matrix is real.  

And who controls the Matrix we're embedded within?  In the movie, it was floating octopus head alien craft (or something - I could never really follow that point).  In reality (or what passes for it) the matrix is controlled by the reptilians.

Now you can see the true genius.  It's not like you could just go run up to George W. and rip off his rubber mask, Scooby Doo-style.  Because George W. is just a construct of the reptilians.  The reptilians control us all - but they aren't HERE.  They control us from the real world, and we all just blunder around through the video game they have devised for us.

To quote Keanu Reeves, "Whoa."

Photo credit: Neil Hague via Wikimedia Commons

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