Ghost lite - the lighter side of paranormal investigating

Ghost lite - the lighter side of paranormal investigating
March 5, 2009
JC Harris
Examiner.com

Hunting ghosts and unknown entities is serious business, right? Of course it is, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have fun along the way. Paranormal investigating can be very intense. The situations we get in from time to time can raise the hairs on the back of your neck and unnerve the bravest at heart. I have been in places where brutal murders have taken place, where thousands have died from trauma and disease and the scene of sacrificial rituals, both human and animalistic. So, given the sometime gruesome and spooky backdrops, how can we find anything to laugh about? Let me explain.

One of the first things I learned as an investigator was to never take yourself too serious, probably good advice on life in general. Let me set up one scenario. You’re sitting quietly in pitch black darkness in the bedroom of a house that has a history of violent attacks from an unknown entity. Your partner is sitting across the room. The air is heavy and you’ve had a feeling of anxiety since you walked in the door. A few minutes earlier, someone or something pulled your hair. When suddenly, your partner’s scream breaks the silence. You spring up and run over to see what happened. “It’s got me” she cries. You flip on your flashlight and find a dress manikin which has fallen over and leaning against her back as she is frozen in terror.
It’s funny how your mind tires as the night grows long. I was on an investigation at a very famous hospital one night with a group of investigators. We had been walking the corridors for several hours and had experienced some good inaction with some entities, when we decided to sit down and take a break for a few minutes. One of the investigators set their camera down on the tile floor and leaned back against the wall. A minute later someone whispered “look at the camera. It just floated up”. We all focused down on the camera. Sure enough, the camera appeared to be hovering a few inches above the ground. Suddenly it sat back down on the floor. “That was wild” someone said. We all started to move in when it began to rise again. Video cameras were pulled out like revolvers in a gun fight. Everyone was getting excited. I moved in for a closer look. I bent down to look under the camera just as it slowly lowered once again. I sat there for a minute, my head flat on the floor in vigil for the next occurrence. Again, it began to rise and as it rose I saw the telescopic lens which the camera had been resting on extend. No spirit was raising and lowering the camera. The lens was simply moving in and out, causing the camera to raise and lower. Disappointing but funny, especially at 3 AM.
Sometimes the humor comes from the situation itself. I remember sitting in the middle of a soybean field at 2 in the morning waiting on a supposed ghost train. After 2 hours of waiting in anticipation with no results, only to find out we were in the wrong field. Or the time I was trying to explain to the business end of a shotgun with a angry and sleepy farmer on the other end that we had mistakenly trespassed on his land looking for the location of a tragic train wreck some 75 years prior. While I explained that we were ghost hunters and not drug dealers at 1 am, the guy that led us there and guaranteed us that the land was not private property headed into the woods in the opposite direction.
The time I videotaped for hours and should have captured some amazing video only to get home and watch hours of black because I left the lens cap on, the conversations I’ve heard on audio when the investigators forgot that we were recording, watching people scratch unmentionable places on video that they had forgotten about, it all good. The human element in an investigation for inhuman entities makes it fun. Being a part of team that appreciate each other and are comfortable enough to laugh at themselves is a good way to spend an evening.