I'm still researching the interesting concept that 'brain type' might affect abillity to sense/see/hear paranormal activity.  I've found another interesting test that gives you a summary of which 'type of brain' you are:

http://web.tickle.com/quizzes/show/3022

If you take the quiz, please post your result and let us know if you have or have not had a personal paranormal experience.

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While browsing the internet this morning, I stumbled across this tidbit:

"Although what the Paranormal Research Society does may not seem harmful at a glance, many people's lives are negatively impacted by those in the paranormal business. Those who cling to members of the paranormal business may, in desperately hoping to communicate with lost loved ones, bankrupt themselves and destroy relationships with the people around them."

You can read the entire letter to the editor here.

I'd be interested to hear everyone's thoughts on this comment; I have my own personal take on the statement, but I thought I'd keep them to myself until others had a chance to share theirs!

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We didn't even know about it, but someone contacted us because of this little mention at the bottom of a story in the local paper.  Exciting to see that people are finally noticing our website and our work!

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"Labourer
Michael Scheres says he and a pal unwittingly snapped the spook while
working on the old Lewis's building, in The Headrow.

Michael, of
Belle Isle, Leeds, said: "I could feel it had gone really cold, I was
shivering and this feeling was shooting up and down my spine. Liam, the
lad I was working with, took the picture. When he saved it came up with
the ghost on. He nearly dropped the phone. I couldn't believe what I
was seeing at first.""

Read the full article here. 

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Somehow, the woman has been able to "see" Jack in her mind's eye, even
though all of conventional science - and common sense - says it is
impossible.

Is this simply a bizarre coincidence?

Or could it be proof that we all possess psychic powers of the type popularised in such films as Minority Report?

That is what Dr Roe is investigating. A parapsychologist
based at the University of Northampton, he is examining whether it
could indeed be possible to project your "mind's eye" to a distant
location and observe what is going on - even if that place is hundreds
of miles away."

...

"

It would be easy to dismiss such claims as laughable, were it not
for the fact that an increasing number of scientists are taking them
seriously.

While Dr Roe's work may appear controversial, he is starting
to garner the support of eminent academics such as Professor Brian
Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist from Cambridge University,
who says: "The experiments have been designed to rule out luck and
chance. I consider the evidence for remote viewing to be pretty
clear-cut."

The military is also taking a keen interest. The Ministry of
Defence takes the phenomena seriously enough to have commissioned its
own research.

Documents only recently released under the Freedom of Information Act detail a series of experiments on psychic phenomena.

Unfortunately, the actual details of the experiments that were
carried out - and what the conclusions were - are still classified, and
intriguingly the MoD refuses to say whether they were a success."

Full article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=510762&in_page_id=1770 

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I'm sitting here contemplating the one thing we never discuss in our family- (the elephant in the room nobody talks about).

I'm from a good Catholic family- have a devout father and an Uncle who is a Priest.  The members of that family have all had experiences with the paranormal; somehow those events have all been accepted and never questioned from a perspective of faith.  I think maybe this is so that nobody has to 'come to terms' with it- nobody ends up questioning their faith if nobody talks about i!

I also realized I'm very reluctant to tell other people what we do or what experiences I've had..perhaps that Catholic upbringing? 

It got me to wondering how others handle this?  Are you religious? Is it a Christian religion? Pagan? Eastern? Something else? How does your religion address ghosts/angels/demons?

Do you talk about ghost hunting/psychics etc openly? What type of reactions do you get? 

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My interest in the paranormal is something few know the details of, as it is very personal, but I decided to share it here.  It is important to keep in mind that there have been many people in my family who have had paranormal experiences.  Here is my father's retelling of the first 'known' incident our family experienced.

"Most families experience something strange in their lifetime, some more than others. Our family has had more than its share, and i will relate some of them to you.

The first happened to my fathers parents, Grandma Anna **** and her husband Joseph ****. They lived in a small town in Pennsylvania, Old Forge, just above Scranton. Joseph was a miner at the time, and they had a baby girl that was ill.Very young, the child had been stricken with pneumonia, and antibiotics were unknown back then.  The doctor did what he could, but her health was failing, and my grandparents stayed up most of the night praying and caring for her.

A miners life is hard, so Joseph had to leave for the mine before dawn. As he headed through town early the next morning he joined other townsmen heading up the mountain. They were asking how the child was, offering him comfort and encouragement, but he was despondent and fearfull.

The roadway ended at a rock wall,so they had to climb a series of ladders set up to reach the area of the shaft to be worked that day, and they started climbing. Joseph was in amongst the other miners, climbing, when suddenly he stopped and turned to look back towards town. He looked down,then slowly up,and then started to cry. Let me down, he cried to those below him. Whats wrong,they asked! Whats wrong!! My baby just died,he cried.

Forcing his way back down,he ran back to town with many miners following him in bewilderment.  Reaching his house, he found Anna crying. She'd dead, she said.

"How did you know",they asked him.
"It was an Angel! I saw an Angel, he said, holding a baby child, rising to heaven. I knew!"

Many of the townspeople saw this same thing. How do you explain it? He knew the minute the baby died, but he was on the mountain side, amongst many witnesses. They later figured out that the baby died moments before he saw the Angel.

A little incident, small in the years of a family,but never forgotten."

Everyone in the family seems to have had an experience at one time or another; I have enough ghost stories for a book and they are all about family members.

On to me...

When I was 18 months old, I drowned.  The doctors estimate that I was under the water for at least five minutes and the fact that my mother forced water out of my lungs and performed CPR until help arrived seems to be the only reason I am alive.  

I was unconscious and 'slipping in and out' of having both a pulse and brain activity for roughly 11 hours following the incident.  The emergency room doctors were preparing my family for the worst; possible death, probable permanent brain damage if I survived.  Neither occurred, and when I finally came to, my first words were, "Mommy, I died and saw God".

From that point forward, I began having odd experiences.

We moved not long after that incident to a home in Florida's panhandle that had survived a fire; it was a wonderful rural homestead, though a bit damaged and charred.  My parents moved in and began to repair the house.  One afternoon I was napping on the couch with my mother when I began to hear footsteps in the hallway.  I woke mom and told her about them; she told me I was dreaming and to go back to sleep (I still tease her over this).  Several minutes later she also heard the footsteps and jumped up to follow them.  Since we were alone in the house, there shouldn't have been footsteps.  Despite the best efforts of my mother to find the source of the sound, there was nobody there.

It wasn't long after this incident that I developed a friendship with an older man who told me he'd lost his granddaughter (not as if she'd died, but he just couldn't find her) and told me I reminded him of her.  He used to sit on my bed at night when I was scared, play games with me.  Nobody else could see him.  Just this past year I discovered that an older gentleman had indeed died in the home- peacefully, not from a fire.  However, after the fire, the house had actually been moved to a new property several towns away.  I am hoping to go to the small town where the house was originally located this summer, to see if anyone can give me more information on the family who lived there.  I do know that the couple had at least one son, as he is the one who sold the house and arranged to have it moved.

When I was six, we moved again, this time to south Florida.  I continued to see this gentleman.  I also began seeing 'shadow people' in my room, but they would disappear when my 'friend' would come.  I was so afraid of the shadow people that for years I refused to sleep without every light in the room being on.  I would still wake to the 'impression' that only moments before 'they' had been hovering overhead, run off only because this 'ghost' arrived.  Luckily, I had a very understanding family; it could have turned out quite differently.

It was during this time that I started developing an odd 'sense' of certain things.  I can't describe it for you or give you an explination.  I can only share one tale, as told by a close friend.  I frequently go by the screen name Luna, so you will see me referred to by that title in the story below.

"This happened a long time ago... fall of 1993 I believe... so the details are a bit shaky for me. Late one night Luna and I were over at a friend's house hanging out when we decided that we were bored and going to take a drive. We went in Kevin's mom's car (that's whose house we were at) because there were 4 of us and everyone else had a truck.

Kevin drove, Luna sat in front with him and Brian and I were in the back seat. We just started driving around in the country looking at nothing and listening to music when we came to a stop sign where the road we were on met the Indiana/Ohio state line. The headlights were shining on what looked like a place where there used to be a driveway. You know how the ditch is filled in so that cars can drive across?

All of a sudden something was strange. The hair on the back of my neck stood up and a shiver went down my spine. The digital clock on the radio went back to 12:00 and I think the music went off. (that's the shaky part)

Luna just stared out the window as we turned north onto the state line. After that we were all so freaked out that we just headed back to Kevin's house. When we got out of the car Luna walked straight to my truck without telling our friends goodbye or anything. I told the guys goodbye and followed her. When I got in the truck I asked her right away if she felt that. The only thing she said was "I don't want you to ever go back there. EVER!" I tried to talk to her a bit on the drive home but got very little response.

Once we arrived at my house she told me that she had a headache and wanted to go right to bed. She slept on the sofa and I went to bed. A couple hours later I was awakened by a very strange dream. In my dream I saw a lady, probably 18 - 24 years old. She appeared to be lying on a bed with her hands tied together then to something... maybe a bedpost. She was lying face down with wind blowing her white flowy nightgown and her hair back. She was definitely scared of something. I didn't get a good look at her face though, but the rest of her resembled me!

Wide awake and a little afraid to go back to sleep, I went to the kitchen to get a glass of water. When I looked into the living room Luna was sitting up on the sofa in the dark. I walked on to the kitchen and got my water. When I started to walk back she said either "she's o.k. you know" or "she's going to be o.k. you know". (again with the shaky details) Of course I said "who?". She replied "the girl in your dream"! That may have freaked me out more than my dream!

The next morning when I woke up Luna had a notebook in hand drawing something. When she showed it to me, it looked to me like a floor plan of a house. One of the rooms had an X on it. I asked her what she was drawing and she told me it was the house she'd seen the night before. I was a bit confused because the place where we felt the eerie feeling was nothing but soybean fields and roads for a couple miles in each direction. She said that when we had the experience she had seen a house on that property. Again she told me that I was to never return to that place.

Needless to say I've never been back and never will. I have no reason to think that the energy we felt there was friendly! "

I continued to get these odd feelings about friends and family; nothing specific that I can recall other than an incident where I begged one friend not to go on a trip and, when he went anyway, he was involved in a terrbile 12 car accident that nearly killed him.

During this time, my 'ghost' continued to visit me. Then one night after I was married, my husband woke me, yelling that someone was in the house and scrambling for some sort of weapon.  When he'd searched the house and finally calmed down enough to tell me what had happened, he explained that he'd woken up to see an older man sit down at the foot of our bed.  After that night, I never saw him again.

However, my niece (who was four at the time) began seeing 'an old man'.  She had already had night terrors and would often stare at and talk to things not there, but now she had a 'friend'.  She would share her food with him, talk to him and play games with him just like I had.  She described him for me and I was startled to find it was the same description of 'my ghost'.

The story continues from there, but this post has gotten long enough as it is, so I will save the other tales for another night.

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Interesting article I came across that I thought I would share.
 

Researchers discover second light-sensing system in human eye

New research on blind subjects has bolstered evidence that the human
eye has two separate light-sensing systems — one that perceives the
familiar visual signals that allow us to see and a second, separate
system that tells our body when it is day or night.

Researchers have long known that the eye performed both functions
but until recent years it had been thought that both vision and the
management of the circadian rhythm that tells us when to be sleepy and
when to be alert had been done all at once through the retina’s rods and cones that enable us to see.

Beginning
in the 1990s, however, research in animals and in healthy human
subjects indicated that though vision was handled by the rods and
cones, the signals that synchronize our body clock with the sun’s
rising and setting are handled through a second system of
light-sensitive cells, located at the back of the retina. These cells
extend from the back of the eye into the brain’s hypothalamus region,
which manages our body’s clock.

Read the entire article here. 

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We've been researching the local Devil's Tree for quite some time, but just last night got an email with quite the ghost story attached. 

As soon as I stepped foot into the woods my legs began to shook and I
was starting to regret the whole thing. After a few minutes we all
collected ourselves, calmed down our nerves and stepped onto the dark,
overgrown path. Through the first set of woods it was very calm and we
began cracking jokes and were very at ease. After about twenty minutes
of being completely lost we came out of the woods and found the canal.
Nothing was out of the ordinary except for the clanking of chains we
heard from time to time....

If nothing else, its a good old fashioned ghost tale! Visit The GRIM Society to read the full story!

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