From our antipode, Australia (The Age, Traveller section):

Do you serve spirits?

December 4, 2008 - 1:24PM

David Wroe on a Shining example of a haunted hotel.

IT COULD have been the start of a horror story. "Have you been up to the old Stanley Hotel?" the shopkeeper asked me. The woman didn't have a hunched back or a glass eye or anything like that. In fact she was brimming with American friendliness.

Nevertheless, it sounded like the last thing a person hears before they're catapulted into a nightmare of ghosts and ghoulish madness.

We'd admired from a distance the grand, rambling set of white buildings perched on the hillside above Estes Park, a pretty little town nestled in the Colorado stretch of the Rockies but had no inkling of its national fame. The storekeeper explained it was one of the top haunted hotels in the US and the inspiration for Stephen King's novel, The Shining.

I know the protagonists in horror stories always seem to have death wishes, the way they wander voluntarily into spooky, obviously dangerous places but we couldn't pass up an opportunity like this, so we drove up and inquired about a room for the night.

"It's the second most haunted hotel in the United States," the young woman at the front desk confirmed. "How do you measure hauntedness?" I asked.

She explained it had been judged as such by various psychics and by the Ghost Hunters, a cable program on the Sci-Fi channel. (It is ranked behind the Myrtles Plantation, near New Orleans.) The infamous Room 217 from The Shining was being renovated so the receptionist suggested a room on the fourth floor. "That's where most of the paranormal activity occurs," she said.

Now, I am a sceptic on the grounds that if I were dead and therefore freed from the shackles of corporeality, I would use my powers more wisely than moving furniture around and blowing small gusts of wind. That said, there is nothing more fun than having the life scared out of you by a good horror story. I would love to have my scepticism shattered; life would be far more interesting were it filled with the kind of supernatural mayhem that goes on in Stephen King's novels.

It came as a disappointment, therefore, when Stephanie, the Stanley's chirpy tour guide, told us there was no evil, malevolent presence at the hotel, only "good spirits". "Actually, we haven't had any bloody murders here or anything like that," she said, ruining the fun completely. By good spirits she meant the likes of Lord Dunraven, whose austere portrait hangs in the hotel lobby.

The fourth Earl of Dunraven was a Scotsman who through various unscrupulous business practices came to own most of the land around Estes Park when it was a small, frontier community in the late 1800s. Eventually his neighbours ran him out of town in 1888 and never saw him again. But before he left, Dunraven sold a piece of land to F. O. Stanley, a wealthy photographic and automotive pioneer, who later used it to build the Stanley Hotel between 1907 and 1909.

So, despite having left town and probably died about 20 years before the hotel was built, Dunraven now haunts the fourth floor, with a special emphasis on stealing the wedding rings of honeymooners and groping the female housekeepers. (Several housekeepers had quit after having their bums pinched by the rascally Dunraven, Stephanie told us.)

Until the early 1960s, when it fell into two decades of decline before being revived, the Stanley was a retreat for the rich and famous. Children were not permitted in the main parts of the hotel so the fourth floor was set aside as a nursery. Dunraven favoured the fourth floor, Stephanie said, because that was where the young nannies could be found.

After Dunraven, the most prolific spirits are a pair of children, a brother and sister, who used to stay on the fourth floor in the 1930s. Both died of tuberculosis and are now often seen playing in period clothing. In room 420, considered the most haunted room in the hotel, guests on the cusp of sleep have heard a small girl whisper in their ear, "Goodnight".

Next, a couple of drifters - a boyfriend and girlfriend - came to the hotel in the late 1960s and began sleeping in the disused concert hall. The man abandoned his girlfriend after the management refused to let the couple sleep indoors. She froze to death one night and has, ever since, haunted the Concert Hall.

The story that really made the hotel famous was the one in which a drunken Stephen King stumbled up and down the darkened passageways looking for his room. It was October 1973, the last day of the season before the hotel shut down for the winter. King and his wife, Tabitha, were the only guests that night. They were stuck in Estes Park because a road that winds up into the Rocky Mountain National Park, was closed.

After a session in the hotel bar, King got lost. As he wandered around looking for his room, he hit upon the idea of a young family who take the job of caretaking a hotel during the winter, when it is snowed in. He changed the name of the hotel to The Overlook and wrote a story in which the spirits and the isolation drive the father, Jack Torrance, to homicidal madness.

It's easy to see how the Stanley could inspire such a tale. The old, white weatherboards and the striking red roof conjure up an American mountain gothic atmosphere. Inside, the passageways are long and the staircases angular.

It is also a beautiful place, with exceptional views of the soaring, snowcapped Rockies in the distance. Franklin Roosevelt stayed there, as did Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash. I would have paid a fortune to meet the ghost of Johnny Cash. On a less stirring note, the Aspen scenes from the Jim Carrey film Dumb and Dumber were also filmed at the Stanley. Carrey stayed in Room 217 and, according to Stephanie, came down in the middle of the night insisting he be moved. He has never explained what happened.

Nothing happened to us, even though we were in room 418, practically the paranormal epicentre. My pants went missing at one stage but turned up exactly where I had misplaced them, under some towels in the bathroom. The toilet flushed oddly and the ceiling fan kept spinning after I turned it off but that was it.

The hotel plays Stanley Kubrick's film of The Shining on a constant loop on its TV system. It is a genuinely frightening piece of cinema, owing to Jack Nicholson's maniacal performance and Kubrick's genius, although King was unhappy with the way Kubrick changed the storyline and sidelined his central theme of a man's battle with alcoholism. Kubrick also used a different hotel, the Timberline Lodge in Oregon, for outside shots and built a sound stage in England for the interiors.

Nevertheless, a couple of days after we were at the Stanley, horror fans voted Kubrick's film the scariest of all time.

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This is WELL outside of my usual dabblings.  That being said, I present the following website which includes a gastronomic page for our Wiccans, Pagans, and other assorted spiritual entities.  At the bottom of the webpage is a dropdown table of contents for the rest of the site.  Enjoy!  CatAnna

Wesley

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The kid in me loves new toys and I know that sharing is good.  So, my fellow SMG members, today's group post includes a download link for the Worldwide Telescope.  A description is on the link page.  Once you've downloaded the program (free from Microsoft, of all places) and its updates, and then run it, begin by selecting the "Explore" menu and click on "Getting Started".  Or, if you would rather get a quick taste of program features (we paranormal people just overflow with curiousity!), click on the "Guided Tours" menu, then on one of the thumbnails you see in the row just below or at the bottom.  A short program will download and you'll get a multimedia tour of the subject.  If you have any questions, just post them in the group.  

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A video from the news aggregator Breitbart.com:

CLICK HERE

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From the Hartford Courant:

Stafford group investigates school ghosts

Associated Press

Journal Inquirer of Manchester

November 28, 2008

STAFFORD, Conn.

With all the talk about the future of the vacant Borough School, there are a few who haven't had their say -- the spirits that may still live there.

Tony Diana, a local ghost investigator, claims there are at least two spiritual entities, believed to be children, haunting the former school. He says there may be another entity, possibly a female teacher from the 1930s and 1940s, who haunts the building as well.

Diana, co-founder of Insight Paranormal Investigations, has investigated the school on several occasions and claims a lot of spiritual activity has taken place.

He calls the building a wonderfully "controlled environment for ghost hunting."

In one incident, in Room 205, an investigator for another ghost hunting group that was working with Insight Paranormal Investigations had his digital thermometer inexplicably fly out of his hand and his camera went next. The incident was caught on video.

Diana says one can see the camera strap lift up before it left the man's hands.

Also, a light in one of the rooms has gone and off by itself during an investigation, he says.

Diana also claims that knocking has been heard and electronic voice phenomena, or EVPs, have been captured on recorded audio throughout the school.

According to Diana, recorders generate a lot of white noise and spirits can modulate this noise to communicate.

Essentially, a ghost investigator asks a question while the recorder is running and waits for a response. Sometimes a human-sounding voice can be heard following a question.

The recorder is kept rolling through many investigations and sometimes a voice will inexplicably appear.

Diana says that was the case during one investigation earlier this year. Some investigators were having a conversation about wine and an inexplicable voice -- that the investigators didn't hear while they were speaking -- can be heard on the audio recording.

Diana says that a little boy can be heard on the recorded audio saying, "It's mine! See you should have brought me some wine."

He also says the sound of what sounds like chopping wood with an ax can be heard on audio. Diana says the area where the school is located was once farmland.

On subsequent investigations, investigators brought wine, but nothing ever happened to it.

Diana says that ghosts are "us" and keep some human behaviors after death. He says the majority of spirits aren't of an angry nature.

Occasionally, there is a possibility that a place can become haunted with a lost or angry spirit.

He also says that conversations can be effective in drawing spiritual entities' voices into speaking.

Some spirits may not like the question and answer format to prove that they exist.

"Who wants to interrogated?" Diana asks.

In other experiences of EVP activity, Diana says an unknown voice can be heard saying "stop coming here" in Room 103.

He says another EVP sounds like it came from a child that says "see me in the corner" and an adult voice follows with "hey!"

The Borough and Witt school buildings closed in 2007 to make way for the new Stafford Elementary School.

Officials are determining what to do with the Borough building. Among the options include turning it to a home for deaf people and even leveling it.

Diana says research shows that two children died of pneumonia near the location before the school was built in 1921.

Diana and a reporter visited the empty school on a recent day.

The reporter explained the building's precarious future and asked any possible spiritual entities what they thought should happen.

There was no audible response in the electronic recording.

But, in other instances, other sounds were captured while Diana and the reporter were talking. In one instance, a high-pitched voice can be heard. In another, there is what sounds like grunting sounds.

In another instance, a possible low-sounding voice seems audible.

Diana also says he seemed to be answered with a faint "hello" and a "no" at different points during the investigation.

But the sounds are not the most conclusive of EVPs. The best EVPs are classified in the Class-A, or crystal clear, quality.

Ghost investigators also use other types of tools to assist them during their "haunting" expedition. Besides digital voice recorders, digital thermometers, digital cameras and an electromagnetic field, or EMF detector, can be helpful.

Investigators use the tools in a variety of ways to detect possible spirits. For example, an EMF can supposedly pick up on possible spirit energy.

Diana says that when a spirit manifests itself, it draws on the energy around it to form. The sudden jump in the electromagnetic field will cause a spike on the detector, and investigators can follow the energy to take a picture and talk into the recorder more accurately.

Pictures can show other things like mist, which is believed to possibly be the coalescing of energy to form an apparition.

Diana recently used a k-2 meter, which is more sensitive than his EMF meter. But, unfortunately, he didn't receive any unexplained spikes at the school.

He says the building seems to come alive with spiritual activity during the night hours.

Diana says people who worked and live near the school have told him about weird things that have been spotted or happened inside the building. Among these stories, people told him of unexplained shadows moving in front of doors and kitchenware rattling.

Doug Minich, the town's data control manager, says he has heard rumors of spirits at the school as well.

He also says a motion sensor sounded an alarm for code 19 -- or Room 204 -- on numerous times.

Minich says during his trips to visit the school after the alarm, he found the structure secured.

He adds that an animal like a rat wouldn't be big enough to trip the alarm.

"This room seems to be a hotspot," Diana says of Room 204. "A lot of stuff seems to happen here."

Diana says a fellow investigator knows a remote viewer from California who guided him to Room 204 via a telephone conversation. A remote viewer is a psychic who can connect with a location via a photograph or a physical connection like a telephone and with that connection they can obtain psychic impressions of a place and its past, Diana says.

The remote viewer said an image of a woman dressed in garb from the 1930s or 40s came to mind with respect to that room in the school.

Diana says that an older adult voice has showed up on EVPs.

He also says that investigators once followed an unexplained cold spot for 10 minutes in the room.

Diana says that entities suck up energy as they move and the area where they've been is cold. Diana likens cold sports to the tails of comets.

Room 204 was where the lights inexplicably went on and off by themselves.

Diana says he would like to continue investigating the school, but access has been restricted to the building due to a neighbor's complaint.

For now, it seems the doings of any possible spiritual beings, much like the future of the school, remains unknown.

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I am presently reading a book entitled Ghosts Among Us, by James Van Praagh.  JVP is the co-creator and co-executive producer of the television series Ghost Whisperer.  He is also a medium.  Given that I seldom watch television (I'm uncultured --I may be a direct descendant of the Visigoths, I'll admit), I have no reference point for how legitimate Van Praagh is or whether the show is any good (I think I've seen only one episode).  I'm sure the show reflects some of his visions of ghosts and the afterlife.

So, kindly render your opinions in response to this post.

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From the Pasadena Citizen (Houston, TX), by Matt Hollis

Paper Ghosts

Debbie Gast of Pasadena Paranormal Investigations checks a storage room for ghosts.

By MATT HOLLIS

They say you can see her in the office windows of the Pasadena Citizen Building on South Shaver, but only at night. She wears white and has black hair. She appears only at night and sometimes appears in the lunchroom. Others say they see her wander the building after hours.

She is known as the Woman in White and she supposedly haunts the building, the same place where newspapers such as the Pasadena Citizen, the North Channel Sentinel, the Deer Park Progress are written and printed.

The North Channel Sentinel ran a story about local ghosts for its Halloween edition Oct. 30. They story caught the attention of a group of paranormal investigators in Pasadena. They asked for permission to spend the night in the building to see if they could make contact with the alleged spirit.

Ghost hunting has become more popular in recent years with shows such as “Ghost Hunters” on the SciFi Channel. Many paranormal investigators have sprung up and decided to go out to scary-looking places in search of ghosts.

“We just started this business this year,” said Debbie Gast, head of Pasadena Paranormal Investigations. “I grew up in houses that were haunted. A psychic told me once that I attract spirits. So we have been playing around with it for about five years.”

Gast and her son, Ryan Burgamy, and daughter, Christi Martinez along with Mary Jones, a rookie ghost hunter, decided to come up to the Citizen building to do a paranormal investigation in the dead of night.

The Citizen Building is located in what was once the heart of Pasadena. There were several stores located where the newspaper is now including a Woolworth, a Pittsburgh Paints and a Singers Sewing store. Today, it is the place where the local newspaper is written and printed. As with many old buildings, there are ghost stories connected with it. As the story goes, the Woman in White was an employee of Woolworth in life and died while in a fall from one of the building’s many stairs. Now she haunts the building, showing up in one of the office building windows and appearing in the middle of the lunchroom, where allegedly a stairway used to be.

The night began with the paranormal team putting together their ghost-hunting equipment. That consisted of video cameras with night vision, tape recorders and an electromagnetic field (EMF) device. It goes off when near something emitting electricity or when triggered by something else. Gast said it will pick up ghosts that come near it.

“Spirits are energy,” Gast said. “Whenever something comes close to the meter, it fluxuates. When it moves away, the meter drops down. Unless something is manipulating it, the meter should give a steady reading.”

Armed with the EMF meter, video cameras and tape recorders, the team set out to venture around the Citizen Building. First, they checked out a set of stairs in the back. Today, this is where forklifts move pallets of newspapers and other items around and is used as a storage area. The stairs are old and rickety, creaking with every step. Old paint from years past chips off from them. It was here that the EMF meter started going off.

Gast and her team paused and tried to speak to whatever was causing the meter to jump.

“What is your name?” Gast would ask. “Did you work here? Why don’t you show yourself to us?”

Gast then said she picked up a cold spot where the meter was going off.

“It feels cool here,” she said, holding her hand in space.

The meter then returned to normal and the hunt continued upstairs into another storage area. Walking up another set of old stairs, the team came across a little room off to the side that held newspapers from long ago. Upon placing the EMF meter inside, it almost went off the scale.

“There is a lot of activity in here,” Gast said.

The team spent some time in the little storage room, trying to communicate with whatever might be in there. With the lights out, Gast and her team talked to the “spirit.”

“Come out and show yourself, are you a wimp?” Gast would say. “Are you a man? Then you shouldn’t be afraid of us. If you are a woman, then don’t be afraid. We are just trying to talk to you.”

Gast said sometimes she has to get aggressive with the spirits in order to get a reaction. Otherwise, they will not respond, she said.

Then the team went into the lunchroom. A night worker told them he had seen the ghost when the lunchroom was expanded years before. He said he and some other workers were in the lunchroom when the figure of a woman came out of the wall near the restrooms. He said it walked halfway through the room before it disappeared. To this day, he said, he and the others are afraid to go near the lunchroom.

A new policy of having the radio play at night prevented any electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) from occurring, so the team then worked its way around to where the huge printers produce the local newspapers. Another worker told them that they had been in the other lunchroom when a door blew open once. The door is always locked, he said.

The team then went outside to see if they could catch a glimpse of the Woman in White in the office window. While no one saw anything, Jones said she could feel a presence up there.

The team then returned to the little storage room where the EMF meter had gone off earlier. This time, Gast said she spotted a shadow in the back of the room.

“It moved when I spoke to it,” she said. “There is something definitely in that room.”

Then the team decided enough was enough for the night.

A couple of days later, they returned with their findings.

A couple of photos they took showed orbs floating near the heads of some of the team members. On an EVP, when asked what the spirit’s name is, a voice can be heard saying “Selena.” The team claims the female voice does not belong to any of them. In addition, videos taken during the investigation show orbs floating across the room.

Orbs, Gast said, can be mistaken for dust particles sometimes. She said if they have a face, what she calls the “Uncle Fester-face,” then it is dust, not a ghost. But, if it emits its own light or has a tail showing movement, then it probably is a spirit.

Based on what they discovered, the team concluded that there is a ghost lurking about the Pasadena Citizen Building.

“It is not malevolent,” she said. “The woman is most likely a residual haunting. In other words, it is like a tape playing over and over. She is repeating something she did in life in spirit. The ghost in the storage room is different. It is more like a classic intelligent haunting.”

Gast said the apartments she lives in are haunted by the spirit of a man named Chris. He supposedly killed his own son before killing himself. She says he has shown himself to her in a full body apparition.

“We are Christians,” she said. “Some say we shouldn’t be doing this, but the Bible says we should have no fear if God is with you. You just have to protect yourself and cast these spirits out if they get too out of hand.”

She has investigated the San Jacinto Battlegrounds for spirits and said she picked up an EVP of a solider responding to questions such as if it knew who Santa Anna is. She says she also picked up the sounds of ghostly soldiers walking in cadence at the site.

So, if you ever feel like you know of a place that is haunted, don’t run for the door, call Pasadena Paranormal Investigations. They just might make you a believer.

They can be reached at pasadenaparanormal@hotmail.com.

Original story

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You may or may not have noticed the two bright "stars" gleaming above the western horizon after sunset.  Those are actually the planets Venus and Jupiter lighting up the azure sky, heralding the holidays.  Venus is the closer of the two to the horizon.

On December 1st, the moon will join them, making for a startling conjunction.  For more information, as well as pretty pictures, diagrams, and links to sky maps, see the following site:  NASA

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