In Which Our Hero Goes Ghost-Hunting (So You Don't Have To)

Wow, I haven't been doing any of my big Halloween plans so far.  Yeah, I still intend to give ya a story, but I'm way behind on writing it (I had intended to do two, like I did last year, but laziness has pretty much fragged that idea).  I still have a week... maybe I can get it together by then.  Also, I was gonna put up some horror book reviews in honor of the season.  Still got a week there, too, so, we'll see.  I'm horribly addicted to slack.

But, I did go ghost-hunting with some friends last night, and it was, in the words (and the exact same spirit) of Count Floyd, "Oooo, veddy scary, kids!"



I gotta admit, while I love ghost stories beyond all else, I'm not a believer.  I'm a hardline atheist, so supernatural anything is kinda a gooby idea to me... but, that doesn't mean playing around with it isn't fun, and I also love the idea of urban exploration, but am (usually) a bit chickenshit when it comes to breaking the law and possibly getting caught for something stupid at my age, so this was a chance to legally wander around tumbledown buildings at 2 a.m.  So, yay!

Here's the site for the tour we booked, if you wanna go look at more pictures and stuff.  The tour was nicely done - the people putting it on were cool, sincere and enthusiastic about what they were doing, and did their best to build things up and make the most out of any little oddity that could possibly be made the most of.   They were good sports and they delivered anything promised - it's not their fault that ghosts didn't show up.  They claimed that earlier a ghost had scratched a guy, and one guy on the tour (who I think was just playing along) said a girl was standing next to him in the dark, and he thought she was just one of the other people on the tour but when he turned to look, she wasn't there anymore.  Oooo!  I had to resist being a smartass and saying things like "Hey, who was that kid riding the tricycle at the end of the hall?" or whatever to egg them on, but really, the scariest thing was having to ride through the woods in the dead of night in the back of a pickup truck that was goin' pretty goddamn fast for having a bed full of people.  I was reminded of scenes from Mr. Majestyk for some reason...



Anyway, I never came anywhere close to getting the creeps (even when they sat me down in a pitch-black hall with highly-sensitive headphones on for ten minutes to listen for ghostly footsteps -- that was just kinda relaxing), but it was fun and worth the trip.  I took lotsa pictures so I could scare all you keeds. 

If you click on any of the pictures it'll make 'em a whole lot bigger so you can see lots more detail, so, you are hereby encouraged to do so.

After wandering through lots of wet weeds in some very-much-boondocks area and listening to cool stories of ghost-horses and such, we got to a building with a long hall in it (it was called "the short hall" but it looked longer than the building they were calling "the long hall" so go figure).

Here's how dark it was if you just used a flashlight, without the camera's flash going off (fortunately a friend showed me how to turn it back on or this'd be all you got -- I'm not big on picture-takin' so don't know all the camera-tech):

These places were crazy-fuckin' dark because they were mostly tunnels and it was 1 or 2 a.m., but once I got the flash goin', I took better pictures.  In this one, you can clearly see an "orb."   Orbs are round manifestations of psychic ghostly energy that only show up in photographs.  I've found that ghosts are attracted to very dusty areas, because the more visible dust you find in the air, the more orbs you're gonna see!  Very shpookie!

This room was called "the vortex."  I'm not sure exactly why, other than "vortex" sounds kinda scary.  Like if Carol Anne's gonna go missing on ya, the "vortex" is where she's gonna do it.

I don't know what that big rusty thing is.  But this is the clearest ghost picture I got -- you can kind of see a figure standing right next to it, that looks kind of like a woman in black holding a purple flashlight.  I swear that figure wasn't there when I took the picture!

(Okay, I'm lyin', just trying to make things a little more interesting.  That was actually the tour guide.  She was very nice and told us spooky stories about the time she saw what looked like a Christmas tree bulb in one of the trees growing in the rooms.)

Here's the ceiling in the vortex room.  Think it needs some fixin'.

When we got back into the hallway, the dust had gotten stirred up, and like I said, dust attracts ghosts, so here's a couple of pictures of an orb-swarm.  A veritable sm-orb-asborg, if you will (and you won't, 'cuz that's silly).

Ya gotta admit, that does look pretty cool, even if though it's dust.  But it may be dust that's been there since the Civil War, so I guess it could be connected to the 4,000 soldiers who died in the Battle of Okolona and are supposed to be buried all over the place there.

People (as part of a Wiccan ritual, we were told) left messages on the walls for the spirits.  Apparently some kids had been playing around the in the building and ghosts followed them home or something, so people left messages to appease the spirits.  The handwriting looks pretty similar on all of 'em...

That wasn't the most sinister graffiti we saw, though.  In another building, there was this message of terror:

 What kind of depraved being could have left such a message?!?  Also, there was this symbol.  I don't know what it is, probably some demonic symbol of darkest witchcraft:

Fills me with horror, whatever it is.

By the way, that room was the dustiest place anywhere, so orbs infested it like you wouldn't believe.

Also, just left of the center of the picture, you can see some spooky lights there.  They look like two red eyes, with kind of a license-platey manifestation between them.  Mankind may never unravel the mystery behind exactly what eldrich horror was lurking out there just beyond the bushes where everybody was sneaking out to pee.  Also, on the opposite wall was painted "WHO MADE WHO?" which proves ghosts dig AC/DC, and there was a cartoon face saying "Awww shit!" which captured the terror of the whole shebang.

Here's a tree growing out of some kind of pit in the "long hall" building.  That's where they sat me down in the dark alone for a nice rest.  I expected that to be scary, but, nope.  The guy was kind of disappointed when I told him the only unusual sound I heard was a distant beep-beep-beep of a forklift backing up at a peanut factory nearby.  Hardly the ghost of "Philip," who's supposed to hang around that hall.  One guy came there wearing a Union Soldier uniform, hoping to provoke the ghosts into some kind of fight or something.  They apparently called his name on some of the EVP equipment, but I didn't hear it.

If you blow the pic up and look really closely, one of these orbs seems to have the number "80" in it.  So that could be the ghost of some football player still wearing his jersey.

This is part of a munitions factory.  I'm not really sure what that light in the far right is... probably somebody's flashlight on the wall or something, but I guess if you want to use your imagination it could be something.  I didn't notice what was going on over there at the time I was taking the picture, so, could be anything.

This is part of an upper story of an extremely-dilapidated factory (going up the stairs to that thing was pretty scary 'cuz there was no railing and the stairs were covered with rubble).  Who knows who Wes C. Brown and Ace are?  Probably ghosts.   We sat up in that room for 'bout an hour in the total darkness, listening to some weird electronic box that would spit out words and syllables.  I'm not sure what was supposed to provoke the box to spout the words, but we sat around trying to interpret them.  The story we put together was that some guy named Walter got his head hurt (the box said "head hurt" about a dozen times) in a "fight" and that some other guys named Tim and Seth also got killed, one due to a "heart attack."  And it sounded like it called one of them a "retard," which is a weird thing for a ghost to say.  It also said something like "Los Angeles police" a couple times, which also didn't make much sense.  A couple of people with me swore it said my name like 3 times, but I never picked up on that.  Huh.  I was pretty sick the whole trip (nasty cough I was fighting back - I mean, the kind of cough so strong it makes you throw up every once in a while) so maybe the dead wanted me to join them.  Cool!

Anyway, creepy room, with all these open pits... ya didn't wanna go wandering around in there in the dark.

Couple more assorted pics, just so you can play "Where's Walter" -

I took that last one during our whole talk with "Walter," to see if he'd show up.  The little squawk box told me to "stop," though, so I quit.  (Or maybe it just said "yarb" and we used our imaginations to make it sound like "stop"... which is really how most of that conversation went).

Anyway, it was kinda silly, but it was fun.  It's all horseshit, but I'd go again.  Supposedly this group's going to do something different next Halloween... if the site's nearby, I'd probably go for it.  We'll see...

Meanwhile... look to your orb for the warning...