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Credibility

Credibility – one show talks about how they have built their credibility.  This show uses ominous music and pictures to build up the show.  This show will use electronic voice phenomena clips that are not always directly related to the questions being asked, though they add in assumptions to make it fit.  If you actually evaluate it instead of taking their word for it, it is clear they don’t necessarily go together.  More often, the message is not clear, and shows like I am describing offer a suggestion that people are supposed to take at face value as being accurate.  Most of us realize encounters are not worthy of a show..they are small experiences.  This show did an investigation in Carson City, Nevada.  The tour guide shared a story about the host having his camera man zoom in on a cable the size one would find to pull down an attic ladder.  It had a loop on it.  He had the cameraman zoom in so it appeared to be the size of actual rope and made some statement about someone hanging there or could have hung there.  I am getting this information from the tour guide.  I have not seen the episode myself. 

They also did a show about an island of dolls.  They say a priest told an owner of a doll that is it possessed.  There was no proof.  They said the doll will not burn and they show a picture of the doll.  There was no attempt to burn this doll.  It is a creepy looking hard plastic doll with cracks.  I promise you, if someone put lighter fluid on this doll, it will burn.

Another show highlights a psychic and a retired police officer conducting independent investigations and then they come together at the end of the episode to compare notes.  I spoke with a person who was on a paranormal investigation team with the alleged psychic.  This person told me the person in question was not a psychic; instead, this person was a regular investigator.  I find it interesting that this person gets a show and is now a psychic.  Each week, the end of the show always requires some new type of paranormal exorcist…a shaman, yoga instructor, Jewish, witch doctor whose favorite color is purple.  It seems to me this show is or was chasing ratings.

I think we must hold shows like this accountable.  Just because they call something evidence, it isn’t necessarily real evidence.  Shows are filmed in a a way that information can be presented out of order and out of context.

Shows need their gimmick.  On one, a new device designed to capture spirits is created.  It is neat looking and fun, but it is not based on any scientific fact and it always fails.  As with most, it is filmed at night.  I am not convinced this is necessary.  It also highlights a loud guy who attempts to challenge spirits.

Another show that chases bigfoot does just about everything wrong you can do when interviewing people to learn facts.  They take a community of people and interview them as a group.  This is no-no number one.  A proper interview typically takes place with one interviewer and one interviewee.  The interview asks open ended questions in a quiet environment free of distractions.  This gives the best possible outcome for someone to give information without it being influenced by other people or the interviewer themselves.  Recollection is already fallible.  I observed a documentary where people were walked through a make believe ufo crash site.  They were interviewed after and then interviewed again at a later time.  It was amazing to see their perceptions and how they differed from what was there.  What really gets me is these people talk about evidence, but what they gather is not truly evidence.

I think the worst show I have seen is one that each week they came across a new monster.  The recipe was to take in information, track the monster to a close call, set up a trap, and the trap would fail each time for one reason or another.  But next week the trap setter was once again touted as one of the best, only to see it fail again.  An entertaining show, but it frustrates me that it is packaged in a way to make it appear real.  I did some reading of posts from people who watch the show and it was amazing how many people believed this and verified with their own exaggerations to give this show credibility.  I have no issue with entertainment.  It’s fun.  But these shows take someone interested in the paranormal and they train them to believe untruths, rather than show them how to do an investigation with integrity, to show what evidence actually is, and to show how to capture evidence.  In addition to this, debunking is our friend.  It is good for us because it shows our credibility that we will only use actual evidence to prove or disprove allegations.  It is nothing to be afraid of.  Many of us know the paranormal is real, so purging out bad information means we will be left with solid information that can be used to dispute skeptics.  We may not locate as much evidence, but that is how it works.

Amityville credibility – Defeo history is an abusive father and a son on heroin.  When you look at the court proceeding, Defeo created many stories.  The possession story was not the first story and it had no extra credibility over the other stories.  He was a violent person and people were afraid of him.  Investigators and psychics came out and verified demonic activity at the residence where he killed his family.  It appears the truth is Defeo’s defense attorney got together with the Lutz’s and concocted the story to make money; something that was later admitted to, but people still believe this happened…no one before or since the Lutz family has encountered paranormal activity.  The story states untruths such as the priests interaction.  It never happened.  Research falsehoods of Amityville to get the truth in more detail.  Learning the truth disappointed me.  I believed in the credibility of some of these investigators / psychics.  Now I realize they are probably people who have learned to manipulate people to sell books.

I think it is important for people new to investigating to understand, and hopefully the veteran investigators out there can agree, facts prove something and they are free from opinion, faith, and interpretation.  Interpretation is someone using their filters of what they have been taught and what they believe when evaluating information.  These are the tools designed to generate opinion.  Fact based investigations have no room for opinion with the exception of expert testimony, which is the opinion of someone who is an expert in a field.  With the paranormal being such an unproven science, I can’t think of anyone off hand that I would consider an expert.  They key is for the evidence to drive an investigation to a truthful conclusion, rather than investigators manipulating information, be it on purpose or accident, in order to obtain the results they want to see.

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How Do You Feel About This?

Something bothers me and I wonder how others feel about it.  We do not have to look very far to find a paranormal team doing an investigation.  We see them go in, use tools to make contact, and when they make possible contact, they speak to each other with surprise as though the spirit can’t hear them.  They ask it questions until it uses up its energy or grows tired of them and stops.

I read a book years ago where a woman talked about her gift to speak with the dead.  She said her grandmother had it as well, and possibly her mother.  As a child, she was frightened because spirits regularly made contact with her.  She said they were out of place.  In the beginning, she tried to avoid them.  I recall her account of going to her grandmother to ask her what to do, and her grandmother told her to ignore them.

That did not work.  As the girl got older, she somehow came to the conclusion that when we die, a light opens up near us for a temporary amount of time.  She said if we walk into the light, we ascend to heaven.  She said if we don’t, the light will go away, leaving our spirit stranded.  I recall the piece of the story that stuck with me was whenever this woman encountered a spirit, she would tell them if a beam of light was not present near them to go to a hospital and to enter the pillar of light that had been presented for someone else who had passed away.

I bring this up because I feel one of the attributes lacking in many of us is empathy.  We don’t take the time to assess the needs of others.  We ghost hunt and get our thrills and off we go to the next opportunity.  Are we not better stewards if once we make contact, we share the information of how to move on to spirits who may not be aware?  I have only met one other investigator who does this, but it is something that I would like to see become a more regular behavior.

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Some Thoughts

I think one of the issues when figuring out how paranormal activity fits into the world is we humans insist of putting information into a neat package that we can articulate.  We balance what we take in through our own personal filters, which consist of our personal experiences, beliefs, and in some cases, the religious rules we have been taught.

I think most of us who are believers can agree that there are two types of hauntings; one is that of a spirit that is conscious of its behavior, and the other is a haunting that is more like an event being replayed like a recorder, with the spirit being unaware of human presence and unable to do anything more than the “recording” of the behavior or event.

The question of animal spirits occasionally comes up.  My mother used to love lying on her bed in the sun reading books and napping.  Pets would love to do this with her.  She would recount the occasional story about doing this, with her dog Casey also lying on the bed.  My mother would tell me that she felt something with the apparent weight of a cat, jump onto her bed with them.  She told me she could see an indention on the bed and Casey would momentarily take notice before laying his head back down to nap.

According to some of my devout Christian friends, animals do not have souls, so they go away when they pass.  My mother was an honest woman, who was of sound mind, and I believe she experienced her time on occasion, likely with Sarah, a cat that we had to put to sleep that was loved dearly.

This has caused me to ponder just how much our strong beliefs make us too rigid to see some of the things around us.  It has caused me to rethink many aspects of my life, including religion.  I was taught from the Christian Bible, but over time, I have come to see holes.  I do believe in God and I do believe Jesus ministered Christian beliefs, but things get hazy for me after that.

There were many books that could have gone into the Bible.  Some were put in and some were left out based on fallible human decision.  Some of these books are said to be authored by people who couldn’t have authored them.  In some cases, the books were written hundreds of years after the death of their supposed authors, telling me it is possible the people who actually authored the books used the names of important people in an attempt to lend more credibility to what they wrote.

Much of the information seems more human contrived than from divine direction.  Don’t get me wrong; I think there is a lot of good information in the Bible.  However, I find it hard to believe God would develop rules for how slaves are to behave.  This sounds more like people in power using God’s name to manipulate people into compliance.  And I will never believe that God would allow people to be born gay, only to have this be an instant ticket to the hot place.

I certainly don’t have the answers.  I’m hopeful this might create a dialogue.  What I don’t want to do is offend anyone or be forced into measuring religious penises.  The truth is none of us actually know the absolute truth.  I am merely suggesting that if we look at much of what we have been told or taught, if we work to confirm it as truth, we may find some of it is not as it has been told to us.

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Another Shared Experience

My friend, who I will call Robert was the person with me in the barn.  He was also with me for another event.  We were eleven or twelve during this time.  His mother moved them around Salem frequently.  It was not uncommon for them to move every one to two years, which allowed for us to constantly explore fields and abandoned houses around different parts of Salem.

During this period of time, Robert and his mother moved into an old house off of Lancaster Drive.  For the sake of respecting the current occupants privacy, I will not give the exact location.  The house was not large for a two-story dwelling.  There was a living room, a small kitchen and dining area, a bathroom, and the master bedroom.  A door just inside of the front door opened up a steep staircase that ascended straight up.  At the top of the stairs, one could turn left around a small decorative banister to reach the light switch.  This area was Robert’s bedroom.  Turning right at the top of the stairs was another bedroom that was not occupied.  Both rooms were small.

During this specific night, Robert and I were alone in the house.  We were playing with our G.I. Joe action figures when the lights went out with a snap.  I asked Robert what happened and he told me he didn’t know.  We began giggling, but were scared.  We moved over to his bed that was in the corner of the room and giggled as we talked about it.  We talked about the snap noise when the lights went out and became concerned that it sounded like his light switch rather than a circuit shutting off downstairs in the garage.  We moved over to the light switch hand in hand when I reached for it and flipped it back to the on position.  I need to clarify, this house was likely built in the fifties.  It had a light switch style that I had only ever seen in my great grandmother’s house.  The switch felt like it had tension behind it.  Instead of flipping it on and off with an easy touch, it required deliberate effort to push it past the tension point.  If it wasn’t flipped with the proper amount of force, it would spring back to it’s original position.  Upon successfully flipping to the opposite direction, it would make a snapping noise that was not quiet.

We stood in the center of his room giggling.  I remember I was scared.  Within seconds, the light snapped off again.  We ran toward his bed, hoping to be the one closest to the wall.  We sat there still giggling, with neither of us generating enough courage to turn the light back on.  Within a minute, the light snapped back on.  Robert’s bedroom window overlooked the roof of the garage.  We grabbed our jackets and climbed onto the garage roof, which sat lower than the second floor roof and jumped off of it, hanging around outside until his mother came home early the next morning.  I don’t recall how much longer after that Robert and his mother lived in this home.  I don’t think it was more than a year.  I don’t recall anything else happening.  At best, Robert may have told me other things had happened, but he was known to fib a bit, so if he did, I didn’t believe him.

You will find that I indicate when nothing else of a paranormal nature occurs after an event.  I do this in an attempt to leave a complete entry.  Secondarily, I find it strange when a paranormal event happens only one time.  My assumption would be if paranormal activity exists in a certain area, it would continue to occur in some sort of a pattern, whether it be on a certain day or when enough energy could be regenerated to make its presence known again.

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Another Experience

The next experience must have occurred when I was ten or eleven.  The field I referred to was half to three quarters of a mile long and at some points a quarter of a mile wide.  It contained black berries, apple trees, and pear trees.  An old house was once located on the property, but it was moved one half a mile away.  A large barn remained along with two small buildings that contained one room and two rooms respectively.  There was evidence of an old chicken coup and a what looked like two graves, likely for family dogs.  There were remains of an old tree fort as well.  Several of us spent more hours than I can count, exploring and pretending to be our favorite action movie stars as we played with our cap guns.

The large barn was amazing.  I will do my best to describe it.  The first floor had a trough area but was largely open.  It contained what appeared to be school furniture from the fifties or sixties.  There was a large pillar in the middle of the barn and it had been turned into a ladder.  Climbing the ladder, at about the twelve foot mark, one could swing their body to the left and step into a storage area.  Climbing another four or five feet, one could step right off of the top of the ladder and be standing on the loft floor, which only covered one half of the barn, meaning a person could look down onto the first floor of the barn.  On the right hand side, there was an opening that was likely used to pull hay up through to store in the loft.  Further down the wall, a couple planks of wood have been kicked out, exposing a tin roof to a shed that was attached to the outside of the barn.  It was possible to climb through the opening, jump down onto the tin roof and then jump off of it and onto the ground if one didn’t want to climb down on the ladder.  As one stood in the loft, facing the proper direction, it was possible to see into that half floor room because a few planks had been kicked out of that wall as well.

On this day, a friend and I were wandering around the barn area.  He found an old style straight shaving razor.  It was very rusty, but still sharp.  We ended up ascending the ladder to the loft.  I was sitting with my back against the wall, facing the half floor room, and my friend sat facing the hay loft opening.  We were talking while he carved into the wooden floor with the razor.  I looked up to say something to my friend and observed a boy that appeared to be our age staring at us from that room.  As I looked up, he ducked down.  He was white, with sandy hair cut into a “bowl” style.  I knew he was a ghost and I was petrified.  The thing about this barn is you could not walk two steps in it without making loud creaking noises.  In addition to this, we saw inside the room as we climbed the ladder and no one was in there.

I whispered to my friend and the two of us began talking bravely about how sharp the razor was.  Our only opportunity to escape was to walk toward that room and then slip through the open planks on the external wall, jump onto the shed and then onto the ground.  We slowly inched toward the opening and then in a panic, fought to be the first person out of the barn.  My friend pushed past me.  In this moment, I was sure the ghost was going to grab me.  As I slid through the open planks, I could not help but turn and look into the room.  The boy was not there.

In fact, I did jump down and my head had not been torn off.  We continued to spend hours in the field, including evenings, and we went back into the barn during daylight hours, but never alone, and I never saw the boy again or anything else paranormal in nature.  As Salem, Oregon grew, the field was removed and a gas station and apartment complexes were put in.

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Another Experience

The next paranormal experience I recall occurred when I was seven or eight in Oregon.  We lived in an undeveloped area of Salem where houses were beginning to be built.  My friend’s house backed up to a large field where we spent a lot of our time.  I bring up this field because it relates to a story I will tell later.

This house was a typical three bedrooms and two and one half bathrooms with a two car garage and decent sized front and back yard.  His parents were in the family room this evening watching television.  We were in the entry way of the front door, wrestling with his brother who was a few years older than us.  His brother faced the living room area, while my friend and I faced the hallway where the three bedrooms and one bathroom were located.  They layout of the hallway had the restroom halfway down the hall on the left, and the master bedroom at the end on the left.  The bedrooms of my friend and his siblings were each on the right side.

I recall the bedroom doors were open.  As we faced his brother, we both took notice of what appeared to be a folded pair of nylon “mom slacks” on a hanger swing out where we saw the folded pant legs swing out from the bedroom and then disappear back into the bedroom.  My friend saw it at the same time I did and he froze with shock as well.  We told his brother and all of us told his dad who did not believe us.  His dad puffed up his chest, and in jest began talking to the person in the room, telling him what he was going to do to him.  We followed and watched him open the bedroom closet, look under the bed, and walk into the master bath.  Nothing was out of place.

To this day, I don’t know what it is we saw.  I don’t recall my friend ever sharing any other strange or paranormal stories.  As time went on, we grew up and his youngest sister moved back into the house after his father had passed away and his mother remarried, and my friend moved into the house when his sister moved.

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A Little Background

A little background on me.  I have approximately twenty-four years of investigative experience.  Investigations have been criminal and administrative in nature.  They have ranged from policy violations, violations of Oregon Administrative Rules, murder, missing persons, drug crimes, excessive use of force, sexual crimes against children, assaults, and background investigations.  I am also a computer forensic examiner.  I am trained in locating evidence and exculpatory material, and I have experience with evidence handling.

I have experienced paranormal activity since I was approximately five years old.  Before sharing some of these experiences, I want to put out a disclaimer that these are experiences that I have witnessed first-hand.  I don’t present the stories here for you to take at face value.  That would go against my opinion that people need true fact-based evidence to confirm what they are being told is true.  Instead, I hope that they may resonate with experiences others have had in an attempt to start a dialogue.  Unlike a television production, my stories are an ensemble of experiences only.  They do not have beginnings, middles, and exciting conclusions.  Nor is there any historical background to explain these stories that puts them in neat little packages.

The second disclaimer I need to put out is I will not filter out adult information or language.  I intend to be respectful, but if you are easily offended, this may not be the blog for you.

The first experience I recall occurred when I was four to five years old while living in California.  I was using the restroom at my next door neighbor’s house.  The layout of the bathroom is such that the bathtub took up the entire back wall of the restroom.  It was to my left as I faced the toilet to urinate.  The sink was to my right and the door to the bathroom to its right.  As I was peeing, I saw out of the corner of my eye was appeared to be a shadow rising from the bottom of the tub and it rose up the wall, taking up most of it.  Surprised, I instantly looked in the direction of the shadow and is instantly moved back down the wall and disappeared into the bathtub.  I ran out frightened and I’m sure I told her mother about what happened.  I don’t recall anything else happening at this house or mine before or after this event other than a phase of frightening dreams that did not persist.

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Hello Fellow Truth Seekers

I am new to blogging.  I am trying this in an attempt to bring together people who understand the importance of fact-based information when identifying paranormal activity.  I ask that you not share anything I post without my consent.  As a believer in the paranormal, and someone who has had personal and shared experiences throughout my life, it has been a struggle to get skeptics to believe there is something more than what we can physically see.  One reason for this has been a lack of good tools to prove the existence of spirits.  We do have some tools that are helpful, but technology is still largely unable to prove without question the existence of life after death.  When people use tools that do not provide consistent fact-based results, it hurts the reputation of everyone who investigates paranormal activity, and it is that much more difficult for all of us to appear credible.

I recall taking my girlfriend on a “ghost walk” tour.  We walked past an area where in the 1960s two women had been murdered.  The tour guide handed out dowsing rods in the form of metal clothes hangers bent into L shapes.  People took a pair of the rods and began walking around the area.  Some rods did not move, while others would move in one direction or the other.  When we were done, no one was any closer to making spirit contact, and my girlfriend questioned how this activity was supposed to make her a believer.  I understand her skepticism; these rods, which are also known as divining rods, or willow witching, are made from different materials.  Depending on who you talk to, some believe they can find water, others believe they can find minerals, and still others think they will direct us to spirits.

I don’t post this for the purpose of offending anyone.  Nor do I want to get called out by someone who tries to convince me this is an effective tool.  My point is many of us want skeptics to understand there is something after our physical existence.  In order to do this, we must employ methods that are credible.  Rods made from different materials designed to detect different matter sounds more like guesswork or old wives tails, and using this tool to convince a skeptic that ghosts exist is very unlikely.

Another reason for this blog is to help people develop a mindset of requiring evidence before believing something they are told.  The more I learn about psychology, the more I realize just how much social engineering we are subjected to.  What I mean by this is people and businesses know how to say and do things that make us think or believe what they want us to.  Grocery stores place items in strategic places so we are more inclined to purchase them.  They place items low and at checkout counters where children will see them and ask to have them.  Main profit items will likely be placed on middle shelves where they are easiest to see and reach.  

Most if not all casinos are monitored by a gaming commission.  The gaming commissions require these casinos to meet a payout requirement on slot machines.  Not all machines are set at the same payout level.  These payout percentages may also be casino-wide, meaning different machines can have different payout percentages and those percentages are averaged over long periods of time, not the short time a person is playing a machine.  Many of these casinos hire a person who is trained to understand the psychology behind social engineering and how we think.  They help casinos place the lower payout slot machines in locations where guests are more likely to play them.

I realize this is not a very thorough example of the social engineering we are subject to on a daily basis, but I offer these examples to make a point.  Many of us who are interested in the paranormal chomp at the bit to learn of a new haunting or an interesting story.  Because we want this, we are inclined to be affirmative when receiving information through a good story.  We want it to be true, so if the person tells the story well enough, we find no reason to doubt it.  I see people go out of their way to build credibility for the person telling them the story, when true evidence has not been provided.

I recently had to face that fact that I had done just that.  Portland, Oregon has a tour that outlines Portland’s Shanghai Tunnels.  It is a rich story of how merchant marine ship captains would pay bar owners to get patrons drunk, drop them through trapdoors to the basement where the men had their shoes removed and they were forced into a makeshift cell until bartenders could sell them to ship captains.  The ship captains would go out to sea and then offer the kidnapped person an employment agreement.  If the person refused, they were sent overboard.  If they accepted, they worked on the ship for the duration of their agreement and were let off wherever the ship happened to be when time was up.  Women had it worse.  They were kidnapped and sent away on ships to be sold into the sex trade, never to be heard from again.  The dirt floors had broken glass on them, so if a kidnapped person escaped, they would cut their feet so law enforcement, who was on the take could track them down and bring them back.

The tour is touted as a paranormal tour if the group prefers.  This history is still told, but the tour guide adds the many ghostly experiences people have had.  The tour spans the length of one to three basements of some businesses.  During the tour, they show a tiny area that is said to have been an opium den, a tiny closet where a kidnapped woman was kept to “break” her, the area where men were held, and a trap door where patrons fell through when a lever was pulled.

The story goes, decades ago, a young boy spoke to an old merchant marine who told him the story.  He took the boy to a tunnel and told him that the shanghaied men and women were walked through it down to the water where they were put aboard ships.  The boy ran around Portland looking for underground tunnels and upon growing up, he presented this piece of history.  The tour guides tell a great story and they let everyone know about the museum where the artifacts of the basements are kept, such as old shoes that were taken from each person shanghaied.  They suggest patrons take a lot of pictures and to let them know if a ghost is photographed.

The two times I went, I remained at the back of the tour, often spending time away from the group so I could hear and smell anything out of the ordinary.  I took dozens of pictures.  Unfortunately, all I had to show for my time was photographs of a dark basement with dust particles and the enjoyment of being told a fantastic story along with a wish that something would have happened.  Each time, I went to work or chatted with friends and shared the shanghai story with them and suggested they attend.  I did this a couple of months ago, as did my girlfriend, who remained a non-believer.  I felt foolish when my girlfriend came home from work.  She told a coworker about the experience.  I will not mention her coworker’s name because I don’t have her permission.  She said that she investigated the shanghai tunnel story for a college project.  She learned the group of people who put on the tour are the only ones who tell the shanghai story.  She learned that no other historian has ever found any credible evidence to support the shanghai story.

I have not personally investigated this allegation, so I am not stating that the shanghai story is false.  What I am saying is I make a point to verify facts before passing on information, or I specify that the information is not confirmed.  In this case, I thought I had been providing historical information to people, when that may not be the case.