Into Other Dimensions

The question to you George Noury is should you, or shouldn’t you? Let me give my readers a little background for those of them who don’t know what I’m talking about. You readers being here at this site implies you have an interest in things spiritual, and supernatural. If you ask “who is George Noury,” then you, friend, have been missing out. George hosts a nighttime AM radio show (formerly hosted by Art Bell) which covers such topics as shamanism, ghosts, evps and hauntings, numerology, witchcraft, UFOs, conspiracy theories, and the like.On next Wednesday’s show George will work a Ouija Board. He is surrounding himself with positive energy type people that, he is convinced, will act as a shield from any bad spirits. Lately he has been questioning whether this whole Ouija thing is a good idea or a bad one. He realizes that many of his listeners will bring out their Ouijas to play along with him, and that even though HE feels protected, THEY may be subject to bad experiences.

Here is what I am afraid of. We’ve all heard of the research done with the power of prayer, where it’s been proven that people being prayed for recover from surgeries, and illness better than people who aren’t prayed for. One thing that George and Art Bell often discuss is the power of mass consciousness. In fact, Art did a show where he and his audience prayed for rain for a draught-ridden Texas, and the next thing they knew Texas was being inundated with floods and storm damage.

Well, if the power of mass consciousness can do that, what if thousands of people are using Ouija boards at the same time? Can they unleash a hurricane of demon energy upon the earth? Will they awaken a myriad of sleeping evils that are better left unbothered?

I believe that there is demon energy all around us, but at the same time there is angelic energy as well. There are probably struggles between good and evil all the time, all around us. So while even if the demons are awakened and called forth, I believe there are angels around that will fight for our protection. But I also believe there are some people that are like sponges for evil - such as drug addicts, alcoholics, sex addicts, people abusers, animal abusers, and people like these - that absorb evil more readily.

There is a huge possibility that the unleashing of all these malicious energies can cause people with mental disorders to be more afflicted, and people with bad thoughts to act upon those bad thoughts more readily. There is immense potential here for bringing upon the world more danger, more inhumanity, more fear.

When I first started writing this I was actually in favor of the Ouija board experiment..now I’d have to say I’ve changed my own mind. Don’t do it, George. We have enough trouble in this world.  Let’s focus on the potential of good, and not taunt the demons.  I say, let sleeping malignant energies lie.

I got to go on an interesting ghost hunt a couple of nights ago, to a very scary place. A group of my boyfriend’s college mates invited my boyfriend to go with them to a haunted house, and I asked to tag along. We pulled into the vegetation shrouded driveway at around midnight. An old, faded, partially-hidden-by-trees, huge business sign stood high on our left. It said rather happily, Welcome to Haven Restaurant and Bakery. We were in the right place.

Even though there is a huge iron fence blocking public entrance, there is a secret way in. Once we were inside, an amazing two-story structure loomed before us, about 100 ft up the drive. In the dark (you know that midnight kind of dark), it reminded me of an old cotton plantation mansion. Dilapidated, of course. Like the one in the movie, Fletch Lives, but with broken out windows, and broken down walls. Up the road another 200 ft or so is a house, I am told, where a former owner lived. Also there is a barn on the property. I saw neither the barn nor the house, and to be honest, I didn’t want to that night. I was creeped out enough.

The vegetation skirting the grounds was thick, and jungly. To the right, somewhere inside all the greenery, a rushing brook could be heard.  The sound of croaking frogs was deafening, until they stopped and left an eerie silence - but that was later. To the right of the Bakery are public restrooms, very much like they’d have in a park, or at the beach. It made me think that at one time the Haven Restaurant and Bakery must have been an incredibly beautiful, charming, refreshing place to come for an outdoor or indoor brunch. I imagined outdoor seating, possibly with umbrellas, and cute little bistro tables and chairs. People would sit out there, by the bubbling brook, eating their fresh hot scones, and just-baked-this-morning Danishes, and drink hot chocolate or just-brewed coffee. Kids would be running around in their Sunday best - little girls with Shirley temple curls, and lacy dresses.

We went inside the Bakery and took a look. Interestingly, the old bakery stove is still there, as is an authentic stainless steel bakery rack. I didn’t look closely, but I’ll bet there are lots of telltale signs of a sudden departure, and no one eager to reclaim property from there. I heard tell one girl found a teddy bear there which belonged to the daughter of the previous owner. I also heard rumor that there was a table there with blood on it - never wiped off.  

There happened to be present another ghost-seeking group at the same time we were there. One of their bunch, a pleasant young man came to share with us of another nearby haunt. He seemed well-versed on the goings on in the area, so I asked him what the story was about The Haven Bakery and Restaurant.

He told us that a former owner had lived there with his small daughter. They ran the restaurant, a busy establishment, and were happy as jays. One day the owner had to go out of town for business. He left his daughter in the care of one of his employees. Unfortunately, while dad was gone, young daughter went down into the basement and somehow, I think accidentally, ended up hanging herself, and dying. When dad came home and heard about his dead child he went insane with grief, and rage. He went into the restaurant and killed several employees and customers. Then he stacked the bodies in the same restrooms I mentioned a few moments earlier. He then went into his house, and hung himself dead. It is said that the hook he hung from is still exactly where it was - in the living room I believe.

I don’t know if it’s true. I intend on going to the local area library and finding out if such a massacre really took place in that out-in-the-country community. I did feel the place was eerie and probably haunted. One of the guys we were with said his friend had felt someone touch him on the back while going up the stairs…and another girl had fallen into the basement - was pushed is more like it - and immediately was attacked by a wire that started wrapping itself around her legs…I have read that the hanging girl’s apparition can be seen in the basement. As well as the father, and other figures hanging around the place.

Me, myself? While standing in one of the rooms (which struck me right off as being one of the creepiest) I was suddenly covered with gooseflesh, while a chill ran up my spine. At that exact moment the frogs stopped croaking and someone said, ”It’s not a good sign when the frogs go quiet like that.”

We didn’t stay long, about an hour, but I would love to go back and do photos, and recordings. After I visit the library though. Regardless, I feel something IS there. That’s all for now.

Till later - happy hauntings!

Gina  

Ghost Hunters Renewed

Ghost Hunters, SCI FI Channel’s popular reality series, returns with all-new episodes in its fourth season next year, the channel announced at its upfront press event in New York on March 21. Paranormal plumbers Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson will deliver 13 episodes of their investigations, exploring a range of bizarre occurrences that will challenge the most hard-boiled of skeptics.

Ghost Hunters will round out its third season with six extra episodes set to premiere this spring and an additional six slated for debut in the fall.

The 2006 season of Ghost Hunters ranked as the highest-rated and most-watched season in household ratings and all key demographics.

The one-hour weekly reality series follows a group of real-life “ghostbusters” as they investigate haunted houses and establishments throughout the country. Ghost Hunters has featured speaking entities, mysteriously moving furniture, ghostly visages and a healthy dose of squabbling among the investigators.

Ghost Hunters is produced in association with Craig Piligian’s Pilgrim Films and Television. Piligian and Thomas Thayer serve as executive producers.

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire/index.php?category=2&id=40680

Divers Die Exploring Ship Off Florida Keys

By CARMEN GENTILE

The New York Times

MIAMI (March 16) — Three New Jersey men died Friday while exploring a sunken Navy ship off the Florida Keys. A fourth man, who did not enter the ship, survived.

A spokeswoman for the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office, Becky Herrin, said the three men, all advanced certified divers, died trying what is known as a “penetration dive,” a risky exploration into the dark passages and compartments of a sunken vessel, in this case the Spiegel Grove, a 510-foot decommissioned Navy ship.

The Spiegel Grove was sunk in 2002 to form an artificial reef just over five miles off Key Largo, 60 miles south of Miami and 100 miles north of Key West.

Even the most experienced diver can become disoriented trying to explore confined spaces like the inside of a ship, Ms. Herrin said, adding, “I’m told it looks like a maze inside” the Spiegel Grove.

The authorities did not release the names of the victims pending notification of family members. Coast Guard officials said that Mark Cianciu, the captain of the Scuba-Do, the boat the men had chartered, notified them when the four did not return to the surface at the scheduled time Friday. A short while later, one diver, who had remained outside the sunken ship while the others explored the interior, surfaced and told Mr. Cianciu that the other three were still inside.

One of the three was eventually brought to the surface by two divers from a nearby vessel and placed on board a Coast Guard ship. The diver, who officials said was unresponsive, was given cardiopulmonary resuscitation but was later pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

The bodies of the other two divers remained trapped inside the sunken ship Friday night. Divers from the Key Largo Volunteer Fire-Rescue Department suspended recovery efforts until Saturday.

Those efforts could be daunting, said the department chief, Sergio Garcia. Waves were topping 10 feet at the surface, Chief Garcia said, with strong currents below, and to reach the trapped men divers would have to submerge to depths of more than 130 feet.

At such depths, he said, divers can become disoriented and lose track of the direction of the surface because there is little to no ambient light.

“There are a lot of challenges posed to our rescuers,” Chief Garcia said. “There is zero visibility down there. We don’t want to have any more victims.”

Friday’s accident brings the death toll for explorers of the Spiegel Grove to six since its sinking, police reports indicate.

Jen Barker, a dive instructor and guide for Ocean Divers charter service in Key Largo, said that thousands of divers had swum around the ship since 2002 and that the water around it was considered a relatively safe place to observe marine life.

“It’s always been a great dive, a safe dive,” Ms. Barker said, but she added that she did not allow her clients to do penetration dives at the site.

Hello friends. I apologize for being out of communication. I’ve been up to some interesting stuff. For the New Year’s, like all good Casino Cats, we went to Las Vegas. It was crowded, to say the least.

Before going to Vegas though, I had an unfortunate experience, so you see, I had to go out of town to lick my wounds. This is what happened. I finally joined a Ghost Hunter’s team. It was a short-lived affiliation, and I’ll give you the scoop.

I got an email from a lady seeking people to join up with her ghost hunters group. She claimed to be big on professionalism, and really big on Teamwork. Professionalism and Teamwork are magic words for me, and I was very interested. However, in talking to her, she kept making certain that I understood that, though we were a “team”,  that SHE was in charge of the team. That she would be making the rules. And I’d have to sign a paper agreeing to a list of rules she’d already made up. No problem, I told her. Then she pulled out a “contract” of about ten pages worth of rules and protocol. Eeeek.

Big red flags waved all around me, but hey, I was looking for a team to do ghost hunting with, and sure, maybe she did have the appearance of a fifty-four year old woman trying to be 18, with her piercings, tattoos and henna-dyed red haired…I gave her the benefit of the doubt, and signed up.

Here’s her story: She’d had a group of ghost hunters, but they were an unruly bunch, questioning her authority as the leader of the group, and taking initiative without her prior approval. Well, one day, the wily underlings all got together and agreed to ditch her. Without a word one day they stopped returning her calls, and they kept all the video and EVP evidence.

I signed the contract because actually the rules - all five hundred of them -  that she’d written down were, albeit redundant, reasonable.

Then came time to do an investigation. This was set to go down end of December. She shared with us some of the client’s signs of being haunted, and since many of them were physical I thought we should ask for some medical history. Of course, they could be from the haunting, but personally, I like to exclude the obvious, so I asked her to consider getting some medical, and psychological history from the clients before we do investigations. She was adamantly against offending any client by asking them personal questions, that would as she put it, “suggest they were insane.” I was like, you don’t have to quite put it that way…

When I suggested that we have a can of mace on hand, just in case the client turned out to be a weirdo - you know demonic hauntings often occur in bad parts of town, and with people with mental illness…she almost threw me out of the group right then and there. She practically spat she was so taken aback. “I will not have our group enter a trusting client’s home with a weapon!” Then she said something entirely stupid - …”I will not have you shooting mace at the first thing that scares you.”

AS IF I WOULD! Jeeze. I’m on a ghost-hunting investigation - I’m going to have some hairy moments. I’m not going to walk around with the mace in one hand and my flashlight and camera in the other…duh.

The mace was my boyfriend’s idea, who was concerned about me going to some off-the-internet, divorced man’s house to investigate a purported haunting with three other women, and one guy. I agreed that it would be nice to have it. Since she was so unwilling to even consider it, or give a rational reason for not having it, I threw in my towel. I resigned.

I learned a lesson the hard way. I had been so looking forward to being a part of a group that could help people with hauntings…and that’s the other thing that bothered me. So we do an investigation and then what??? Just acknowledge, that yes, there’s a ghost in the house? Is that all we can offer a client? That’s all she was willing to give. There has to be more.

I’d offer a clearing - or at least - a cooperation of the energies. Sometimes we can coexist with spirit energies, and that’s great. Sometimes, the energies have to be led into peaceful transition - and that can take several visits, and hours of work. I have a gift for that kind of work.

I would like to have a group one day. We’d take history information on the house, and the people in the house, their signs and experiences. Our group would have a case manager, a demonologist, tech people, a psychic, and a mediator. Maybe it’s my turn to send out emails…

Luv, Gina

So, who all caught the new ghosthunters (GH) third season premiere last night? I thought it was one of the most exciting episodes so far, possibly more so than the investigation they did at the Stanley Hotel in Colorado! Well, maybe not. But last night’s show comes in second on my GH-Ometer - The Stanley Hotel still has to be my favorite, if for no other reason than Stephen King stayed there and had his own paranormal experiences, which inspired his writing of The Shining.

In case you didn’t catch it, the GH investigated The Birdcage Theater in Tombstone, Arizona, which boasts being frequented by infamous gunslingers like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, the Clanton gang, et al. 

Anyway, it started with eerie sounds such as a ball (most people on the GH message board think it sounded like a pool ball) hitting the ground and bouncing around. There were other wild west sounds like boots walking, and they caught an EVP of back-in-time (Calliope?) music that no one there heard until the recording was played back.  Brian and Jason caught whiffs of lady’s perfume, and saw shadow people crossing in front of windows, to the point where the showdow people blocked out light streaming in from the street.

Probably the most interesting part was when Jason and Grant caught sight of a full-bodied apparition: a lady wearing a long, pale colored dress, and bonnet. They saw her for just a moment before she disappeared downstairs.  We didn’t see her because they had no camera pointed at her. Only they saw her, but we take their words for it, right?

In fact, we didn’t even see the shadow people even though there were several sightings of them. Makes you wonder why they don’t wear hat-cameras, eh? 

And someone else on the board posed a good question…why on earth would they not continue to investigate the theater after catching a full-body apparition by extending the investigation, and putting the cameras in more strategic positions. I mean, if it is a residual haunting (lady with bonnet) as they called it, they just have to put the camera where they saw her because she would eventually circle that way again, right? Seems they would, if they truly caught the “Golden Grail” of ghost-hunting, as they so aptly described the experience.

Questions to ponder.

Don’t get me wrong…I still love Grant and Jason, and I really like Brian, and Steve. But one has to say to themselves and their blog readers, “hey, if that were me, I would put the cameras in more strategic places, and stay a few more hours…” After all, it’s the golden grail of ghosthunting, and as Jason says, it’s his passion, it’s what they live for. Get it on tape, Jase.

 Luv, Gina

Montel Williams + Wednesdays = Sylvia Brown. When possible I watch, because I love some of her ideas. I think that where Past Lives is concerned, Sylvia is spot on target. However, I’ve heard her say repeatedly, “Honey, ghosts can’t hurt you.” I don’t agree with her about that. Not at all.Take Ghost Hunters for example. It has turned out to a very popular show, and reasonably so. Jason and Grant are personable, logical, next-door neighbor type guys, with seemingly good common sense. They’ve paired the unexplainable, with scientific technology, so they can conscientiously debunk unfounded sightings when possible. They go for undeniable evidence and their videos catch a lot of paranormal events, such as chairs sliding across floors, water glasses breaking, closet doors opening and closing, crew member getting smacked in the face - all  by unseen forces. If you’re interested in these kinds of things you gotta love it! At the same time, you’re alerted to a certain level of danger present in ghost hunting.

I’ve noticed a lot people are interested in the Fox sister’s article here. Honestly I’m pleasantly surprised. I didn’t realize so many people were even aware of the sisters. The reason I’m writing is because while most manuscripts and articles make a big fuss over Margaret’s “confession” that the whole thing was a hoax, I don’t buy it.  I find it highly incredible that a girl cracking her toes would sound like rappings on the walls, floors, ceilings etc. The Fox sisters had an impressive, faithful following of well-heeled, brilliant people…I really don’t think they’d be so easily duped. Apparently Margaret lived as though she believed in her gifts - she spent countless hours in cemeteries (which I used to do but have decided not to spend so much time in them anymore since I am convinced spirits can cause illness and I’m no Munchausenian.)