Greetings!
Ahhhhhhhhhh…. a nice Sunday Morning… had a good day yesterday. Gretchen has this ‘thing’ for Haunted Locations. She used to do paranormal investigations back in the day. Now this’s something that I’m in the ‘not too sure about these things’ column about. We’ve/She wanted (and got) to go to the May-Stringer house in Brooksville
which is famous for being one of the most haunted houses in Florida, and it’s architecture. Add on that it was also a Doctor’s Office in the late 1800s. The website is HERE
Not that I don’t believe in specters, spooks, ghosts and the like.
It’s that IMO there’s ‘stuff’ that you probably shouldn’t fuck with
The dead/undead and the like.
As I told our guide yesterday after the tour, “If I can’t kill it, fuck it, or eat it, I’m not dealing with it.” The day tour that WE took was more of the historic tour, and we found out they offer Ghost Tours that are offered late at night Fridays and Saturdays. The house has been featured on a LOT of those Discovery Channel ghost shows. Gretch is addicted to them I swear. So, it’s only an hour ride, and gas has dropped locally to $2.99 if you can believe it, so off we went.
We had to bring the Sausage Princess Stella with us as Sapper’s been getting beaten like a rented mule at work. His boss got a better gig, two other guys left, leaving him and three others to do the work of 7. The issue there is one of the 3 is a noob, and in training, so he’s more worthless for the time being. Poor bastard comes home (IF he comes home mind you) looking like he’s been jerked through a knothole, positively covered in salt-sweat stains… he works as a Fuel Guy at the various ports and has to sample the tanks… meaning he spends the shift climbing up and down them Giant Storage Tanks. He also has to go out to the BIG tankers occasionally, which is a crapshoot on whether or not he’s getting battered to death on the small skiff if the Gulf is riled up so to speak.
He makes great bank, but it’s a tough gig.
So since his schedule is sooo fucked up lately, we can’t leave Stella at home if we don’t know when we’re coming home. Now she’s trained to an unbelievable level so we can take her anywhere. The Tour Guides allowed her to go in on the tour, and well… it was… interesting.
Now Gretchen has all these ghost-hunting apps on her phone. One is an SLS video thing… SLS stands for Structured Light Sensor. According to the app store : “GhostTube SLS SEER detects humanoid bodies in your environment similar to the Kinect SLS cameras” If you’ve ever watched any of the Ghost Hunter shows, it senses, I don’t know? Ghosts? It picks up moving objects, seen and unseen, and lays a ‘drawing’ that looks like a stick figure where the object is. According to the ‘how does it work?’ Q&A “The SEER app senses Magnetic fluctuation using the phone’s magnetometer which could detect the presence of EMF”
The other is a Spirit Box app. That’s the one that can ‘hear’ words. Supposedly it picks up EVPs, electronic voice phenomena. Now as to the validity of these ‘things’? I’m kind of undecided. Now, saying that there WERE some seriously odd things.
One of them stick figures showed up in the Doctor’s Office. There was a combination birthing chair/surgeon’s chair/x-ray machine. According to the guides a lot of people had died in this house to include a bunch of kids in the 1800s. We all seem to forget that life back in the day was brutal on kids, and the mortality rate was really high… hell, I’m 54 and that’d be considered an Old Man back in the day.
According to an article by J. David Hacker, the life expectancy for males and females in the United States between 1893 and 1897 was 44.1 years. This estimate is based on life tables for the white population that use data from Massachusetts, a state with higher levels of urbanization, industrialization, and immigration.
The Goolag
And according to that article, the lifespan in 1860 was 39.
“Life moves pretty fast.”
Ferris Bueller
SO, despite my various misgivings, we did the tour, or at least Gretchen did the full tour because my bad robo-knee doesn’t like stairs, nor does the Sausage Princess. A three story building? No elevator? And those are normal stairs I’m talking about usually. This place had these insanely high-angle with really high risers and narrow tread. I was content to hear and walk the first floor, but after that me and the Sausage sat out the remainder of it.
Now, Gretchen was in her element got some videos of that chair I mentioned:
Right there at the beginning you can see the ‘thing’ and as the video progresses, you can see the people who were actually there getting ‘mapped’ as well if you will…
The other video was in the dining room of what appeared to be a person dancing on the table. A very short person. For some reason it won’t upload, so I can only describe it as such.
In fact I have like 8 other videos from around the house she shot, and none of them will upload. Even when I change the file extensions it’s still erroring out…
Wild huh?
It’s personally irritating the shit of me…
Anyways, it won’t let me upload the vid, but I screencapped this shot of what appears to be a kid-sized ‘thing’ dancing around the dining room:
Creepy Aye?
She also ran that Spirit Box and the words that came up were pretty wild too:
The wildest according to Gretchen was when they went into the Nursery. This’s where one of the kids, a baby, really died shortly after birth… That was when the word “infant” popped up.
The “We’re following you” came up she said as she was going back downstairs…
And the name “Elizabeth” keeps coming up not only with Gretchen’s thing, but according to our guide, she said that name comes up on almost every single Ghost Hunting app/show/investigation that’s been through there.
The thing that convinced ME that ‘strange things were afoot’ was when everyone went upstairs, and Stella and I were chilling in the front foyer. Stell was sitting all placid like, laying on the cool floor, on her best behavior. About 5 or so minute into just relaxing she popped her head up, her ears all straight up on alert. That usually only happens when she hears something or the Amazon guy is at the door. Her head and ears popped up, she got up, and walked about 5-6 feet away from me looking down the hallway, towards the Doctor’s Office. She was fully alert.
So I got up and went over and checked down the hallway…
Nothing.
So I started down the hallway.
Stella wouldn’t budge.
Her lead is one of those automatic feed/rewinders that you can lock if you want her on a short leash… usually when I take the lead I don’t have to do anything. She’ll fall into a heel and keep the pace with me.
Normally.
This time she just stood there as I passed by and did this lil ‘woof’ thing she does… sort of a light doggie grunt/exhalation. She rarely barks unless the doorbell rings. SO I get a few feet past her (the hallway is about 25-30 feet long and runs the length of the house) and I look back and she’s like not moving.
That’s about when I got the hairs on the back of my neck going up… like I was like… Nope… Nope… so I go back to the chair where I started from, and Stell comes and plops down beside me. About 3 minutes later, she does the same thing. Alerted, walks to the same spot, and stares down the hallway for a minute or so, then comes back.
She was seeing or sensing something that’s for sure.
All them gizmos may-or-may-not work, but I’ll take my doggo’s instincts over everything else.
Afterwards Gretchen and I and the guide compared notes. That in itself was interesting, so much that we’re going back for one of those late-night Spook Hunts in July. No idea if it’ll be productive, but either way it’ll be entertaining.
More Later
Big Country
So you’re sayin’ an Smart Fone can mebe detect hidden bugs?
Me and the Mrs went to a tour of the Bartonville Illinois insane asylum (Former state asylum for the criminally insane).
The building was sealed and chained shut pending asbestos removal. We both saw someone watching us from a upstairs window. I had brought a Silva compass, it would swing at random and when we got in the car, it spun 4 complete circles.
Needless to say we saged ourselves when we got home.
My wife, a couple friends, and myself spent the night at Ashmore Estates asylum in Illinois on Halloween. Part of a ghost tour thing.
That place ain’t right. And I’m a hard sceptic.
That said, my wife sat at the end of a ft hallway wearing headphones connected to the ghost radio (static multichannel freq hopping) and someone at the other end whispered questions. My wife was shouting anything she heard on the headphones. She could not hear the questions.
About a 75% correlation that what she was hearing (relaying to us) could have bee. Answers to the questions.
I’m adopting Big C’s “Fuck, Kill, or Eat” policy.
Be totally honest…the themesong to ‘Scooby-Doo’ was totally going through your head the entire time you were at that haunted house.
the price for beef cow is per hundred# weight… not a whole cow.
Yes, I believe in the spirits/souls of the departed.
But being disembodied with nothing physical, I don’t believe they can attack people.
Those stories and shows of people sensing spirits, I think are just people scaring themselves with their imagination in a dark room.
But what do I know? I never claimed to know everything.
How about relaying one of your stories from the Sandbox vehicle boneyard for us all? I know with the shit that I saw and felt both in the Big Green Machine as well as 32 years as an RN I have no doubts about the reality of such things.
Funny our philosophy on spirits are the same. I use to say” if I can’t fight it or kill it then I’m not fucking with it.”
I live in plantation country in the south. I’ve been in a lot of spooky ass places.
Ex brother-in-law owns a house on the historic registry. Built in the 1700’s haunted by 12 spirits according to a medium. Spent many nights there and heard shit I can’t explain
Recently had an old dog come live with me. Occasionally he will go out and bark at the invisible boogymen. I know it is the invisible boogymen because when I go out to bark at them (it’s a pack thing, you wouldn’t understand) he comes right out and joins in.
Carl Sagan said the most useful thing, and this works well in real life-not just science.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
Only if the claim is truly new is it extraordinary. Some “scientist” who never heard of it or considered it, doesn’t make it extraordinary. Just sayin.
That’s bs. Proof is proof.
I dated a ghost once. My suspicions were confirmed immediately when she walked through the door.
Saw a bunch of spooks at Popeyes.
You should not post stuff like this when I am drinking my evening PBR! I just barely missed my keyboard. Bleib ubrig.
We gotta have some levity from time to time!
If the nature of the being after death has some correlation to their nature in life, I wonder if any departed low-IQ dindus ever end up haunting the wrong house by mistake.
Maybe some try to torment a random white guy upon whom they place more blame for their deaths than the black gangbanger who actually shot them.
I have a ghost cat that walks across the bed at night, sometimes. Every once in a while, people catch it out of the corner of their eye down the hallway. I think it is one of my old cats I had to put down after she got too stove up to even move herself around anymore. Doesn’t give me the heebie jeebies or anything like that. It’s just one of those things that just is.
Since you know Hohenfels really well, do you remember a castle ruin downrange? I slept up in it by myself one night. Everyone else in the squad was chicken. We had 48 hrs. standdown and the company pulled up into that old village ruin with the castle ruin up above it. I figured if spooks were anywhere, it would be around there. Didn’t see a thing, but did have some wild dreams.
I have a ghost cat like that, too! It made itself known right after we moved in here, so I don’t think it’s one of mine. I won’t feel it for years, and then one day I’ll feel it walking right next to me! How funny that you have one, too!
I felt a hand push my shoulder ten feet from the morgue and the POC nurses who had just drew out way too much blood all went white and almost levitated away from me.
Then The Ecstasy Of Gold by Ennio Morricone played.
Just because you can’t see it that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Trust the dog. They know.
Mongo,
Bet you wish you hd Stella in the vehicle boneyard with you in Kuwait (from Charlie Mike Comics), as to life expectancy, the number alwaqys given are somewhat innacurate,as they are life expecantcy at birth, rather than at age five. The childhood death rate was amazing in the past, and only got better in the last 100 years.It is tought to find charts showing life expectancy at age five, but people did live a lot longer than we commonly belive. Studies of cloisterd munks and Nuns (simple diet, no stress, no violence, unless the Vikings show up), show that women have about five more years than men, that is referred as the grnadmother effrect where older women would look after the young, and allow the mothers to forage, while us older men had no use after we could no longer hunt. We are still living with the hunter gatherer bodies that we evolved into.
Yeah. I had a business & the alarm would trip due to a
disturbance at the back door IR sensor. Happened every
year I was there, late October.
Found out last year that I was in that spot that a previous
renter had offed himself by the back door…
after my divorce back in 1990, i rented an 1800’s 2 story wood clapboard sided haunted house complete with family graveyard that was used to bootleging on lake St Clair
while painting at night before occupying, i ran out of that house scared shitless from ‘something’. straight to the corner bar…
the fucking “michigan basement” was painted RED and my big bad rotty wouldn’t go down there- ever.
nothing good ever happened there to say the least and i was gone within a month-LOL
One of the creepiest places that I have been is at Gettysburg PA.
The ghost tours are excellent but for those who say it’s all BS, go there after dark especially at Devil’s Den and I promise you the hairs on the back of your neck will go up and pictures you take will be full of orbs.
You can’t have that many people violently die in one place like that and there not be some ghosts hanging about.
That ghost chasing stuff is nothing to fool with. You can end up with some nasty things “i.e. demons” following you home. There’s a reason that the Bible says not to mess with this stuff.
Be careful with that shit Big Country. Is the stick figure app the Ghost Tube sir? I should film myself when I sleep. Every now and then I have a “sleep paralysis” event. Mine seem to be extremely horrible. That’s the scientific term (SP) anyhow.
I have a spiritualist on Substack kimberlysteelesubstack.com She says it happens when I don’t make it out of the lower astral plane when I sleep. Last one was a couple weeks ago. Started about 2003ish and for a while a dark figure used to haunt me. I am still scared of that son of bitch. I try to fight him and others but I can’t move. I get violent and start dating them until I remember where I am. Then I drop all pretenses fighting and try and bring myself out of it. That’s not so easy either sometimes.
Have always had somewhat violent dreams. Just last week there were killers chasing me around who had carved up a corpse in front of me. I had my assortment of weapons but the damn guns always jam or fall apart. However this is different, it’s a real dream. The sleep paralysis is almost equivalent to being a wake. When I recognize where I am I sometimes freak out lol.
Anyhow, you guys be safe. Have seen some of those ghost hunting guys messed up after what they had determined to be an evil encounter. Idk if I believe the shit either but it is quite unsettling. Finally got me another dog. He seems to travel with me “astral projection.” It’s exactly like that movie “Insidious” which scared the living shit out of me. It’s good to know he’s in the room with me.
Unexpected but very cool read man.
Try waiting to get violent until after you start dating them.
Lol, it’s crazy when I had my first episode circa 2003 I had no clue about the sleep paralysis being a thing. Was about 10 years after a friend told me about it. First I was relieved because at least now I could blame it on that. I didn’t tell very many people because I thought I was off my rocker.
It comes and goes now. I have not seen the demonic male figure in a long time knock on wood. However as soon as know what’s happening I usually sense his presence. Should probably get an exorcism lol. Have talked to others about it and many don’t see these characters. However if you google SP demons you will see plenty that do.
This is why I prefer going to bed with a buzz.
Surround your house with white light. Just imagine that a bubble of light is covering your property. Assure yourself that nothing can get through it without your permission. The gift of imagination comes straight from the creator. It is our divine gift. It will protect you from outside influences. It seems remarkably simple, but as children of the Divine it is our birthright. Animals can be self aware but they can’t imagine. Only we can.
Me too. I’ve experienced real sleep paralysis a few times. Seriously weird shit. There’s even been a few times when I woke up hitting a huge oak tree in my front yard. Wife and kids were seriously freaked out. Sorry about the joke. It just hit me funny and I thought things were getting a little heavy.
I worked with a dude who had lived in a haunted apartment in New Orleans. The ghost wasn’t anything romantically gothic or chilling; the ghost was some chick from Indiana who accidentally drank herself to death in 2013. She’s got a heel broken off one shoe and she can’t find her phone, and she can’t find her keys, and she can’t find her cigarettes…. When he told me about it years ago I thought it was hilarious, this annoying party girl goes right on being an annoying party girl into the afterlife, but now I realize she can’t communicate, she can’t get out, and she can’t even have a smoke to blow it off. That’d be annoying, too.
Hey people!!!!!
Good mood and good luck to everyone!!!!!
About 40 years ago while working overtime as a Paramedic, we had a call for a little old lady in her late 80’s in acute pulmonary edema at about 4 AM. She was unconscious and gurgling away, and I knew she was on the way out. We worked her up with various meds to try and get her stabilized so we could transport if she could hold on long enough. All of a sudden, the room temperature dropped like 15-20 degrees and the curtains ruffled one at a time as if an invisible finger walked past. I had the feeling at that moment that there was something else in the room. At that point she went into cardiac arrest. None of our protocols did anything from that point on and we ultimately pronounced.
I am convinced that the Angel of Death was in that room that night. I had other spooky events, but I never had a room get very cold like that before or after, or see something like those curtains move by themselves one ruffle at a time ever again.
Heh, didn’t realize that Sapper’s a surveyor. We have a few ex-surveyors who jumped over to tug and barge crew at my company. BCE, if he’s interested, we’re hurting for Tankermen PIC’s-crew on manned oil barges, an easy jump from what he’s doing, and less stairs. 14 on/14 off or 21/21 or 28/14, and starts at I think $450/day if he’s interested. I just had a near retarded trainee leave yesterday, guy who needed to unzip his drawers to count to 11.
Hey BCE, been reading your content for a while. I’m moving to Florida later this summer or fall, bought a place in Spring Hill right by Brooksville. I’d like to link up with some like minded OGG’s (old gray guys) when I get out there. Any way we could comm offline?
USMC 2/7 MCAGCC ‘91 – ‘96
No Problem man, the DM line is BCE187th@protonmail.com Let me know if you send me a mail b/c as of late, I’m getting very few replies back from emails I’ve shot out to people…