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
