Use Your Words, Dude

Today I want to talk about our Words and specificity.

Some people think it’s nerdy to be concerned about word choice or specifics. To which I say it’s everything, and fascinating, and incredibly important.

This vlog will be simple today. Only two parts.

For the first part, I want to examine the importance of being specific in your questions on a ghost hunt. Let’s take a listen again to the interaction we had with the spirit of Lucy through a cell sensor April of two years ago. In this example, we have the instance of my asking Lucy the question:

“Do some spirits feel negative energy?”

Lucy responds without an answer, indicative of a “no” response. But her answer is immediately ambiguous in the yes/no situation. Is this true that no other spirits feel negative energy? Or, I wonder, quickly adjusting my question,

“Do you KNOW if some spirits feel different energies?”

Her response is again no. So to fully clarify, I ask;

“So you don’t know?” And she then responds with a yes.

But even here in this example, there’s loads and loads of questions and clarifications I didn’t ask, that I didn’t realize at the time, being younger and put on the spot. We’d been asking Lucy about feeling our “positive energies” and then opposed them to whether she feels (or, sometimes, as we accidentally used interchangeably, “draws from”) negative energies.

See the obvious problem here? She might have understood what we meant, discussing the positive attitudes and excitement of the group, versus the negative energy put off by grumpy people. But especially when asking even pseudo-scientific interview questions, we start talking about “positive energies” and that could mean something completely different to her, or say, a scientist. Some scientists theorize that ions may contribute to paranormal phenomena, or be a factor in the manifestation. Ions are charged particles. What’s interesting is that an excessive amount of positively charged ions in the air make people feel bad. And, inversely, excessive negatively charged particles make you feel good. (This is where you get those “Ionic breeze home air filters” on infomercials. They charge the particles negatively so that your room feels better.) Some think then, that as a byproduct or condition of the spirit’s manifestation, positive ions may contribute, and may also explain the heavy, more negative feelings associated with even benevolent hauntings.

So as we sit asking about Lucy only drawing from “positive energies,” who’s to say she wasn’t referring to ionic charge, not attitudes?

You can understand how quickly, from even this one example, what seems like a simple question can be loaded, and especially difficult for a spirit to answer with just a yes or a no.

Look at the simple difference between the questions “Can you do something?” and “Do you do something?” One speaks to potential, the other speaks to whether it actually happens. How easy would it be to ask Lucy if she can interact with the other spirits, then begin to tell the story that Lucy does interact with the spirits. There’s a jump in the facts here. Perhaps she can but doesn’t.

What I find interesting about this forms the second part of the vlog today, and that applies to real life applications of thinking about our words.

For example, I have a tattoo on my forearm of a Jack o’ lantern. Some people would say specifically that I have an “evil Jack o’ lantern” tattooed on my arm. I’d say I have a scary looking Jack o’ lantern. Now this isn’t an issue of semantics. My tattoo is supposed to be scary. And specifically so.

In fact, I got it partially because of this idea that Jack o’ lanterns were meant to scare off evil or negative spirits. So to say that my tattoo is itself an evil Jack o’ lantern is not only inaccurate, but also contradictive to it’s very purpose in a MEANINGFUL way. Having an evil Jack o’ lantern would make my ink a part of that evil rather than combating against it.

If you think about it, we see a lot of things that way. Many of us see things that are scary as inherently evil.

And I think that making that distinction between scary and evil is a very important distinction. One that horror aficionados, for example, have made for a long time. But one that a fair amount of the general public have been ignorant of. They often act under the assumption that for one: scary things are evil. And then leap to two, if you like scary things, you’re interacting with things that are evil or are romanticizing the evil.

This opens doors to different conversations, but what I want to stress is the importance of the distinction.

So I urge you to continue to make distinctions. To study those binaries we tend to group. Not just within the paranormal and the questions we ask, but with ANY distinction. In politics, in literature, in music. In social interaction. Because it’s important to clarify what you mean, what society means, and where you stand.

If you liked this vlog, feel free to check out the earlier episodes here, subscribe, and give that like button a click.

Karl Pfeiffer is a writer, ghost hunter, and blogger/vlogger. He won the first season of the pilot reality series Ghost Hunters Academy, and went on to work with the Ghost Hunters International team on the same network. Since then he’s lead the weekend ghost hunts at the Stanley Hotel, studied religion and writing at Colorado State University, and published his first novel, Hallowtide, in October of 2012. More can be found at www.KarlPfeiffer.com

Where American Horror Story S2 Went Wrong and Why it Was BRILLIANT

American Horror Story. Season two. Four months later.

I’m happy to say my hopes for this season were for the most part absolutely executed.

What it had going for it again was a brilliant season of discussion about hard modern American issues, everything from religion to the handling of mental patients, to the way we look at people with mental disorders. To issues like abortion and women’s rights and the role of women in society.

The show handles these issues with extremity and the kind of “othering” perspective gained by the horror lens that allows examination of different sides of these issues. Without being too spoilery, take for example, the instance of rape by a derranged serial killer. Is that an okay situation for an abortion? Or on the other hand, as the show demonstrates, what if choosing to do the “right” thing, keeping the baby to avoid more death, winds up turing on its head. By putting emphasis on nature instead of nurture, by studying this idea of essential evil, the show suggests that maybe even in the instance of doing the “right thing”, not the right thing happens.

That’s the real depth of post-modern, horror storytelling: turning issues on their heads, considering things differently and extremely and forcing you to think.

The season played with beautiful dynamics between monsters (traditionally embodying the deeper “American” horrors of the series rather than the purely grotesque ones). Here we have represented: religion and whether there can be such a situation as purity of the human being, and equally the ideas of pure evil in a human being; science as a method of salvation and destruction, embodied in the Aliens, used toward the end (the white light) to contrast the work of religion (the shadows); the masculine, represented by the serial killer Bloody Face, the idea of paternity and motherhood, of power of women, sexuality, and what that means to society.

Studying the play of these ideas is absolutely what makes American Horror story one of the most brilliant shows on television. AHS is the bar I set when I walk into a horror movie.

Now, this season did have some flaws.  I actually stopped watching for a number of weeks because I wasn’t into it. The season felt early on as if it bit off more than it could chew. Throwing in mental patients with deranged killers, with monsters, with aliens, and possession. It was too much. Tack on the upping of the more extreme camera work, action too fast paced to milk the scares, the level of in-your-face gore and horror — it felt that the writers had lost their way from the thematic hearts of the show.

But I returned, watched the rest of the season in two sittings, and was blown away by the end. The threads were brought together, thematically and practically balancing each other out, to arrive at a cohesive whole.

And, upon reflection, the cons wound up supporting the real positive work of the show.

Though the link from the aliens to the demonic wasn’t particularly elaborated on in terms of practicality (a la that god-awfully executed but brilliantly realized Fourth Kind), it was there subtextually and thematically. Aliens as scientific advancement. Religion as archaic advancement. Nazis somewhere in between. The dialogue throughout between the three.

One of my early problems with the season was the real claustrophobic feel. Creators would likely say they were going for that. It’s the idea of an Asylum. You’re cut off from the world. You don’t have a lot of freedom. It should be claustrophobic. They might say then my reaction was a sign of successful execution, where I felt it had more of a feel of being fake.

But this idea of fakery brings up a fascinating angle on it. This idea of what is real and not real. Of Camp. In storytelling, Camp as a genre, or style, is where you can see the strings, where you can see behind the scenes, where you have “reality” immediately presented to you, and you know to some extent what is not real. This places emphasis on what is more important: what’s real: Emotions; Story; Theme.

So in this case, that element of Camp that was played up more this season than last season, worked. I’m more of a fan of uber realism, myself. But here, whether intended or not, it was successful. The whole season we wind up questioning these ideas of reality: what’s real, what’s not real. Right down to the set-work and camera work.

The constant Dutch angles were a little much for me, but they contributed to that over-the-top style of horror that American Horror Story doesn’t shy from. That idea of Camp storytelling and essentially this in-your-face horror, where we’re not afraid necessarily to show the monsters we’ve made. We’re almost proud of them. We like to put them in your face, we want to talk about these issues. The hard issues.

That’s America.

And that I think is crucial and essential American Horror. And it wraps up the real success, even in what I didn’t like about it, for season two of American Horror Story.

Karl Pfeiffer is a writer, ghost hunter, and blogger/vlogger. He won the first season of the pilot reality series Ghost Hunters Academy, and went on to work with the Ghost Hunters International team on the same network. Since then he’s lead the weekend ghost hunts at the Stanley Hotel, studied religion and writing at Colorado State University, and published his first novel, Hallowtide, in October of 2012. More can be found at www.KarlPfeiffer.com

Flashlight Technique: Friend or Foe?

Last week I talked with you guys about K2 meters and the rule of five. This week I want to piggyback off of that and talk to about similar pitfalls with the flashlight technique.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out last week’s video, you can click right HERE to visit the video.

I want to break this vlog down into parts like last week. This week it’s FOUR PARTS.

Part ONE: How the flashlight technique works, if you don’t know.

You’ve probably seen it on all the ghost shows if you’re not an investigator, so I want to give you some background. Now, when the flashlight turns on during these investigations, it’s not turning on purely on its own. The flashlight is set up to encourage this happening. The flashlight technique is NOT just setting up a flashlight and hoping it turns itself fully on. That happens very rarely on cases and is usually completely unexpected.

What you do is you take one of these small maglight flashlights with the twist-on caps, and you turn it so that it’s just barely off. A good rule of thumb is to then tap on the flashlight to ensure it’s not too delicate. (Some investigators will tell you that it’s best practice to play with the flashlight at home and make markings on the cap and the body to ensure you have the most reliable position every time. Which is good advice, Marty).

Now the theory is that spirits can either twist the cap ever so slightly to get it to turn on, or, more likely as it seems to me, they can somehow complete that connection inside that’s already almost barely completed.

Which leads into Part TWO: Why this is important.

Some people will say that with these flashlights, they’ve called the company and if the light is off it’s off, and there is no in-between. This is inaccurate. I’ve seen these flashlights turn themselves on from this delicate position more times than I can count. Whether it’s because of a static buildup or a kind of heating up and cooling down of the parts involved, sometimes these flashlights will turn on, then turn off a number of seconds later. Usually they’ll go thirty seconds or a minute or two in between turning on each time, and often they’ll continue to do this for any period of time between ten minutes or an hour.

This is why, point THREE, we use more than one flashlight at a time. This way, we can so direct the spirit to turn on specific flashlights. When consistency is gained, you can trust better that it’s beyond coincidence.

If one flashlight should turn on, I like to first see if the spirit can turn on the other two flashlights. Best case scenario, the flashlights are set up in a way that if a spirit can turn one on, you’d think that the spirit could also turn the other two on.

Once all three have turned on, you can direct the spirit to individual flashlights. Like say “turn the blue one on, now the red one, now the gray one. Okay now the gray one again.” And if you can specify an order with a bit of a twist, the odds of that happening on chance begin to drop significantly.

I had the mis/fortune of getting perfect interaction exactly like this the very first time I used the flashlight technique with three flashlights.

I was at the Stanley Hotel last spring, filming with the AdventureMyths team. It was around three in the afternoon in the Billiards room. The team was setting up lighting for an interview and I’d just purchased my three flashlights. So I was trying them out with a couple friends while waiting.

For the next fifteen or twenty minutes, we were receiving perfect on command interaction, well beyond coincidence. (Video of some of the interaction is embedded in the vlog)

But, point FOUR, I want to again reference last week’s rule of five.

If you’re speaking to just one flashlight and not double checking your answers constantly, it’s going to be very difficult to trust the interaction. Because these flashlights DO go on and off on their own, you could build a whole interaction with a single flashlight that is not genuine.

Always hold the spirit to at least two flashlights, and if you do only have one or two, keep the questions very specific and double check.

“Are you a man?” Yes. “Are you a woman?” No. “So you’re a man.” yes.

Now again, keep in mind to be understanding of the spirit. Asking the same question multiple times can be annoying, so be sure that the spirit knows you’re not just making it jump through hoops, but it’s a validation process to help be sure.

Again too, this isn’t exact. We don’t know if it’s very hard for a spirit to jump so quickly between flashlights. We don’t know if on many nights only one flashlight is in a position that a spirit can use it. Or if it’s very hard for a spirit to expend energy this way to multiple lights.

But because we’ve seen it happen in perfect communication before, we need relatively perfect communication again if we’re to trust not only the phenomena, but the information then gleaned from it.

Karl Pfeiffer is a writer, ghost hunter, and blogger/vlogger. He won the first season of the pilot reality series Ghost Hunters Academy, and went on to work with the Ghost Hunters International team on the same network. Since then he’s lead the weekend ghost hunts at the Stanley Hotel, studied religion and writing at Colorado State University, and published his first novel, Hallowtide, in October of 2012. More can be found atwww.KarlPfeiffer.com

Mama Review

Not going to lie to you, I was damn excited for Mama. Watching the trailer suggested to me that this was going to be a gritty, well-filmed horror flick that hopefully took its time, dug at the psychology and creepiness of feral children, and maybe even a bit of philosophy to boot.

Unfortunately it wasn’t really any of these things. But I’m not going to say it was bad either.

What Mama had going for it:

Fantastic acting by the two young children, particularly Mini Maggie Gyllenhaal, er–Isabelle Nelisse. Downright creepy and charming and totally understated. 

The story was very well written. While lacking in much depth, with characters who felt a bit more like plot-puppets than plot-drivers at times, and an end that unraveled in a way that was so clunky compared to the relative intensity of the first 90% it seemed almost to be a different writer completely, the overall story was solid.

The end, though with laugh-inducing CGI and, as I said, with an undeniable clunkiness, it was mostly satisfying (a trait altogether lacking in most horror movies these days). One half of me says yeah, maybe the end was a bit too, ah, storybook–in a way that contrasted the promised grittiness–the other half says it actually worked in a kind of Del Toro way that blends a bit of childlike magic with–well, creepy fingers.

The movie was genuinely unsettling for the first three quarters, until they put the glasses back on the camera lens and decided to show you the monster–It’s movies like this that prove the adage, KEEP YOUR MONSTERS IN THE GODDAMN SHADOWS. And save the cartoons for Saturday morning.

The cinematography was nothing to remark upon, and right out of the gate threw distracting amounts of CGI in what was otherwise a rather normal crash-while-driving-in-the-snow scene. In a movie that demanded reflection of the very grittiness of a childhood in the wild, the CGI made it feel fake, and cheapened a kind of genuine horror experience.

The glimmers of philosophical dialogue were forced and clumsy and only really applied in the most rudimentary of ways to the plot. (Is it a spoiler to suggest that the ghost has unfinished business?) After what could have been a far deeper play between reality and imagination, between psychological trauma and the nature of ferality, in the dynamic between mothers and daughters, and the timeless American horror play: between the wild and civilization, we instead get a kind of extended monster-of-the-week story. Disappointing, but not altogether unexpected these days.

Now, I can’t promise you won’t shake your head and laugh a time or three during, that you won’t turn to your ladyfriend after the movie, as I did to mine, and with a half-frown say, “I guess it wasn’t… bad.” But I can promise it’s a good ride. It’s certainly better than Sinister, The Apparition, The Possession, and half the other half-assed horror movies from the fall months in 2012. In fact I’d go so far as to say this movie could have been brilliant if the right director got a hold of this script thirty years ago.

But saying it’s special would be a lie.

B-

Karl Pfeiffer is a ghost hunter, novelist, and blogger/vlogger. After winning the first season of the reality spinoff series Ghost Hunters Academy, he went on to work briefly with the Ghost Hunters International team. He published his first novel, Hallowtide, shortly after graduating Colorado State University where he studied Creative Writing and Religion. He now works at the Stanley Hotel leading the weekend public ghost hunts. More can be found at www.KarlPfeiffer.com

 

Talking to a Dishwasher With a K2 Meter!

Today I want to talk to you guys about K2 meters and the Rule of Five. Odds are you’ve probably heard of a K2 meter, but you haven’t heard of the Rule of Five (Probably because I made up the Rule of Five, but I’ll get to that in a second).

First the K2 Meter, ghost hunting device, electrician’s tool. It measures EMF.

Scientists would like to say that if you’re going to measure EMF on an investigation, you have to know your sources, think critically about it, and get down to the heart of what’s actually sending out that signal.

I like to say that if you’re getting responses for twenty minutes in perfect answer to your questions, you’re probably not talking to a stray signal from a washing machine. (Unless of course it’s a really smart washing machine, which would be paranormal in its own right, but not quite what we’re looking for).

But this opens up problems between the Experiential Investigator (the person just doing it to have an experience of the paranormal) and the Scientific Investigator (the person writing a proof, or trying to understand what’s happening empirically).

Quick secret, you don’t have to be a “scientific investigator” to do a paranormal investigation.

Quick secret about the secret, you should probably learn as much as you possibly can about the subject anyway.

Which is why I’m doing this vlog right now. We have a huge trend right now in experiential investigators. We have to educate ourselves. I’ve seen way too many people go through the Stanley Hotel believing every little thing is a spirit. (Which isn’t to say that I blame them, most have never done this before, but there is a trend in that SO many people now are joining teams, creating teams, and investigating as a hobby EVERYWHERE, that we need to cover our basics).

So, speaking about the K2, we need to cover the device and this idea of  justified “perfect answers to your questions” as an acceptable substitute for “scientifically investigating.”

So the rest of this will come at you in five points.

Point ONE: If you don’t already know, some people theorize that as a spirit manifests, it produces EMF at the frequency that a K2 registers, or they can take this EMF from somewhere else, and reproduce it to communicate back and forth.

But, point TWO: Just because your K2 is going off, doesn’t mean it’s a ghost.

Which leads to point THREE: K2 meters are set off by EVERYTHING. Cell phones. Wireless signals. Walkie talkies. GPS. All of these communication signals that we have around us all the time, K2 meters pick up on those.

Point FOUR: The Rule of Five. Storytime. So I’m sitting up at the Stanley Hotel a number of months ago, we’re sitting in Lucy’s room with a group of about fifteen people, and the K2 meter starts going off. Now it’s going off a little different than normally. It flickers eight times in succession, then pauses for twenty or thirty seconds before going off eight times again.

Now I’m thinking mechanical. My gut instinct as a technical investigator, if it’s that repetitive, it’s probably mechanical.

Meanwhile, I start timing the intervals in my head, then with my iphone, and about the time I realize for sure that there’s twenty or thirty seconds between each flicker, I decide to write it off. But in the time it took me to do this, the group had already built up a whole story. Which isn’t hard to do.

By getting “yes” confirmations at every twenty seconds, you can build a conversation. Are you a woman? No. Are you a man? Yes. Okay. Are you a spirit from the Stanley Hotel with us? No. Are you the spirit of someone in this room with us right now? Yes.

What I’ve seen from enough instances like this though, is that the spirit stops making sense around four or five questions.

Why?

Because for one, it’s not a spirit. But for two, it’s because you’ve built up enough of a specific story that you start to expect answers around then, and then it stops giving you the answers that you want. You start asking more, targeted questions that you’re expecting a “yes” answer to, and less questions you’re expecting a “no” answer to. So you’d expect that the frequency of the “yes” answers would increase, but it doesn’t, because it’s on a specific, twenty to thirty second signal.

So point FIVE, ask good critical questions. Ask the same questions in a different way twice and hold the spirit very accountable for those answers.

Now, is this a hard and fast rule? No. Maybe the spirit takes a little extra time to rebuild their energy again before they answer you again so quickly. Maybe it takes them some time to get their bearings back before answering the second question. Maybe they can only answer five questions before losing their energy and maybe it’s really hard for them to come through on one of these devices.

But because information is so crucial in this field right now, and people think we’re crazy enough already, we have to be as specific as possible.

Now, unfortunately for the spirits, this could get a little bit annoying, but as is the nature of the beast, we have to hold these spirits to a standard that we can get this “evidence” as specific and sure as possible.

Karl Pfeiffer is a writer, ghost hunter, and blogger/vlogger. He won the first season of the pilot reality series Ghost Hunters Academy, and went on to work with the Ghost Hunters International team on the same network. Since then he’s lead the weekend ghost hunts at the Stanley Hotel, studied religion and writing at Colorado State University, and published his first novel, Hallowtide, in October of 2012. More can be found at www.KarlPfeiffer.com

Ghost Hunters Academy DVD Release and FAQ

If you didn’t already know, the Syfy spinoff Ghost Hunters Academy DVD hits shelves today, a couple years after the last episode aired in the second of its two six-episode seasons.

The show was the second spinoff of the pioneering success Ghost Hunters, and focused on training young, college-aged students in the art of the hunt. Though met with mixed Critical reviews, it went on to produce a second six-episode season before it finally stalled out and met with unofficial cancellation.

But it’s near and dear to my heart because I was on it. And I won the first season of it.

So if you’ve found my blog because you already follow me, because you were running a search about the show, or you tripped through a strange interwebz warp and found yourself lost, dazed, and mildly confused in this stark blogosphere landscape, I’ve written up a quick FAQ about the show to honor its release.

What did you get for winning?

This sweet sweatshirt.

I was given a chance to work with the Ghost Hunters International team along with the other winner, Susan Slaughter. I appeared on one episode in the summer of 2010 and was given the runaround by producers after that. Though I still don’t know what happened, I’m thinking they had too many cast members and didn’t like the idea of having two winners from their spinoff show. Anticipating the coming loss of their two female leads, I think they chose Susan over me.

What are you doing now?

I came back to Colorado, finished college with my degree in Creative Writing and a focus on Religious Studies. I worked with a few local teams here and there before I wound up regularly attending the Stanley Hotel’s weekend public ghost hunts. A few months later I began working there officially, and I’ve been there ever since. That’s been about two and a half years ago now. I also lectured around the nation for a short while about the varying philosophies and approaches to ghost hunting. And just this last October, I released my first novel, Hallowtide. It’s not about ghosts or the supernatural in any of the traditional senses, but it does have a psychological and mystical component. It’s about a young man who begins having nightmares of a journey into Hell. More can be found about it here.

What was your hardest challenge on GHA? -@DimitriNesbitt

There were many. The show was boot camp for ghost hunters, not so much a classroom. And in order to get as much drama from us, we were often left in the dark. For example, the first episode, we tour Fort Mifflin, and then they say, “Alright. Go get the equipment.” We glance at each other, confused, questions on our lips before deciding to turn back to the RV and explore the nooks and crannies for the Pelican cases. Sometimes the hardest challenge was putting up with team members that you found yourself butting heads with, sometimes it was trying to feel confident about doing something you’d had no training in, but could be kicked off at any moment because you weren’t doing it right. In a lot of ways, making it through and winning. That said, though these were challenges and stressful, I wouldn’t trade them for the world.

Greatest idiot moment? -@GAC_Ninja

There were plenty of those! With cameras on you and a million people watching at home, any error feels like the biggest idiot moment. From the one time I felt the gaze of every single viewer when Jane called me out for being inconsiderate at Buffalo Central, and I knew immediately that that moment would make the episode, to the time I forgot a voice recorder in a room we were investigating at Fort Mifflin, to the time in Eastern State when I forgot to log a tape with crew and Steve chewed me out for ten minutes. You always feel like an idiot when you’re under the gun and inexperienced.

What do you think would have saved it from cancellation? -Evie Warner

I think so long as the show was such that one winner was promised a slot on the TAPS or GHI teams, it was destined to end. They have only so many open slots that they need to fill at any one time, having too many seasons would stack up winners.

People love Ghost Hunters because of the characters and the ghosts.

The formula for Academy was essentially the same framework as Ghost; Race through the setup, get down to the investigation. Here I think their meat and potatoes was in turning the lens inward toward character interaction and behind the scenes, which was what established Ghost Hunters in the first place, and was emphasized in the Academy idea of the premise. This show needed emphasis on characters and ghost hunting. I think the competition side was important for getting return viewers, but the opportunity that was lost was in the education, the down and dirty, the running back and forth between buildings at Essex County in the pouring rain and yelling down from a busted out window three stories up that you’re going to toss cable down.

What really goes bump in the night? How have your experiences on the show changed the way you think about unexplained events in real life? What location was freakiest? -Mandy Rose

What really goes bump? Mostly people’s imaginations. The show taught me that most of the locations we went to, some of the most haunted in America, can have quiet nights. Working at the Stanley since then, I’ve seen how easily people scare themselves and how badly they want to believe. As far as what we’re actually dealing with when something does come through? The list is long; human souls, angels, demons, elementals, inter-dimensional beings, animals, time slips, energetic echoes, extra-terrestrials. Which are genuine and which aren’t? I’ve yet to know.

I grew up three years in the two months it took to film the show. I learned how to live life on the road, how to put my problems second to those people I cared about, how to put my head down and get a job done no matter what, how to stay humble, how to present myself to people, how to perform, and how to be a good critical thinking ghost hunter.

Essex County Sanitarium was by far the eeriest of the places. Though the activity wasn’t the strongest, being there in the epitome of fall, the last week before Halloween, where the weather alternated between glowing orange leaves and drizzling rain, the place had power; Run down, decrepit, and creaking with sighs and sounds of what could have been supernatural. Maybe it was lying in the body slabs at the morgue that finally did it, but there was no place I’d rather have been.

You can buy Ghost Hunters Academy, the complete series, at Amazon.com or in stores starting today, January 15.

New Blog! Another Intro

As I disappear and return again to talk some paranormal issues that…really need talked about.

But here it’s mostly to fill you in on the last six months.