COLFAX, Wash. – A dozen University of Idaho ghost hunters face trespassing charges.The students had heard rumors of a haunted insane asylum. Police say that late Sunday night, they broke into an abandoned hospital in Colfax to try to track down the haunting ghosts. But shortly after midnight, some neighbors noticed someone inside St. Ignatius Manor Hospital, and called police.
Those police didn’t find any ghosts haunting the hospital, but they did find the students, and cited them for the invasion.
Deputies say they only thing haunting the old hospital overnight was the students. Whitman County Sheriff Brett Myers says he has no evidence of ghosts in Colfax, but his deputies will keep their eyes open.
3/26/2007
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NOT LONG AGO, I wrote an article on this website called Enough with the Orbs Already, in which I expressed my reservations about the relevance of orbs in photos. Some paranormal researchers believe they possibly represent spirit energy; others say they are merely dust or other airborne particles. Still other researchers contend that it depends on the circumstances: some orbs might signify a haunting, others might not. Readers weighed in with their own opinions on the controversy.
L.E.M.U.R. has been conducting experiments to prove whether or not electrostatic fields can create orbs. Here’s a clip of an orb-like anomaly emerging from the base of a Van De Graaff generator in a household kitchen, shot by Brian Irish (during a L.E.M.U.R. meeting) in late 2006. This effect has been easily reproduced many times. We know orbs can be created by airborne particles, like dust, that adhere to electrostatic fields. That means dust orbs do serve a valuable purpose–allowing us to see fields that are usually invisible! The question is: what creates the strange, transient fields at haunted places?
“Everybody is entitled to their own opinion,” he says. “My opinion is that there’s something out there. I can’t quite explain it, but there’s definitely something more to this.”
Meador says it’s an investigator’s job to collect evidence, analyze it and determine whether a site is paranormal.
And please, don’t call them “ghost busters” or similar terms. She says, with one exception, that people don’t want to get rid of their ghosts.
Spirits hang around for a variety of reasons. For example, they don’t know they’re dead, or they believe they were wronged in death and have unresolved business.
Meador uses seven criteria in her investigations: photographic evidence, tape recordings, temperature fluctuations, odors, electromagnetic field disruptions, physical contact and movement of inanimate objects.
She says she’s only been in six sites where they found nothing. That’s far from the case at Sierra Sky Ranch: “I can probably safely say this is probably the only place that I would say is haunted.”
Paranormal activity may involve a single criterion. To be considered haunted, Meador says a site needs to meet at least five — Sierra Sky Ranch meets six, all except electromagnetic field disruptions.
By JERRY HARKAVY, Associated Press Writer
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. – Joe Hill knew it was only a matter of time before one of the publishing industry’s hottest little secrets became common knowledge. He just wished he could have kept it under wraps a bit longer.
But when Hill’s fantasy-tinged thriller, “Heart-Shaped Box,” came out last month, it was inevitable that his thoroughbred blood lines as a writer of horror and the supernatural would be out there for all to see.
It’s a decent article with some (no longer downloadable apparently) files.
This excerpt is a bit disappointing to read:
The process of sorting through the evidence is slow, especially with day jobs and social lives that intervene. A few orbs and partial apparitions — “a form of a spirit, like an energy … it’s got matter to it,” Zimmerer explains — have surfaced. She has her recorders at home, and she meant to start working on the sound files over the weekend, but life — and a small turf scuffle with a competing group of ghost hunters who were badmouthing her methods — intervened.
Nothing like a good old “ghost hunter turf battle.”
