OINT PLEASANT — The Mothman continues to lure visitors to the area with its mysterious background and paranormal appeal.

The Paranormal Research Society will visit Point Pleasant Feb. 19-22 to examine the Mothman legend. Mason County Convention and Visitors Bureau Chairman Denny Bellamy described the tour as one of the first tourism events of the 2009 season.

Those that participate in the Return to Mothman tour will meet the cast of “Paranormal State,” a show that examines paranormal activity on the A&E network. According to the Web site www.paranormalresearchsociety.org, tour participants will experience amazing lectures and discussions, go on an exclusive ghost hunt with the “Paranormal State” cast and learn about the history of Point Pleasant, has been home to dozens of sightings and strange occurrences.

During the workshops tour participants will learn about the history of the Mothman, Point Pleasant and the Silver Bridge collapse. In addition, tourists will hear accounts from local residents. Tourists also will have the opportunity to take a guided tour of Point Pleasant and the TNT area.

According to the Paranormal Research Society, several activities are included in the tour’s admission, such as a welcome ceremony and screening of the “Paranormal State” Mothman episode with the show’s cast, complimentary dinners for both Friday and Saturday of the tour, autographs and photos with the show’s cast, a question and answer session with the cast and a ghost hunt at the Historic Lowe Hotel, where rumored haunts are told and where “The Mothman Prophecies” author John Keel stayed during his Mothman investigation.

The tour also will feature special guests including psychic medium Chip Coffey, Mothman Museum Curator Jeff Wamsley and Mothman investigator John Frick. According to the Paranormal Research Society, the Mothman tour is the third field trip for the group. The first two field trips investigated Katies Bar with fans and attendees.

The Paranormal Research Society is a professional organization dedicated to exploring the unknown. The organization originally began as a student club prior to becoming a professional organization. The society continues to expand its boundaries with its research lab, a library and growing staff.

A full schedule of events will be announced at a later time. For more information, visit www.paranormalresearchsociety.org.

Source: http://www.paraurl.com/?HGepB

Doors were open. Lights were off. The thermometer recorded a temperature of 69 degrees. The electromagnetic field meter beeped and flashed as Becca Warren carried it around the second floor of Prentis House.

Her team gathered in a room with a fireplace and large desk jutting from the wall. The teen scientists placed a compass and a Geiger counter - a metal box that detects radiation - on a rug and waited.

Then they got their cue: “Let’s party like it’s 1899,” Marcus Daniels, their teacher at Lakeland High School, called over the radio, signaling it was time to start the investigation.

Since September, members of the Lakeland Skeptics Society have pitted science against the supernatural. Daniels, an earth science and oceanography teacher, formed the club to boost students’ problem-solving skills. Twenty-five students signed up.

Using the scientific method, the students meet after school and on weekends to investigate myths, urban legends and paranormal activity.

“It’s strictly science and I like to keep it that way,” Daniels said. “These kids have all kinds of different beliefs.”

Early on, the group tested the question: “Is a Ouija board guided by the paranormal or is it just a piece of compressed cardboard and plastic?” They formed a hypothesis - that the board works by subconscious human error - and conducted the experiment. Ten students decided paranormal activity couldn’t be ruled out, while six others agreed with the hypothesis.

Something of a novelty in high schools, the club is scheduled to be featured next year in an issue of Colorado-based Haunted Times magazine.

Last month, students met on two Saturday nights for evidence-gathering sessions at Prentis House, a more than 200-year-old structure that’s home to the city’s visitors center.

Several students sported black shirts with the “Ghostbusters” logo. They carried plenty of gear, including a Ouija board, tarot cards and a $5,000 thermal imaging camera on loan from Southeastern Environmental & Construction.

The room where Becca’s team sat was quiet, save for a couple of whispered questions and Civil War-era music blasting on the floor below. Daniels, who described it as “Lil Wayne of the 1800s,” figured the music might stir up paranormal activity, if any existed.

“We’d really like to talk to you if anyone’s here with us,” Becca said.

“Can you just give us a sign of your presence?” freshman Kayla Culbertson asked in the same quiet tone.

The sign never came.

Or did it?

Anyone on the second floor knock? Daniels asked over the radio. Nope, they responded.

But somebody heard a knock.

Students on the third floor thought they heard a scream. Then Daniels said he heard another knock on the second floor. Becca’s team heard nothing.

A minute later, they did hear a knock - a loud one. Their bodies stiffened. Becca immediately reached for the radio.

“There’s somebody at the front door,” Daniels said.

Source: http://www.paraurl.com/?JEZAp

Brian Hendrian is a deer hunter from Shelbyville and, when he gets a spare moment, a stalker of the supernatural. He’s been pursuing things that go bump in the night for the best part of 20 years but, so far, not one demon, let alone many.

“There are a lot of demon cases out there,” he explains. “But I think they are fabricated. I’ve never been involved in one myself.”

As ghost hunters go, Hendrian isn’t exactly type cast for the part. Quiet, relaxed and unemotional, he sits in his living room full of deer head trophies and doesn’t look the sort to be easily transported to a state of ectoplasmic joy by the prospect of seeing dead people.

But he is gripped by a burning curiosity to know the answer to the ultimate question: What happens to us when we die? And while maybe two haunting cases in 10 turn out to be worth his time, he’s experienced enough to become what he describes as a “skeptical believer.”

“People getting slapped, pushed around, voices that just come out of thin air, I’ve witnessed things I can’t explain,” says Hendrian, 34. “There is a lot of fraud out there, but not all of it is fraud.”

To help sort through the cases, he’s gathered around him a group of likeminded spirits, so to speak. He’s the founder of organizations that include the Shelby Paranormal Research Society, the United States Paranormal Society and the Shelbyville Cryptozoology Research Society.

The Cryptozoology folks hunt for “hidden animals,” creatures whose existence is not recognized by science: at least, not yet. Hendrian says there’s a lot of fraud in this area, too, but he believes there is credible evidence for the existence for both an “unknown biped” (Big Foot) and for something large and toothy slinking through the Illinois undergrowth.

“We get a lot of black panther reports in Illinois,” he says. “And I believe there is something out there.”

When on the trail of ghosts, he starts by a series of gentle e-mail or phone interviews with the person claiming their home or whatever is haunted. If it looks good there, he will follow up with a face-to-face meeting and, eventually, a site visit.

He says the best piece of ghost hunter gear yet invented is the thermal imaging camera, which has yielded some cool results for other groups. But they cost many hundreds of dollars, and he can’t afford one. So Hendrian and his colleagues make do with night-vision cameras, recording equipment and healthy doses of patience.

“It can get dead boring when nothing happens,” he says. “And you also need a sense of humor.”

His wife, Renee, has joined him on many hunts, and while she has experienced strange sounds and the icy presence of something she couldn’t see, so far she’s not been frightened out of her wits. But she says it will take something dramatic and scary to make science stop snickering and take the supernatural seriously.

“As technology advances, I think it might be possible to get some pretty definitive proof,” she says. “To maybe actually catch a full apparition on video for everyone to see it, and to where you can see nobody faked it.”

In the meantime, it’s back to the hunt for the truth and the more than occasional exposure of the fraudulent. Her husband and two of his fellow enthusiasts — one in Joliet, the other in California — host a weekly Internet radio show which features ironic awards distinguishing particularly blatant supernatural scams.

One of the Shelbyville ghost hunter’s favorites is the eBay vendor who claimed to be selling “ghosts in a bottle,” actual spirits banished and sealed in bottles by real live ghostbusters. “And people were actually buying this stuff,” says Hendrian. “It just gets more ridiculous.”

Source: http://www.paraurl.com/?WuWeP

Ghost hunter Zak Bagans wants you to join him on his next overnight stay inside Bobby Mackey’s Music World in Wilder.

Bagans says he was scratched by evil spirits at the club while taping the October premiere of “Ghost Adventures” (8-11 p.m., Travel Channel).

He’s returning to our region Jan. 20-22 for a symposium, a private Mackey concert and a 3 a.m. ghost hunt inside the club. Tickets are $259.

Bagans’ sidekicks, Nick Groff and Aaron Goodwin, will be there, along with Doug Hensely, author of “Hell’s Gate: The Terror at Bobby Mackey’s Music World,” about the murders and satanic rituals in the 1850s slaughterhouse beneath the club.

Bagans’ crew used high-tech night-vision cameras as they recorded strange sounds from the club bathroom. Over the years, all kinds of spooky things have happened - doors and lights coming on by themselves; an unplugged jukebox playing music; and people pushed down stairs, struck by trash cans and demonically possessed.

“It is haunted; that’s a fact. It’s one of the most haunted places I’ve ever been to in my life, and I’ve been to hundreds,” Bagans says.

“This is an opportunity for people to experience what they saw on the show. We’ll be there at the ‘witching hour,’ 3 a.m., when I got attacked. We’ll be there when it happens, whatever happens.”

Tickets are available at http://bobbymackey.com/LIVEGhostHunt-Orders.html

Source: http://www.paraurl.com/?HBQe7