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

UFO aficionados are urging Barack Obama to release classified documents about sightings of alien spacecraft, spurred on by support from within his own White House team.

They have written to the president-elect, pressing him to reveal the contents of America’s X Files.

In a letter, the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee asks Mr Obama to ‘end the six-decade truth embargo regarding an extraterrestrial presence engaging the human race’.

They hope to have garnered 40,000 signatures in support of their campaign by the time Mr Obama is inaugurated in January.

The enthusiasts are encouraged by public statements from John Podesta, who is running the president-elect’s transition team, and Bill Richardson, the Governor of New Mexico, who is expected to land a cabinet post.

When he was the White House chief of staff under Bill Clinton, Mr Podesta was in charge of a project to declassify 800 million pages of intelligence documents.

He said in a press conference: ‘It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the real nature of this phenomenon.’

Gov Richardson is a fellow UFO enthusiast. He has written a forward to a book on the ‘Roswell Incident’ in New Mexico, where an alien spacecraft crash is said to have landed in 1947.

Campaigners believe the corpses of humanoid aliens have been locked away by the government.

Gov Richardson has urged the Pentagon to disclose what really happened, and last year insisted there had been a ‘cover-up’.

The committee wants the U.S. to follow Britain’s example in making public reported contact with UFOs.

Stephen Bassett, Executive Director of the Extraterrestrial Phenomenon Political Action Committee, told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The release of documents in Britain and France has put huge pressure on the US. It makes the government here look pretty stupid.

‘I think we are seeing the Democrats moving towards disclosure.’

The group wants military services and intelligence agencies to brief the incoming president about what they know.

They also urge Mr Obama to open congressional hearings ‘to take testimony from scores of government witnesses who have already come forward with extraordinary evidence and are prepared to testify under oath.’

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

After patrolling Bridgeport for 11 years, Police Officer James Myers has found another calling: the spiritual realm.

Break-ins at the downtown complex of the shuttered Savoy Hotel and the Poli Palace/Majestic theaters got him inside the rundown buildings, where he took photos, an old hobby for the 38-year-old father of three.

But these photos were different from other abandoned buildings he’s shot.

“Things started to show up on my camera,” he said.

Not just anything: orbs, which indicate the presence of spiritual energy. And lots them.

Then a chance meeting in Bridgeport Hospital with famed psychic and Monroe resident Lorraine Warren set him on the path to becoming a paranormal researcher. While working there, he heard Warren, 81, was a patient and approached her. She knew his name before he introduced himself.

As Myers recalled: “She said, ‘Jimmy, how are you?’”

Since then, in his spare time, Myers has been assisting Warren and her son-in-law, Tony Spera, with investigations for the A&E network’s show “Paranormal State.” He helps interview people and collect data with recording equipment.

“They are pretty much calling me their psychic photographer,” Myers said. “[Warren] says I draw the energy.”

He’s not sure of that, but supernatural things seem to like his camera. While taking Warren and Tony and Judy Spera on a tour of the theater complex on Sept. 7, he took photos covered with orbs. They also appeared in photos he took of the Colonial Theater on Boston Avenue, where the Warrens had dates.

Sept. 7 is the birthday of Warren’s late husband, Ed Warren, the famed demonologist. He died on Aug. 29, 2006, and worked at the Poli as a teenager where they sometimes saw movies, Warren said.

Myers assembled his photos into a slide show dedicated to the Warrens, and Lorraine Warren is showing it during her lectures all over the United States. He goes by the handle 826 Paranormal and says he is “looking at the unknown through a cop’s eyes.”

He said considers himself “open-minded but skeptical.”

“I go in with the same attitude as at work. It’s just doing another form of investigation,” Myers said.

It’s also a hobby and stress reliever that has proven a little creepy sometimes. While he’s never seen anything with his naked eyes, he’s definitely felt things.

“The only time I ever felt something [in the Poli] was in the Savoy at the main desk,” he said. “It felt very, very cold, like an ice chill down my back.”

Warren said she thinks there may have been two homicides there in the 1940s. The team checked for drafts but found nothing.

Before he met Warren, he took photos at the former Norwich Psychiatric Hospital, where he experienced the most disturbing thing to date.”It felt like ice water being poured down the back of my shirt,” he said.

He also got blurred photographs at a house in Monroe he believed to be haunted. That house has since burned down.

But, he added, “I’ve been disappointed on many cases.”

Warren, who said she can see auras and can learn about a person from them, felt something special for Myers immediately upon their meeting.

“I was very impressed by him. He seemed very sincere. I could see a man who had a really deep interest,” she said. His job as a police officer makes him disciplined, a requirement for any paranormal researcher, according to Warren.

Myers is also wary, but not scared, in paranormal situations.

“He’s a guy that isn’t afraid,” she said, adding, “You’ve got to be leery. It’s stupid not to be leery” in haunted areas.

And the Savoy complex is still occupied. Warren said she had a vision of the past during a tour: a couple watching a movie in the Poli, as if time had stopped for them.

In Myers’ photos of her sitting in the theaters, Warren is surrounded by orbs. They float about the ceiling. They represent people attached to the building, some possibly actors who gave up family and personal lives to perform there, she said.

Still, Myers’ big test came Mischief Night, Oct. 30, when he and a Stamford police officer, who has been helping the Warrens for years, stayed overnight in the Occult Museum in the ghost hunters’ Monroe home. People who try to stay there overnight have fled in fear, Warren said. It contains artifacts from their investigations, some famous for reportedly leading to the death of anyone who touched them.

Myers didn’t touch, but looking through a video camera, he saw a moving orb. “It looked like there was a ping-pong ball bouncing around my camera,” Myers said.

Working with Lorraine and the Speras, visions like that could become a regular sight for the officer. But he maintains a professional attitude in his work.

“He’s taking photos, he’s taking recordings, he’s gaining knowledge,” Warren said. “He’s a good listener. He doesn’t go foolhardy into anything. He’s not in everybody’s face.”

“All in all, he’s really proven himself to us,” she said.

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

EAGLE, Colo. — It was mere coincidence that the production crew from the History Channel’s “Monster Quest” series set up in Eagle, Colo. on Halloween. But it was an appropriate day to investigate monsters.

And that was exactly the purpose of the visit: Production of a documentary piece investigating the possibility of a Sasquatch or Bigfoot presence in Colorado, where rumors of huge “monkey-men” creatures have been reported since the late 1800s. The Sasquatch or Bigfoot legend became more famous in the early 1950s, following publication of an out-of-focus photo of a huge, ape-like creature.

Minneapolis-based producer Liz Pollock and her crew were drawn to the Eagle area, located about 31 miles west of Vail, by a couple of incidents reported in the spring of 2000. Within a three-week period that year, two fishermen reported separate instances of finding huge, human-like footprints — 18 to 20 inches long — alongside the Eagle River.

One sighting was below Gypsum, and the second was just above Eagle. At the time, wildlife experts and law enforcement officers filed reports and studied the photos, but couldn’t explain what had made the tracks.

The popular “Monster Quest” show is a documentary television series that examines monster sightings around the world. Each episode is a mix of scientific examination evidence, eyewitness reports, and observations from informed skeptics. It’s a science known as “cryptozoology” — the study of animals that fall outside of contemporary zoological catalogs.

“Our main goal is to keep it as credible as possible,” said Pollock, “We try to get unbiased experts to look at people’s physical evidence.”

The documentary, tentatively slated to run this spring, will mark the first time a “Monster Quest” bigfoot story has centered on Colorado.

Pollack’s research turned up 100 reported bigfoot encounters (including track sightings and vocalizations, as well as physical sightings) reported in the state.

The completed program will include a mix of interviews, a scientific experiment, and an “expedition.” Pollack said that the approximate 15 full days of filming will include a couple of days on horseback and two days of helicopter flights over the Pikes Peak area (where the most recent Sasquatch sighting was reported) with a representative of the Colorado Bigfoot Organization.

Skeptics and the science
The Eagle segment features a scientific experiment and interviews with several locals who were involved in the track sightings.

Pollack tapped retired Division of Wildlife Officer Bill Heicher as the program’s “informed skeptic.” A wildlife biologist, Heicher makes it clear he’s not a bigfoot believer.

“If bigfoot were out there, somebody would have found signs, like scat, or fur samples that could be used for DNA tests,” he reasoned. Still, after talking with one of the men who found the tracks eight years ago, and examining the photographs, Heicher says he can’t explain what left the track near the river.

“I don’t think it was human. I ruled out wildlife tracks. I don’t know what it was,” Heicher said.

Bill Kaufman, now a captain with the Eagle County Sheriff’s Office, was one of the officers who looked into the incident at the time. Pollock’s crew filmed Kaufman discussing what he described as a credible witness, and the mysterious tracks.

Kaufman is not a bigfoot believer, but he noted law enforcement officers at the time could not determine what animal made the large, human-like tracks. Although the hind feet of bears produce tracks that can appear somewhat human, the size was way beyond any local bear track.

“I can’t explain it. The track was bigger than what I can explain. It’s that simple,” Kaufman says.

The “Monster Quest” crew, in an effort to get a feel for the size of a creature that would leave footprints the length and depth of those found in 2008, decided to organize an experiment. A hinged plywood “Sasquatch machine” was constructed and equipped with the molds of Sasquatch footprints.

The contraption was set up near the Eagle River. Cameraman Jim Tittle captured the action as Heicher and volunteer Eric Eves loaded sandbags onto the machine, then checked the depth of the resulting footprint. The conclusion: Well more than 800 pounds of weight was needed to leave a track in the hard-packed gravel bed. That’s considerably bigger than any local bear or moose.

Putting it all together
The film crew also spent some time at the Eagle County Historical Society Museum. Historical archives include persistent reports of mysterious ape-like creatures encountered in the woods.

A report in an 1881 Leadville newspaper told of local residents seeing a “man with long arms and a long shaggy fur covered body in the Lake Creek area.” (Lake Creek is a common stream name in Colorado, and the Eagle Valley does have a Lake Creek.)

A tale of Leadville-area miners encountering a strange, hairy, man-like creature with extraordinarily long arms is chronicled in Percy Eberhardt’s book “Treasure Tales of the Rockies.” The “Monster Quest” crew plans to film a re-enactment of that story.

Historically, a story about a Sasquatch-like creature in the Pearl Creek area of Camp Hale, outside of Leadville, circulates every couple of decades or so. The accounts, typically of the friend-of-a-friend-told-me variety, usually involve the sighting of a huge, shadowy form in the trees, big footprints, and the disappearance of some hapless individual (a soldier from Camp Hale, a hunter, or somebody’s spouse).

Pollock said once the filming is done, the writing of the show takes about two weeks, then the editing of the film involves another month of work. The program is scheduled to air in “Monster Quest’s” third season, probably in February or March.

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

A SPATE of UFO sightings on the Central Coast has attracted the attention of the UFO and Paranormal Research Society of Australia.

The society has convened a conference at Gosford this Saturday.

Society secretary Dominic McNamara has urged locals to attend and discuss any paranormal sightings and to question a panel of experts.

Mr McNamara said UFO sightings are regularly reported, and by everyday people.

He said the Gosford area was a UFO hot spot.

“There was a sighting over the Northern Beaches and Central Coast area a few months ago,” he said.

“People reported seeing a low-flying, white, triangular object moving silently across the sky,” he said.

“Reports stated it was moving as fast as a jet. It was completely silent but if it was a jet it was moving too fast to be so silent.”

Mr McNamara, an engineer, said his science-based occupation had not prevented him from exploring the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

“People ask how an engineer could take this seriously when this science is loaded with ifs and buts,” he said.

“We are a group trying to find the truth, to discover if there really is something out there. I pursue this topic with passion and logically.

“We visit reported sites and rule out any variables using scientific equipment.”

The Next Dimensions conference will be held at The Willows Quality Inn this Saturday, November 29, from 9am to 5.30pm.

Tickets cost $33 and are available for purchase from the society’s website at www.ufosociety.com.au.

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

Recordings of disembodied voices and a number of eerie personal experiences are enough for the Mason Dixon Paranormal Society to conclude that the Schifferstadt Architectural Museum is haunted.

After conducting a two-night paranormal investigation nearly three weeks ago, the society met with the museum’s staff Monday to reveal its findings.

During the investigation, which was open to the public for a fee to benefit the museum, the society collected about 70 hours of digital video recordings, more than two hours of thermal imaging video, and 180 hours of audio. After days of close watching and listening, the group came away with 35 electronic voice phenomena — believed to be recordings of ghostly voices.

“It’s a very low frequency tone that you cannot hear with the human ear,” said Stewart Cornelius, co-founder of Gettysburg, Pa.,-based society. “But for some reason mechanical devices can pick it up.”

Some EVPs from the Schifferstadt investigation feature clear answers to questions posed by the investigators — “yes” or “no” from unidentifiable voices.

Twice, society recorded a child’s voice saying what sounds like “mommy.”

Other recordings seem to be in German — fitting because Schifferstadt was originally home to German settlers. Even a few longer phrases were captured, such as a deep, raspy voice saying, “On the wall over there.”

Although the EVPs were chilling, they are not enough to scare away the Schifferstadt’s staff.

“It doesn’t really change things for me, but I already knew what was going on,” said Greg Glewwe, who helps with the museum’s Spirit Tours. “Even if you do get a little bit of a creepy feeling, there’s never been anything negative happen. In the end, there’s some stuff that you can’t come up with an explanation for.”

Liz Lipke, Schifferstadt’s former director and a self-proclaimed skeptic, thinks the ghostly evidence is more reassuring than anything.

“I have heard footsteps here myself and I can’t explain where they come from. I think that the investigation is a way to capture evidence of what the unexplained is — maybe make me feel as if other people have heard what I heard, and it’s not just my imagination.”

But to anyone unfamiliar with the paranormal and the strange happenings at Schifferstadt, the society findings may seem outlandish.

“People come up to me and they say I don’t believe it, and that’s fine,” said Darryl Keller, society co-founder. “You might not believe it and then you can be shown evidence, and that evidence could be taken to the most qualified video expert, and he can say, ‘Yes, I can tell you that this film is not tampered with.’ And still people won’t believe it until it happens to them.”

Whether someone believes in ghosts, there nothing paranormal about the society’s willingness to boost the museum’s fundraising efforts by doing the investigation.

Christina Murphy is the museum’s head gardener.N

It’s an icon of America’s tortured history of witch hysteria. Its very name evokes this city’s unending fascination with the occult. But is the Salem Witch House haunted? That is the question a team of ghost hunters hopes to answer, the Boston Globe reports. If the city grants permission, one night soon they will descend on the house with gadgets to search for any sign of paranormal presence in the home of one of the judges who sent 20 people to their deaths during the 1692 witch trials. Read more at chicagotribune.com/ghosts

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