Ghost Trackin'...

G'Morning! :)

It's just about 9:30 am as I write this, and I've already had a full night's sleep. That's because I decided to go ahead and flip my sleep schedule to Normal Folk Time. Lately I've been having trouble getting to sleep on Sunday morning when I get home from work, so since I'll be spending Thanksgiving with normal people on a normal sleep schedule, I decided to go ahead and stay up as late as possible last night. I went to be a little before 8:00 pm and woke up a little after 4:00 am.

Fascinating, isn't it?

Anyway... My bro wanted to research the towns we're going to be driving by/through on our way to and from Mom's house. He wants to know where the hauntings are. (Not that we're planning on stopping and investigating on either trip -- we've yet to actually go on an investigation so far -- but just to know.)

Well...

Obsessively looking things up on the Net happens to be something I do regularly, so I volunteered to write up a report on which towns are supposed to be haunted and what's supposed to be haunting them. We don't have printers that work, so I can make text files out of them and upload them to my iPod for convenient travel and reference.

3 HOURS LATER...

My shoulders are tense and my vision is blurring, but I've got the best superficial notes available! :)

(Ideally, one would actually visit the libraries and local newspaper and hall of records and so forth of the individual towns, if one were doing real research. But since we may not even be stopping in any of these towns, superficial -- i.e. Internet-only -- research suffices fine.)

I haven't created the text files and uploaded them to the 'Pod yet. I wanted to rest my brain for a moment.

So, here's why you should be impressed with me. Besides Google-ing each town, I went to Ghost Village.com and searched through a decade worth of Personal Experiences archives, we're talking 1999 to 2008, scanning each year for 18 different cities.

I also took notes on 4 towns from so-called reports on Ghosts of America.com before realizing that these accounts are COMPLETELY FABRICATED! Probably using a computer program! I came to this conclusion when, on the 4th town, I noticed that certain aspects of the excounters were identical to other encounters in other towns.

For instance: Austin might have "reports" of skeletons sipping blood from a jar, and a girl with a machete sticking out of her head throwing throwing into Town lake. Then Houston might have a sighting of a girl with a huge knife sticking out of her head sipping a jar of blood, and a coal miner throwing bricks into Lake Houston!

I boggled at the revelation!

Then I read the About Us page, on which the webmaster(s) states that they "believe that everybody has the right to read about ghost sightings in their own towns or cities. So for the towns and cities around the country that are not lucky enough to have their own sightings we have made up fictional sightings as a public service. As a city or town gets more and more sightings submitted the fictional sightings are automatically dropped."

Okay, so I have to give them props for that. Had the Net been around when I was a kid, I would have dug reading about a scary skeleton with a clever sticking out of its head throwing jars of blood into Buffalo Wallow, lol. Though, interestingly, Odessa (where I grew up) actually has real sightings there. So they wouldn't have had to create fictitious encounters for my home town.

Still, before I read that I was pretty annoyed. The fictitious accounts are written with hair-curling-ly poor grammar that is not merely an aesthetic pain to read, but also a logistical nightmare to wrap your brain around! Like this little nugget of prose gold:

"The ghost of a coal-miner is rumored to have been witnessed on frequent instances being carried by a bicycle on a murky highway near Franklin (Texas)."

Did your head explode?

I mean, the fact that the entire thing is in the passive voice is enough to make you want to vomit prepositions. But exactly HOW can a highway be "murky" and did the bicycle in question possess arms?!

But if the folks at Ghosts of America are using a computer program to randomly generate
these stories, that explains the sense-bending grammar, lol.

I was helped a bit in my research by Texas Ghost Hunters.com. They didn't have reports on many of the towns we'll be driving through, but the shed some light on a couple.

I started out with Shadowlands.net. Most of their info seems to be culled from other web sites, but it's a decent place to get started. It's easy to navigate, and if you find reports there you at least have some ideas to follow up on. If you don't find anything in their index, you know you've got more intense searching ahead of you, and you're braced for the possibility you may turn up nothing.

Like I said, though, Brian & I haven't even performed a single investigation here in town, yet. We're still piecing together the equipment and reading up on the subject and whatnot. We just want the info for this trip to amuse/educate ourselves on the drive.

Okay, so I'm going to get this info onto my iPod and then rest my brain for a few hours.

Hope you have a spooktacular day!!!

:D