Para-Thoughts...

It's Friday night/Saturday morning and I'm back at work, babysitting the TV station, and I finally have a chance to gather my thoughts about last weekend. :)

It's been hectic.

After the event, I pretty much spent Sunday and Monday sleeping, lol. I seriously don't remember much except for checking my email a couple of times.

Then Tuesday and Wednesday were dedicated to reviewing some video footage from a client investigation. (I wasn't able to be there, but I got to help out with the evidence review. Very cool! I need verification from the investigators who were there, but I believe I caught a motion sensor going off by itself when every member of the team could be accounted for, and none of them were in the same room as the motion sensor!)

Thursday, naturally, was spent getting back into my work groove.

But even as busy as the last few days have been, I keep thinking back to last weekend!

Okay, lets set aside the fact that we got to ghost hunt with a Ghost Hunter (and a Ghost Hunter International). That was overwhelmingly cool, no doubt!!! :D But even if Mr. Harnois weren't with us, this still would have been a really cool investigation!

I mentioned breakfast, and teammate Megan giving me a lift to Yorktown. But just arriving at the asylum was, in itself, an amazing thing!

You drive through this quaint little town, and when you're just about to exit the other end of town, the asylum pops out from behind some trees and goes "Boo!"

This was really fun for me, because Megan hadn't been to the asylum before, so I got to enjoy her seeing it for the first time.

Then we all pile out of our vehicles, and you simply have to run up those steps and say "Hi" to the place! You can't help it! It has such a welcoming presence!

Well... sort of, lol.

I mean, it's creepy, but not really menacing. You know? Like a cool old at a family reunion uncle whose sort of a curmudgeon: You know he's gonna give you a hard time, you expect it, but you also know he doesn't mean any harm.

So when everyone arrives and has a chance to greet the building and stretch their legs, we get to work.



I started out helping Jeromy and Terri (pictured above, with Brian Harnois just behind them) runs cable throughout the asylum for the cameras.

Right off the bat, Brian Harnois had an experience in the kitchen, so Terri and I ran the cable through the ceiling, so that investigators wouldn't be tripping over it all night long.

When I say "we" ran the cable, I should probably fess up that Terri climbed a ladder, threw the cable across ceiling tiles (through a maze of support struts which did their damnedest to block her throw), then moved the ladder to the next position.

I pulled the cable taught between throws.

Terribly helpful, aren't I? ;P

The fact, though, is that Terri and Jeromy make a formidable tech team, and staying out of their way is actually a valuable contribution, lol. These cats know how to set up and tear down the equipment!

And they should... Jeromy built a considerable portion of it!

An excellent example:

The way I catch EVPs -- the way most everyone captures EVPs -- is to take an audio recorder into a possibly haunted location, turn it on, and let it roll.

It's the way Hans Holzer did it in the 1960s and it's the way Jason & Grant do it today.

And there's no bad there.

But Jeromy wasn't satisfied with this.

His big problem with the traditional method was that, since it's all aural, you can't see everyone one in the room, to prove that the source of the EVP is paranormal.

So he created this cool hand-held device that he calls the Tri-Filed Audio-Visual Recorder. It has 2 cameras on either side of the front of the device, each with a mic and wide-angle lens. So if you're holding this device, you can see everyone in the room.

If you watch Ghost Hunters you've seen them catch EVPs with their video cameras. But something that bugged Jeromy about this setup was that you couldn't see the camera man. If a skeptic really wanted to be stubborn, all he/she has to say is "how do we know the camera operator didn't say that?"

And it's a valid point.

So Jeromy's Tri-Field Audio-Video Recorder has a camera and mic that covers the camera person, too! :D

Everyone in the room is covered. If you're reviewing the footage and you hear a voice or a cough or something, you can check all three cameras (4, if you choose to attach a thermal imager to this setup, an option Jeromy has allowed for) and verify for yourself that no one in the room made the sound!

Debunk that! ;P

The first time I met Jeromy -- which was the March investigation of Yorktown -- he was carrying around a larger version of this. It had the 2 forward IR cameras, a forward-pointing thermal camera, and the cameraman cam. (That's when he explained to me about wanting to be able to account for absolutely everyone in the room, to more thoroughly validate evidence.) At that time you needed both hands to hold it, even though it was surprisingly light.

But now he's got the thing so streamlined you only need one hand. The way he waved it around, it can't weigh more than a toy gun!

So when you're investigating with Jeromy, you're investigating with the coolest equipment! If it doesn't already exist, he'll just create it, lol!

A lot of investigators wish they could investigate with a thermal camera, but we get to investigate with cool equipment that doesn't exist anywhere else, hee-hee. :P

But besides being a mad inventor, he's also a fun guy.

Actually, all of Texas Spirits are fun folks!!!

There is this peach tree (or, you know... peach suspiciously-tall-scraggly-brush) whose roots are reported to be uncomfortably close to a sewage line. Through out the setup, you'd hear the odd threat that if you didn't get so-and-so done in time you would be forced to eat one of the Peaches of Questionable Root-Source.

Well... The threat didn't last very long...



Sheryl is either a very brave soul or a very silly soul... But she reported the Peaches of Questionable Root-Source are actually quite tasty.

We took her word for it.

Most of us... I think there was one or two other crazy-people who took a bite out of it, but I can't recall who just at the moment.

Before the investigation, we all had dinner, and we set up a tent to house the table that had all the food on it. I so wish I taken some pics of Jon, Jesse, Brian Harnois and me setting this thing up!

Okay, I open the box, and it's filled with a white tarp and roughly one billion almost identical white metal poles.

I'm usually not one to bother reading instructions, but with this I decided to root around the box for some...

What I found was colorful confetti, which I believe was, at one time, the instructions.

So you've got four creative male minds with this over-sized Erector Set, each with a different idea of how it probably goes together.

Now, if you were one of the guests, hopefully, you didn't notice anything untoward when you got there. But the way it finally came out, the support structure was too short for the tarp to fit one way, and too long for it to fit the other way, lol!

Like I said, I think we pulled it off. It served its purpose perfectly! But it was interesting putting it together, lol.

This weekend, what I'm most excited about is reviewing the digital audio recorders I brought! (The video footage was priority, because that was a client case. So, naturally, that took priority.)

The way the investigation ran was the guests formed 3 investigative groups who took a floor (basement, 1st floor and 2nd floor) and the Texas Spirit team was divided up as team leaders for each floor, with Brian Harnois floating between teams.

Jesse and I were helping the team on the first floor for the first leg of the investigation, and right off the bat one of the guest investigators gets this really strong, distinct impression from the Operating Room.

So I turn on one of my digital recorders and Jesse leads us in an EVP session.

I took a lot of pics -- something I'm trying to train myself to do; I'm aurally fixated, so it's easy for me to forget that pictures might capture even more compelling evidence.



It was really cool watching Jesse work. He's got this sort of authority when he's leading an EVP session that makes you feel certain that if there's anything unseen in the room, they will surely speak up, lol.

I can't wait to get to that audio!

Ooh!

Some of the photos I got provide evidence of one type of infestation that, I think, speak for themselves...





...whatever spirit entities may or may not reside in the Yorktown Memorial Hospital & Asylum, I think it's clear that at least one of those aliens from Alien lives there for certain!

I call these pics "WTF! It's Eating Through The Frickin' Pipes!!!" Parts 1 and 2. What do you think? I'm currently waiting to hear back from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth regarding their interest in hosting an exhibit of my work. ;P

For real, though, there was one moment, right after the guests broke up for a break, when we got some confirmation we might not be alone there that night!

I had done a shift watching the monitors for the IR cameras, and everyone was sort of passing by or hanging around our base of operations (which is the nurse's station on the first floor). Out of nowhere Stephanie reports an odd spike on her K-2 meter!



We stare at her meter for a moment before the rest of us grab a piece of equipment and add it to the mix. In the picture, you can see Jeromy's hand holding the Tri-Field Audio-Video Recorder. After taking the pic I set one of my audio recorders down.

That's another audio file I can't wait to review!

And what's really exciting for me is that these are just a handful of memories off the top of my head! When I did into the audio this weekend (my relative "weekend", not the real weekend, which it already is as I write this, lol) I know that I'll get to relive a hundred more fun memories!

I'm telling ya, being a part of this team is a no-lose proposition: Even if we never got any evidence of the paranormal ever again, investigating with them will ALWAYS be a blast! :D

Okay, my shift's nearly over. Thanks for helping me pass the time and re-live an AMAZING experience! :D