Paranormal Research Club Ch. 01

I briefly wondered how far a "stadia" was, and while I remembered the word "Maenads" from Greek Mythology, I couldn't quite place it. I was about to ask him for some clarification when he turned his back and begin striding away from me and my thoughts left the subject immediately. The women that had been patiently standing nearby fell upon me like a pack of wolves. Their pretty faces were wild, twisted with insane lust. Their claw-like fingers, some carefully manicured with delicately painted nails, were clawing and tearing at my clothes. Their faces were set with savage intent, and I began looking forward to being raped by these women.

We had plans to camp for the night at the Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Apparently Erin's parents enjoyed birdwatching and had found a nice, out-of-the-way place to camp where we could park the van and get some sleep for the night without anyone bothering us. A large bump awakened me as the van ran over some hidden unevenness in the road. I didn't know how long I had been asleep, but it was pitch dark outside. Outside I saw dark trees framing a purple, starlit sky. Erin directed Kim to turn down a rough road that dead-ended in a grassy clearing surrounded by thick reeds and water. The moonlight was bright enough that we could see without our flashlights.

We made a small campfire. Erin had brought graham crackers, chocolate and marshmallows, and I had packed an earthenware jug of "Apple Pie", a beverage so named because despite its wicked alcohol content it was sweet enough that it tasted like molten homemade apple pie, especially when served warm. You can hardly tell the alcohol is there, which makes this a bit of a dangerous drink for the uninitiated.

(I make my Apple Pie drink a little differently every time, but I'll share the basic recipe with you. I use a half-gallon of apple cider, about a quart of apple juice, between three and five cinnamon sticks, just enough pumpkin pie spice that you can hardly taste it, and a splash of good vanilla extract that a friend of mine brought back from Mexico. Sweeten it to suit yourself, but I use roughly two cups of white sugar. My uncle, a crazy old bachelor that lives in a wooden shack by himself in the mountains of western North Carolina, prefers to use brown sugar, but I don't. Let it simmer in a slow cooker for a day or two on low, then fish out the cinnamon sticks or the cinnamon will get to overpowering the rest of the drink. Now, let it cool down so that the alcohol doesn't evaporate out after you add it, and if you want you can let it age for another one or two days in the refrigerator. Then decide how potent of a drink you want. I add about a quarter of a bottle of decent rum, about a quarter cup of cheap brandy, and then top it off with about a half-cup of any respectable vodka. My uncle prefers to just dump in half of a bottle of pure, 190-proof grain alcohol or spike it with a canning jar full of his homemade moonshine. Now, I love my uncle and I hate to sound cocky, but my uncle is crazy and you should make this drink my way because my way tastes better. Serve the drink warm, especially during the Fall and Winter. I use a slow-cooker on low, with the lid kept on so that the alcohol will re-condense instead of evaporating out, and we ladle it into coffee-cups. During the wintertime, I also make a homemade mulled wine that I ferment myself, but my family brought the recipe and the original yeast cultures over from Europe many years ago, and I'm not sharing the recipe with anyone.)

I built a small fire from oak twigs, then I loosened the cork in the jug of Apple Pie so that it wouldn't shoot out when the beverage began to heat up and set it down close to the fire. As I did this, Diana used her pocket knife to whittle some sticks into forks for the rest of the crew to use in roasting hot dogs and making s'mores. I knew Diana well enough to know that she would want to re-sharpen her knife after using it, and I also knew her well enough to know that she never packed a whetstone or a ceramic stick. Retrieving them from my rucksack, I wordlessly slipped them into the back pocket of her tight blue jeans. I didn't deliberately try to make any more contact than was necessary to slip her the sharpening supplies, but only a dead man could have failed to appreciate what the small amount of contact I had with her wonderfully firm ass cheek.

"Thanks!" Diana said as she smiled at me brilliantly. She didn't need to be told what I had just put in her back pocket. I had clearly read her mind.

Wedged in between the luggage and plastic storage bins full of the rest of our gear in the back of the van, we had a few folding chairs which the other ladies helped to set up in a ring around the campfire. Soon we were munching our dinner and sipping the hot, sweet apple-flavored beverage from the battered and fire-stained tin cups we used for camping. The faces around the campfire reflected the flickering light, and the memory of the torchlit scenes from my dreams came unbidden to my mind.

Kim walked over to the van, and pulled out a blue plastic storage bin. Diana and I both instantly began to rise to help her. "No, I've got it!" she grunted as she awkwardly lugged the plastic chest over to where Sarah and Heather were sitting. Both of my cousins glanced expectantly at the plastic chest.

Plopping herself down on the ground near the fire, Kim pried the lid off the storage bin and began pulling out items.

"Hey, Kim," Sarah asked. "Did you get a tattoo?"

My heart seemed to stop and a chill ran down my spine as I remembered the tattoo on my sister's left hip from my previous night's dream. I looked over, and as my sister had bent over to open the container her t-shirt had ridden up just enough to reveal the top of a tattoo on her left hip. Her pants covered most of it, but the part I saw looked dreadfully familiar.

Kim smiled at Sarah. "Yep!" And then she erased any further doubt in my mind by pulling the waistband of her jeans aside and showing Sarah her new tattoo, a small stylized heart with the words "Love is Forever" written around it in flowing script. My heart pounded inside of my chest. I didn't know what was going on, but there is no way that I could have known about that tattoo last night when I had seen it in my dream, looking exactly as it now did in real life.

"It just finished healing up," Kim said. "I've been waiting until it was healed up to tell people about it, since people always want to see a new tattoo and before it healed it just looked kind of gross." She reached into the container and pulled out a battered fanny pack made of nearly indestructible fake leather. A stencil on the top of the bag identified it as kit number 3 of the five spare kits of basic ghost-hunting gear that we keep on hand to loan out to people that don't have their own.

Kim began: "First things first: when you're ghost-hunting, you'll always be with a partner at all times. That way someone else can verify everything you see, and it's also important for safety reasons. Now, most people that do ghost-hunting a lot have their own kit, but you'll be using one of the club's extras. We keep everything together in a fanny pack for easy access." Kim unzipped the main pocket of the fanny pack. "In this pocket, there's a small notepad and two mechanical pencils for taking notes. Record anything unusual you encounter in the notepad as specifically as possible. For example, if you get a sudden temperature change, record the time, the starting temperature, the ending temperature, and the amount of time that elapsed. Whenever you see or hear anything unusual, write down specific times so that we can look for possible causes that aren't supernatural. Too much data is far better than not enough. Some people also use the notepads for automatic writing, but our club doesn't have anyone in it that really does that, and since both of you are just starting out with this I would really discourage trying it for now. For one thing, I don't like the idea of letting just any old spirit out there use my body for any reason, and for another thing it's too easy to get results that you either deliberately or unconsciously influenced."

She held up a narrow, foil-wrapped cylinder. "This is a chemlight. If the batteries in both your primary and alternate flashlights go dead, this will give you enough light to safely find your way out. You might find that batteries sometimes die a lot faster when you're ghost hunting than they usually do under normal circumstances. In this pocket, we've got spare double and triple A batteries. Almost all of our portable equipment runs off of one of those two types, and at least one of the two flashlights that everyone carries should take one of those two types of battery. That way we can all share batteries." She held up a small digital camera. "This is a cheap little digital camera. I'm sure you know how to use it. Whenever something unusual is going on, feel free to start snapping a few photos even if you don't see anything unusual. Sometimes you might luck out and get a picture of something that was in the room with you that you couldn't see. I know that some of the regular members of the team like to carry their fancy infrared cameras, and those usually do work a lot better for catching pictures of paranormal activity, but they're also a lot more expensive. There's a spare memory card in the same pocket as the camera. Don't be afraid to take lots of pictures, and don't hesitate to use the video feature if you think you might catch something interesting. This is a digital voice recorder," she said while holding up the same sort of recorder that some students at school use to record the lectures. "Some people use it as an alternative to the notepad when it's too dark to write things down, but the main thing we have them in the kit for is for use while looking for EVPs, or, oh, what does that stand for?"

Heather looked at Kim and raised an eyebrow. "I don't know how I feel about all of this 'something in the room with me that I didn't see' stuff."

I answered Kim. "EVP stands for Electronic Voice Phenomenon. You ask questions or talk into an empty room, and sometimes something will answer you. You won't hear anything while you're asking the questions, but when you play back the voice recording you'll hear it. Most of the time it's so garbled that it's hard to tell what it's saying, but on rare occasions you can hear it loud and clear. It's pretty cool when they answer the question, but don't be surprised when say something entirely irrelevant or incoherent. Don't ever try to contact any spirit that you suspect might be evil or demonic using EVP or anything else. If you're getting EVP recordings and start getting a feeling you really don't like, it's usually a good idea to stay calm and in control, stop what you're doing, tell your partner, and leave. There's no point in taking any chance of getting a negative spirit attached to you if you can help it. Oh, and don't ever try to get EVP recordings anywhere but where you're investigating. We don't pretend to understand much about how exactly this works, and most of the people that do think they understand it are too cocky for their own good. But if you look for EVPs in a place that isn't already reputed to be haunted, there's a good chance that spirits that want to communicate with you will move in looking for you, and they'll likely be hard to get rid of. And you don't want that. Some people might disagree with me, but I say to never look for EVPs in your own home under any circumstances."

Kim smiled at me. "Thanks, Egon."

Diane chuckled. "I think the clearest EVP we've ever gotten was a man's voice saying 'it's dark in here'. We were in a private residence, asking if he was the spirit of a man that had killed himself in that room, but apparently he thought that it was more important to make sure that we had noticed that the lights in the room weren't on. If I were personally ever going to go through the trouble of returning from the grave and I finally got a chance to communicate with the living from the other side, I would hope that I would have something better to say than that!"

Several members of the party chuckled. Heather wasn't among them. I smiled at the reference to the EVP, and sipped my warm apple-flavored drink. There was a lot of alcohol in it, and I felt a warm flush in my face. The fire popped loudly. Neither Diana nor I like sudden, loud noises, and we both flinched. But Heather was already trembling slightly, and at the sudden sound she spilled a bit of her drink on her lap. Sarah giggled at her sister, and Heather responded to her with a withering glare.

Kim continued digging through the bag. "Use the walkie-talkie to communicate with the rest of us. We keep them all on channel 3, unless we are getting too much interference. We probably won't have cell phone reception where we'll be going. Turn the walkie-talkies off when anyone around you is looking for EVPs, for obvious reasons. Most people carry their own EMF detector, but you don't really need one. The plastic hiking compass in your bag is also affected by electromagnetic abnormalities, but it doesn't have batteries that can die and, far more importantly for our purposes, it's cheaper. Compasses are one of the oldest pieces of ghost hunting equipment that people still regularly use. If the needle quits pointing north or starts to spin, it generally indicates that something freaky is going on. Or it can mean that you're near metal or something that generates electricity, so don't just chalk up your compass acting up to anything abnormal. Record what your compass did and the time it happened in your notebook. By itself, most people don't consider EMF readings or a compass acting up to be clear evidence of the paranormal, but it can give you a strong indication of where to look for it. Now, this is a digital thermometer that can quantify and assist in documenting sudden temperature changes. Again, a sudden temperature change isn't evidence by itself, but it can help you find evidence by letting you know that something unusual might be going on. Some people say that it gets colder when spirits suck heat out of the air or they can take power from electrical equipment so that they can get the energy to manifest themselves. The little spool of masking tape is for marking locations without damaging surfaces, and the plastic bag with toilet paper and adhesive bandages is there for your comfort. The whistle is in case your radio quits working and you need help immediately, so only blow it in an emergency."

Sarah spoke up. "Are we going to use Ouija boards and stuff like that? I tried one of those at a party once, and it just spelled something that looked like someone had a cat walk across the keyboard of their computer."

Erin answered her from her seat across the fire. "Some people like those, but nobody in our club is much of a fan. I've heard of too many people that have played around with those boards and have had trouble with negative, harmful spirits afterwords. The Ouija boards don't guarantee contact with anything evil or demonic, and choosing not to use one doesn't guarantee that you won't encounter evil or demonic entities. It's a tool like any other, and it's neither inherently good nor evil. But I've known about enough people that have been hurt using it that I'm personally not interested in giving it a try."

Sarah looked at her. "But you are going to go after EVP recordings? What's the difference?"

"There really isn't much of one from the standpoint of, either way, you're trying to contact spirits and you never know with any certainty who or what, if anything, is going to answer you. But Ouija boards can be manipulated by people moving the planchette to what they either deliberately want it to point to, or to what they subconsciously expect it to point to, so the results aren't as objective or empirical as we would like them to be. We try as much as possible to keep the techniques that we use limited to ones that we can't either deliberately or unconsciously manipulate. That's part of why our own club doesn't rely much on psychics or mediums that claim to talk to the dead, although some other clubs find them very useful. You can't usually prove whether the experience is genuine, or whether they believe themselves to be channeling a spirit when in fact it's wishful thinking on their part. We'll listen to psychics or mediums that feel like sharing things with us and we're always respectful of them, but we take what they say with a grain of salt."

Reaching back into the storage bin, Kim dug out one of our stationary cameras. "Obviously we can't be everywhere at once. This is an infrared video camera that we leave running all night. We're going to have several of these set up in potentially active areas where we won't have people. We used to use motion activated ones, but apparently they aren't always sensitive enough to get triggered by ghosts. A camera can't pick up everything, but it's a lot better than just leaving spots that we can't monitor entirely blind. Also, they are good for detecting animals, people that aren't related to the investigation, or anything else in the area that might help us to account for things that would otherwise be hard to explain. On every investigation, our goal is to go in with the assumption that there is a logical explanation for anything that happens, and we only assign a supernatural cause for things that we cannot find any other possible explanation for. As far as the specifics of what you'll be doing tomorrow night, I'm sure that either John or Diane will give you all of that information after we break up in teams to begin the investigation. Any questions so far?"

Sarah and Heather regarded her soberly. "I don't think so," said Heather quietly. Then she got up and poured herself another cup of warm, alcohol-laden apple drink. Her face looked white, and her hands were trembling.

"Heather, are you sure you want to do this?" Erin asked.

"Yeah, it's not too late for you to sit out the investigation if you're not comfortable doing it," Diana offered. Prior to the last minute personnel shortage that we experienced, Diana and I had agreed that this would be an excursion that only experienced members of the club would be coming on. Partly, that was because we wanted to do the most professional job for Erin's parents that we could. Partly, our decision was because this was not going to be an easy haunting. If half of what Erin and her family said about the old church was true, this was going to be one hell of a wild ride.

There are two major types of hauntings, depending on how you classify such things. Residual hauntings are by far the most common. You could compare them to watching an old recording of something that has happened in the past. They're usually more-or-less predictable, and you may encounter sights, sounds, smells, feelings, or other phenomena that don't have any rational explanation. Even so, residual hauntings are typically absolutely harmless. Whatever is happening there, it doesn't involve any sort of spirit that knows you're there or is interested in interacting with you for good or ill. They're usually good hauntings to use for training beginners.

Intelligent hauntings are different from residual ones. With intelligent hauntings, the spirit knows you're there and may be interested in interacting or sometimes even communicating with you. These are the hauntings that most people think of when they're thinking about ghosts. They can interact with objects, open and close doors, and they can also interact with people. Sometimes these hauntings are playful and harmless, and at other times they can be horrifying or even downright physically dangerous. There are some types of intelligent hauntings, such as demonic activity, that beginners should definitely not ever be involved with investigating. We didn't know for certain what we were getting into here. There were definitely going to be multiple spirits involved, and categorizing a haunting like this one is well-neigh impossible. The persistent fear that the haunting had seemed to inspire for over two centuries now was not a good sign at all. My sister was probably experienced enough to hold her own, especially if there was someone more experienced than herself paired with her. I began to feel guilty for allowing my cousins to come with us and not speaking up in the restaurant this morning. Heather might get herself into trouble by panicking. Sarah could get herself into trouble by failing to take things seriously enough.