NoTimeForFools Thread

So here goes nothing.

When I was in college it was the height of all the ghost hunting shows. I was always really interested in the possibly of it all since I was a kid. I didn't know if I believed in it or not, I just liked the idea of investigating it all - so I started doing research. I read books, watched documentaries, and studied different techniques. The more and more I learned the more I realized that going into a situation "looking" for ghosts or spirits will complete ruin an investigation. What tends to happen with this mentality is that your brain starts finding things that aren't there - so I started to train myself to go into situations as a skeptic and instead of looking for the paranormal, it was better to look for normal explanations for the abnormal.

While doing this I met people from all walks of life who also adopted this method. We eventually made a club in our university that actually became the most active and sought after club to be a part of. We were invited to houses, business, and historic parks (Gettysburg namely) to see what explanations and evidence we could find. We would hand pick teams for special investigations if we considered them "serious." We did this because the club was open enrollment and while we would take days to have refresher courses of do's and don't's during investigations there would still be people looking to find ghosts.

Anyway, out of all the investigations we did we had three places we went to that we could not explain what we had capture on video and sound.

One was a theater in our home city. The entire night we caught nothing and thought it was a bust. Even going through evidence - which we would do three times - provided almost nothing....until a co-investigator's mother walked through the room where we were watching a tape of the entire theater and said "Who the hell is up there?" We made her show us. In the balcony seats (which were locked that night and we were not allowed up there because of the antiques in it) there was a lamp lit behind a window curtain. You can see a a figure move in front of the light of the lamp to almost block it (similarly as if you were to put a white sheet in front of a light to deaden the intensity of it) and then you can see something pull back the curtain a little bit as if it were peeking out. It lasted about 15 seconds. We checked our records of where each group was at the time and asked each person if they'd been in the balcony - all responded no. We then asked our guide (who would unlock and lock the sections we were investigating) to which she responded that she did not have a key to the balcony because of what was inside of them. Regardless, she was with my group at the time of the event and every other person at the investigation was accounted for because we were able to match up timestamps from their recordings.

Two Gettysburg. There were three instances at Gettysburg that were unexplainable. This evidence has been lost because we did this investigation close to 7 years ago when we were less organized. The first was a picture - one of the best I've seen. There were actually three pictures that ran together - the first two being just fog that seemed to have a blue hue to it and the last one sending chills down my spine because it was a clear as day man laying on a rock at Devil's Den looking at Little Round Top (from the bottom) dressed in full confederate garb. When first looking at it it looks like the picture was distorted until you realize you can make out the whiskers in his beard and the gold in his patches on his hat and arms of his coat. The second (which I was not there for) was supposedly a piece of paper that was put on a rock in the woods that said "what's your name" - they walked back about 40 feet or so and recorded and watched for 30 mins to make sure it wasn't tampered with. When they went back there were clear scribbles on the paper, but they weren't anything legible. The third and final Gettysburg story is when I was walking through an area between the Wheatfield and Cemetery Ridge. I was with two or three others and we had about ten feet between us as we walked in line. This is all on a digital recorded. You can hear something hit me in the back - like if someone threw a rock or something. I stopped and say "Ouch, Joe...what the hell, dude?' to which he says he did nothing....at the time of this we were all stopped and through the recording you can hear us go silent and in the distance hear a drum play a few beats. We did not hear this at the time we were stopped until we listened to the recording later, but Joe (as mentioned previously) is a drummer and went white when he heard it...he listened a few more times before telling us it was a halt from a drum line.

The third one is very lengthy and I guess I'll write it if there is any interest. I don't currently do these investigations and I'll be the first one in the room to be a skeptic with any paranormal claim...but there were a few times that I was stumped. I'm not saying I know if ghosts exist or not...I don't have that answer. I can, however, say that there are things in this world we don't understand. Throughout the years we did the club in the university we became highly recognized - have been given awards from the school for what we have done in our investigation tactics and also community and charitable work. Doing investigations are absolutely not what you see on TV - they are much more boring and you seldom have anything happen, but it's a labor of love. It's hard to explain it - because once you find that one piece of footage you can't explain you want more. I know I'll get backlash from these claims, I always do when I post my experiences, but I promise on my parent's lives that what I say DID indeed happen. I have NOT tried to emphasize any of it and I have told the stories as they've happened.