Basement IR still – Denver area family support center.

We did an investigation a few weeks back with our friends from Full Moon Explorations at a family support center in the Front Range area (the folks who work there preferred we NOT name the location, so we won’t.) They indicated some reports of shadow figures, voices and inexplicable cooking aromas, centered primarily around the basement. Several of the employees there feel decidedly uncomfortable in the basement – one or two won’t go down there alone, ever.

The building itself has a somewhat interesting past; originally built as apartments  (probably in the 30′s or 40′s), the stone building was actually moved sometime in the late 50′s, fairly surprising given the girth of the building and the fact that it was made almost entirely of large bricks. The building had been converted to this family counseling center in the late 1970′s.

One of the folks who works there indicated that a medium, upon entering the building for the first time and not knowing anything of their reports, indicated that there was a presence “associated with the land”, rather than the building itself.

While we don’t usually put too much credence in non-specific observations of mediums, we did find it interesting that they indicated some sort of presence without being told ahead of time that the folks who work there also sensed something, and further that the presence was not associated with the building, but with the land itself.

The ‘funny’ hallway threshold – the ‘therapy room’ is on the other side of the wall on the right

As for me, I do not consider myself a “sensitive” in any way (a lot of paranormal researchers do, for whatever that’s worth), but during my initial walkthrough of the basement, I did get a little sensation passing through one of the hallway thresholds. It was a non-intuitive little passage between two sections of the basement, with a couple of funny angles in the building construction, and maybe it was just that…but the worker whose office (we call it their ‘therapy room’) was right next to that threshold indicated that she believed this was the most active part of the basement.

She indicated she often felt that someone was just out of sight outside her office, essentially in  the same hallway threshold. She told me this after my walkthrough; I found that an interesting coincidence, and we spent a good part of the evening investigating in that room. I did tell her that weird angles, low ceilings and otherwise non-intuitive spaces in buildings can produce feelings of claustrophobia and unease, and we tried to keep that in mind when we investigated in the nearby office.

As for visual evidence, we ran a static IR video camera in two locations – probably 3 hours total – and I set a static digital camera at the far end of the basement. Nothing of note in any of the imagery from either device.

Therapy room

We did, however, capture a number of interesting EVP’s:

This was captured in the ‘therapy room’ – inexplicable voice at the 4-5 second mark. Listen carefully.

Also captured in the ‘therapy room’ , at the 5 second mark.

This voice, which seems to say a name (we won’t indicate what WE think it says), was captured early in the evening, while Michelle from FME was setting up her video system. 5 second mark you may need to turn this up a bit on the computer:

Finally, this voice seems to say…we’ll let you decide, if the title doesn’t give it away….this one is subtle and very fast; check out the 1.5-2.5 sec section of this recording.

The place didn’t feel particularly beset with spirit activity – it is, after all, a working counseling center, with offices, a pantry brimming with toys and food supplies, and decidedly normal vestiges of an operational space. But that how it works sometimes – you don’t need a derelict old building to find inexplicata.

Is this place haunted? The EVP’s are indeed interesting.

A 16,500-year-old cemetery with human remains — buried alongside those of a red fox — suggests humans may have had a soft spot for the animals well before dogs became man’s best friend.

The site at ‘Uyun al-Hammam in northern Jordan is the earliest known formal burial ground in the Middle East, pre-dating other cemeteries in the region by a few millennia, scientists from Canada and the UK report in a new study published in PLoS ONE.

“This may be the earliest known cemetery period,” Edward Banning, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto who is leading the excavations, told me today. “It probably depends on what you mean by cemetery.”

Cool stuff, but in short order the ghost hunter geek in us rises to the surface and asks, “Could we try an EVP to hear they language these people spoke?”

Is that a silly question?

Last week’s episode of Ghost Hunters featured a segment where one investigator, in a room (presumably) out of earshot from another, requested that a spirit convey a one word message to his partner in the other room. ‘Atlantis’, in this case, and then another: ‘Comet’.

The second investigator then reported, when the pair reunited a few minutes later, that he distinctly heard a disembodied voice whisper ‘Atlantis’ to him, followed by “something that sounded like ‘comic’ or comics’ or ….”

Well, you get the picture.

First off, like just about everything else on this and other ghost hunting reality TV shows, one has to take it on faith that it was not rehearsed ahead of time. There is a certain suspension of disbelief, or suspension of skepticism if you will, that these guys are not faking evidence ever, in any way – or else the program fails as anything but parody or chincey entertainment. No way to convince the true disbelievers, of course, but that’s okay. It’s not likely they’d be persuaded by anything aired as evidence on these shows anyway.

But let’s say this is the real thing. Unrehearsed, unscripted. What does that mean?

It means that the prompting investigator successfully communicated to an unseen spirit, tested its ability to hear him, tested his ability to communicate a message, and trusted his partner to hear it. The stack of assumptive tests in this experiment is pretty substantial – one would presume that had the experiment failed, it wouldn’t have aired, so to be fair, we don’t know how many times they’ve tried this in the past.

But one of the unspoken tenets of EVP experimentation is that the spirit may be inclined or able  to respond to a provocative questions (“What’s your name?”, “Who are you looking for?”), but more often than not merely vocalizes something at random, oblivious to, or in defiance of, an investigator’s questioning.

The notion that the investigator asked them to repeat a phrase or word to another member raises some interesting possibilities, but also some basic questions about the investigators themselves. Why not, for example, have the spirit identify themself by name. Their birthday, death day. Their spouse’s or children’s names?

How about, “What’s it like to be dead?”

We’re still trying to merge the seemingly trivial content of this exercise with the profound implications it offers. Perhaps we’re looking too closely at something that was concocted at the last minute, or simply falling for an easily staged parlor trick, aided by rehearsal off-camera.

But treating a spirit as a disembodied parrot seems a wildly pointless exercise in revealing the nature of the afterlife. Couldn’t we get the spirit to even intimate about The Final Answer?