Passing Lane Paranormal Investigations

The land along the Little Miami River in Ohio is known for a number of important prehistoric American sites. One of the most important is the Turpin Mound area in Anderson Township (named after the Turpin family farm on which it stood). Much of the area, including an area to the southwest known as Sand Ridge, is believed to be of Fort Ancient origin, according to surveys carried out in the 1870s and early 1880s. The mounds may have been created around the years 700 – 1500 AD. Other later surveys made note of many more sites.

One of the mounds in the Sand Ridge area is reported to have had a circle of large standing stones surrounding it, much like some prehistoric sites found in Great Britain.

For months, the Turpin area has been raided by amateur archaeologists looking for artifacts. This is now against the law, and police are currently looking for people who robbed a section of the site just last week (and left behind their car and cell phone as they ran off into the woods to escape arrest).

This just illustrates how urgently we need to work to protect prehistoric sites like this from further destruction. The sites have already been desecrated by earlier excavations, with most of the artifacts taken to the Peabody Museum in Boston. The artifacts taken by the famous team of Squier and Davis were eventually sold to a private collector and then taken by the British Museum in London. I think there should be some sort of action taken to get these items and to return them to Ohio where they belong. It’s a disgrace that they were removed from mounds and earthworks in the first place but since they have already been removed, we could at least put them in a museum in Ohio where people could see them and learn about the cultural and spiritual history of the land they live on.

Robert Bess’s Parabot Containment Chamber

The other day I wrote an entry about how it may be possible to use the general idea from an old Outer Limits episode to create a contained system that would make it possible to provide an environment conducive to paranormal activity.  You thought I was joking, right?

It seems that several other people are thinking the exact same thing. I didn’t even realize it but a man named Robert Bess has designed what he calls a “Parabot Containment Chamber” in order to capture spirits. This sounds a lot like the contraption called the “Cube” which was featured in the remake of the movie Thirteen Ghosts (photo below).

The Cube from the movie Thirteen Ghosts

Robert Bess’s Parabot got a field test last night when the Ghost Adventures crew investigated the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. Bess’s contraption sputtered and made a lot of noise as it appeared to attract spirits with it’s  built-in Tesla Coil.  According to Bess,  this is how the system is designed to work:

“If the EM sensors on the chamber detect an energy field, its doors open, and it moves in the direction of what it senses. Once it captures the energy in the chamber, the doors will shut and the massive 8-foot Tesla coil inside the unit produces 1.4 million watts of energy, “feeding” the EM field until it cycles at a far faster or higher rate, rendering the spirit visible.”

So in other words, it’s a ghost trap designed to capture spirits just like the Cube device in the Thirteen Ghosts movie.

Bess’s Parabot did seem to be doing SOMETHING last night. One of the investigators captured photos of what appeared to be  a ball of plasma. This would make sense, since the Parabot is cranking so much energy into the environment. A plasma is a gas that has been energized to the point that some of the electrons break free from, but travel with, their nucleus. Gases can become plasmas in several ways, but all include pumping the gas with energy.

There were some dramatic moments in last night’s investigation, like when Bess claimed to have been punched or pushed. In one highly suspicious moment his EMF meter flew down the hallway as if it was knocked violently from his hand.

If the Parabot was indeed drawing in spirits, it didn’t seem to be doing a very good job of containing them. Maybe he should have lined the walls of the Parabot with a bunch of “containment spells” like those written on the cube from Thirteen Ghosts.

Anyway, these ideas tie in with what I had in mind, but my idea was not to contain anything. I don’t think it’s ethical to try to capture someone’s spirit, any more than it is ethical to hold a live person against their will.  What I had in mind would be more of an open system through which spirits could manifest, without constraints.

I guess if things went wrong though and you happened to attract a particularly nasty entity, you would wish you had a real containment chamber.  Something like the guys had in the Ghost Busters movies. Seriously though, I think it is possible to build some kind of system that would make it easier for spirits to manifest. Providing a ripe environment by providing them with lots of whatever kind of energy they need, may lead to some real advances in the field of paranormal research.

In the very first episode of the popular science fiction TV program The Outer Limits, a radio station engineer has built a phone booth sized machine in order to communicate with a being from another galaxy. They don’t go into a lot of details about the workings of this fictional machine, but it seems to be based on the idea that three dimensional radio waves (in the frequency of TV signals) can be manipulated and tuned in order to provide an interface through which the “galaxy being” and the radio operator on Earth can communicate.

There are a lot of flaws in this idea, but the idea has stuck with me over the years. I am beginning to think that this general technique could be refined and used as a way to communicate with ghosts, or spirits if you prefer the term.

Most paranormal researchers agree that if ghosts exist, they exist as some type of energy, an intelligent energy that can somehow move in and out of our range of perception. We pick up tiny fragments of conversation with EVP recording techniques, but what if we could finally find a way to hold real conversations with people on the other side? Instead of seeing brief shadowy apparitions, what if we could provide an artificial portal through which spirits could be seen clearly or even travel?

Several researchers are working on the assumption that if you pump a large amount of energy into a room, it charges the atmosphere and makes the environment conducive for paranormal activity. In recent episodes of the TV programs Extreme Paranormal and Ghost Lab, we have seen people use a Jacob’s Ladder and a Van De Graaff Generator to pump energy into the environment. Joshua P. Warren has long proposed that using an electrostatic generator to fill a room with charged ions, like the Ghost Lab crew did with their Van De Graaff Generator, would enhance paranormal activity. Actually helping a spirit to materialize.

I don’t think these activities are taking it far enough. The radio engineer from The Outer Limits may have been onto something. I think that if we create the right environment, it may be possible to finally communicate in a better way with entities in the “paranormal” world. I don’t think that setting up a Phone Booth Spirit Communicator Contraption in a scientific lab would be helpful, but if we could set up an apparatus like this in a location we believe to be haunted, maybe we would get some interesting results.

This is an artifact I found on a sandbar in the middle of the Great Miami River, near Cincinnati, Ohio.  I think it may be a pendant or amulet of some kind from the time of the Adena culture, which would mean it could  be 2,000 years old! I cranked up the contrast on this photo to try to reveal some surface details.

You can’t really tell from the photo, but there are a few engraved gooves on each side of the object. The hole was obviously drilled by a flint or stone drill.   I plan to take this somewhere soon to get an expert opinion, but it really does seem like it was created to be a pendant.  One of the bottom corners is broken, but you can still tell it must have been carefully crafted.   It is almost exactly 1 1/2 inches long and 1 inch in width.

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Yesterday I traveled up to Chillicothe, Ohio to explore the group of Hopewell mounds called the Mound City Group. It is a 13-acre site surrounded by an earthen wall, with 22 mounds inside the enclosure. I have been trying to investigate ancient mounds and earthworks to see if I can detect any paranormal energy or abnormal electromagnetic properties of any kind. I don’t really have the equipment I need for a thorough examination, but I have been using my EMF meter, compass, and other devices. I even tried using a pendulum to dowse around the site.

My stone pendulum

This would work better if I knew exactly what it was I was dowsing for, but I thought I would give it a try with the intention of finding human remains or artifacts of any kind. I didn’t get much of a reaction from my pendulum, but that could be because I am new at this and need a lot more practice. OR it could mean that the mounds are now completely empty. That’s another possibility.

Paranormal investigators who are trying to get by without spending a ton of money on all the latest high-tech gear may want to try out these nightvision goggles made by Eyeclops. These second-generation goggles are said to be an improvement over earlier models, and for only $60.00, they may be an alternative to the professional goggles costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars. You just have to consider that they ARE being marketed as toys, so don’t expect them to be as good as the professional gear. However, these goggles would be a lot of fun. They are said to have a clearly visible range of 50 feet and you can switch from a regular green infrared mode to a black and white mode. Not sure what the difference would be. Another drawback is that the goggles are said to be a big drain on batteries. No surprise there.  They take 5 AA batteries and you’ll probably need a lot of spares.  If you’re looking for nightvision gear that won’t break your budget, these may be worth a try. Personally, I’d prefer to just stare through the viewfinder of my nightvision camcorder. You can get these at Walmart, Toys-R-Us, or where ever fine toys are sold.

A few days ago I revisited the Fort Ancient site in Ohio to explore the mounds and earthen walls of the “fort.”

I sat for a while and tried to do some EVP recording but there were too many people walking around, talking, laughing, and making noise. Parks around here will be closed for the season soon, so I am trying to get out as much as I can. This is a photo of one of the stone-covered mounds there. There are also a few mounds which seem to have been built as boundary markers. They were not the typical burial mounds.

This is a house in rural Indiana. In back of the house is a family plot containing several of my ancestors.

No one from my family has owned the house for many many years now, but we visit the cemetery now and then just to see if it is being maintained. It isn’t, really. Some of the markers have mysteriously disappeared and the whole cemetery plot is overgrown with weeds. When we last visited the place, the man currently living in the house told us a strange thing. He said that three consecutive generations of women have hanged themselves in the house’s kitchen.

I find this pretty creepy. I am going to do some research to find out if this story is really true. I do know that none of the hanged women were related to me, so that’s a relief.