Ghost in the Machine, Part 1: Spooky Week #2

Garrison travels to the Oregon Ghost Conference to uncover the truth of how spectral phenomenon permeates our culture.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
Welcome to it could Happen. Here's Spooky Week special presentation.
I'm Garrison Davis and earlier this year, I, along with
my friend Elane, attended the twenty twenty three organ Ghost
Conference in Seaside, organ the past few years, I've had
a growing interest in the occult, both for testing the

(00:33):
limits of manufacturing my own weird experiences as well as
looking at it as a vector of political extremism. Sometimes
it's useful to not just to look on from the outside,
but actually hop into other people's reality tunnels to gain
a more intimate understanding of how they interact with our world.
This was my primary motivation in attending the Ghost Conference,

(00:57):
to learn what metaphysical beliefs drive the attendees and how
said beliefs intersect with politics and our broader culture. My
experiences at the conference ranged from ghost hunting to being hypnotized,
to learning of the galactic Federation of Angels and abortion
hungry demons. So with that in mind, I hope you

(01:19):
enjoy my report back on the twenty twenty three Oregon
Ghost Conference. The first challenge we faced was simply getting
to the town of Seaside. The first day of the conference, Friday,
March twenty fourth, coincided with a massive snowstorm along Highway
twenty six from a Portland to Seaside. As we were

(01:40):
driving on the treacherous mountain roads, a white out completely
engulfed our view. When we emerged from the snowstorm, it
was as if we'd gone through a portal, transporting us
from the mountainous forest to the small coastal town of Seaside, Oregon,
into a world of ghosts, spirits, specters, and overpriced convention food. Seaside,

(02:03):
as the name suggests, is a beachfront town situated in
northern Oregon. It was founded in the late eighteen hundredths
after railroad baron Ben Holliday built his summer vacation quote
unquote Seaside house on the plot of land which is
now Seaside's golf course. It's always been a sort of
tourist resort town that people from Portland travel to for

(02:25):
beachfront entertainment. The conference is put on by a friendly
high school art teacher and Oregon City commissioner, Rocky Smith.
Smith has been doing ghost tours in Oregon since the
mid nineties and has been putting on the Oregon Ghost
Conference since twenty twelve. Originally, it was held in Smith's
hometown of Oregon City, an extremely haunted town often cited

(02:50):
as the end of the Oregon Trail. In twenty sixteen,
the conference outgrew its Oregon City venue and relocated to Seaside.
It's now the largest paranormal convention in the Pacific Northwest.
The conference features ghost tours, classes, guest speakers, vendors, tarra readings, seances,

(03:10):
ghost hunting, and paranormal investigations. The first big event I
marked on my schedule was a ghost tour to get
acquainted with Seaside's most haunted places. The tour began right
outside the convention center. Conference director Rocky Smith led this
one himself. He filled us in on some old ghost

(03:32):
conference lore. The Seaside Convention Center went through some extensive
renovations right before the pandemic, but the first year the
conference took place in the convention center, they had a
class for kids where a group of children explored around
the old building to find what they thought were the
most haunted places. There was one hallway on the west

(03:52):
side of the building where people routinely reported strange experiences
back in twenty sixteen, a child at the conference claimed
they saw a ghost down this hallway when exiting the bathroom. First,
they just saw something out of the corner of their eye,
and then when they turned to the left, they saw
a woman in an old dress staring at them. At first,

(04:16):
they weren't sure if the dress was long or short
because they were too scared to look down, but then
they noticed that the woman didn't have any legs and
was just floating in the air. Because of the new renovations,
that hallway is no longer accessible. Rocky Smith remarked that
he didn't know if that was intentional or not, but

(04:36):
said that a lot of times when they redo buildings,
they'll change the part of a building that used to
be kind of scary and uncomfortable, so that hallway is
now used for storage, although one of the convention staff
members claimed that a vacuum cleaner now held in the
hallway is possessed. So there's that. The convention Center was
originally built in the seventies and doesn't really have a

(04:58):
lot of notable hit history, but when looking into hauntings
or reports of ghosts, typically people try to learn the
history of the building or plot of land in question.
For Seaside. That's kind of hard because in nineteen twelve,
four blocks of downtown Seaside burned to the ground, destroying

(05:19):
most of the town's early history. The first stop on
the ghost tour after we left the Convention Center was
one of the reportedly most active sites of ghostly activity
in Seaside, the Bridge Tender Tavern. It was built in
nineteen fourteen, so just a couple of years after the
Big Fire. I used to be called the Pastime Bar

(05:40):
and then suffered its own fire and was later renamed
the Bridge Tender. The previous owners of the bar claimed
that in the early twentieth century it was a brothel.
This is unconfirmed, but it relates to the tavern's most
frequent ghost, the Madam. Staff and patrons of the Bridge
Tender regularly addressed the Madam. If customers are being rude,

(06:01):
It's said that the Madam will spill drinks on them,
you know, stuff like that. The story I like the
most about the Madam has to do with the taverns
old CD jute box. If a specific song played on
the jukebox, something would go haywire, CDs would shoot out
of it or other weird things would reportedly happen in
the bar. Patrons would put the song on repeat just

(06:23):
to see what would happen. Eventually, the owners took the
CD with the song in question out of the jukebox
so that people would just stop playing the song. But
people are persistent bastards, so now people just play the
song on their phones or the new digital jukebox in
the Bridge Tender. Now the theory is is that the
Madam just really hates this song, so she gets mad

(06:46):
when it plays and then causes some commotion. The song
is Dancing Queen by Abba, So if you want to
go test this yourself, you can travel to the Bridge
Tender and play Dancing Queen and see what happens. Another
highlight from the ghost tour was learning about the old
Seasider Hotel at the end of the promenade. It was

(07:08):
purportedly haunted by multiple spirits, and it was believed that
when the hotel was torn down in the eighties, the
ghosts followed the hotel staff who got new jobs at
a restaurant in downtown called Girdles. New employees are said
to have recognized apparitions from the hotel and the restaurant

(07:29):
gained a haunted coffee pot that would either move on
its own or even fly across the room, depending on
who you would ask. I think it's nice that the
ghosts seem to have a pretty good job relocation program,
something that most of us do not so good for them.
As the ghost tour approached the beachfront promenade, that snowstorm

(07:51):
from the nearby mountains seemed to have caught up with us,
and a dreary mix of rain and snow began to descend.
Upon ceased, as if some otherworldly force was trying to
keep us from further exploring the hauntings of the town.
So as even my trench coat began soaking through, we

(08:12):
took refuge back indoors. The very first class my friend
Elaine and I took at the conference was titled Ghost Detectives. Now,
despite the silly, stounding name, it was probably the most
grounded class throughout the entire weekend, certainly the one with
the least amount of spiritual dogma. The class was focused

(08:35):
on best practices for conducting paranormal investigations, specifically to ensure
that the process and finding's mirror the evidentiary standards. Set
by the justice system for law enforcement investigations. The instructor,
doctor Nelson, is a supervisor for a crisis hotline with
degrees in mental health, metaphysics, and fine arts. He described

(08:57):
his methodology for investigating paranormal activity as quote unquote applied science.
He was definitely the most meticulous investigator of the whole
weekend and the least ghost hunter esque in terms of
advocating for strict investigative procedures and not just assuming that
every spooky noise was evidence of a ghost. Most of

(09:20):
his class was spent explaining very basic police investigative procedure,
proper ways to collect evidence, having a chain of evidence,
and not simply jumping to conclusions. It's a little foolhardy
to assume every single spike on an electromagnetic field or
EMF meter is actually a ghost trying to communicate. The

(09:42):
other unique thing about his class was the emphasis on
before pulling out your special ghost detecting tools, perhaps one
should conduct thorough interviews and collect witness statements. If the
people reporting the phenomenon, try to figure out what's going
on in their life, maybe even look into their own
mental health background. As much as you're able to if

(10:02):
they've had any sudden losses, past trauma, or history of
paranormal experiences. Asking thorough questions can give a much fuller
look at what someone might be going through. Some examples
of things to ask or look into were if the
phenomenon is related to a house, who owns the house,
who lives there, who has experienced the event? What led

(10:24):
to a paranormal investigator being called? What precipitated the phenomenon?
When it occurred? How often has it occurred? When was
it first noticed? Was there just one random strange experience?
Or is someone going through an event in their life
that has made an experience suddenly stick out as strange?
Has the person sought help, and has the phenomenon been

(10:44):
verified by more than one person. In terms of haunted houses,
figuring out if there's any issues in the house is
a great first step, because if there's a carbon monoxide leak,
that could explain a great many things, or if someone
claims ghost ectoplasm is leaking through the ceiling and walls,
perhaps the roof and water pipes should be inspected. Elene

(11:08):
and I did a little debrief after the conference, and
they reminded me of another good tip gleaned from the
ghost detective class.

Speaker 3 (11:16):
I mean, my favorite was when he was talking about, like,
if you're using an EMF detector and one wall just
keeps setting the EMF detector off, you might actually just
need to call an electriciity.

Speaker 4 (11:27):
Yes, yeah, No, he definitely was one of the more
reasonable people we spoke with in terms of Yeat knows.
He seems he seems pretty close to like consensus reality.
Like he also he also is like a part of
like the Portland Ghostbusters cosplay group, Like like he's he's
someone who like makes stuff with his hands. He's very
like he feels very grounded and like and like consent

(11:49):
this reality a lot in a lot of aspects, and
this is like a very fun hobby that combines his
two favorite things, well two of his favorite things, just
like Ghostbusters cosplays and also like parnimal investigation stuff.

Speaker 2 (12:00):
I'm not actually sure if the instructor for the paranormal
investigation class really believed in ghosts or if you've just
had an interest in researching paranormal experiences. I don't think
I believe in ghosts the same way literally everyone else
at the conference did, but almost half of Americans do

(12:21):
believe in ghosts, and around one fifth are unsure if
their believers or not. The rate of belief in ghosts
is about the same as belief in demons. But the
interesting thing about that is although Americans belief in organized
religion has been decreasing, especially Christianity, belief in ghosts has
been and still is on the rise. In fact, it's

(12:44):
gone up by nearly four hundred percent since the nineteen seventies.
These last three years, for really the first time ever,
Gallup polls show that less than fifty percent of Americans
say they belong to a religious congregation. Alan Downe is
a computer scientist and professor at the Olin College of
Engineering in Massachusetts. His research suggests that the Internet is

(13:06):
a major cause, not just a correlating factor, in the
decrease of religious affiliation, and with the rise of the
Internet and reality TV, ghost hunting has become a relatively
popular niche hobby. But as religious belief has declined, belief
in the afterlife has remained the same about seventy percent

(13:27):
according to the General Social Survey. Gallup's polling suggests that
currently about three and four Americans have some sort of
paranormal belief Thomas Moen, a sociologist who's been conducting a
study on religion and paranormal belief at Bowling Green State University,
said that he's finding that quote atheists tend to report

(13:48):
higher belief in the paranormal than religious folk unquote. As
to why so many Americans believe in ghosts, Mohen says, quote,
people are looking to other things or non traditional things
to answer life big questions that don't necessarily include religion unquote.

(14:17):
Throughout the conference, the word ghost, spirit, and entity were
often used interchangeably. Each of those words kind of act
as an umbrella term for a broad swath of ontological concepts.
Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that relates to the
nature of being. Depending who you ask, a ghost or

(14:37):
a spirit can be anything from a wayward soul of
a deceased human, some otherworldly energy, an evil presence, or
even some sort of temporal loop. Historically, these terms have
never been very clear either, they've evolved with the times,
so Elene and I prepared a brief history of ghosts
to help give context for the rest of this episode

(15:00):
and the next. The idea of contacting spirits or interacting
with some sort of spirit world obviously isn't new. Worldwide,
people have traditions of interacting with ancestors that deceased and
a variety of non material beings. Ancestor veneration in China
goes back at least six thousand years, while the word shaman,

(15:23):
relating to someone who works with spirits and in the
spirit realm for healing and divination, comes from the Tungusic
language of Siberia and has practices that are at least
too millennia old. The term necromancy stems from a Greek
word meaning divination of the dead. In the Odyssey, Homer
writes of Odysseus learning necromantic rituals to summon the shade

(15:45):
or underworld ghost of Tyresius. While clerical necromantic traditions through
the medieval period made a clear distinction between the souls
of dead humans from other random spirits, that separation was
not as ubiqui among folk beliefs of people who claimed
to interact with the spirit world. Emma Wilby describes in

(16:06):
her book Cunning Folk and Familiar Spirits. How into the
early modern period, many cunning folk basically low level magicians
and conjurors had ghosts, fairies, and animal spirit companions, all
of which seemed to interact very similarly. The European concept
of ghosts being linked to evil or demonic forces is

(16:27):
a relatively new idea. It came to be as a
byproduct of the Reformation and rejection of the Catholic Church.
The Catholic doctrine of purgatory and limbo was rejected by
the new Protestants, which caused some cosmological problems when it
came to people's own experiences with ghosts and spirits. Catholics

(16:49):
held that ghosts were basically spirits of dead humans on
vacation from purgatory, But with Protestants rejecting purgatory for its
lack of biblical basis, they defined some other way to
explain the apparently fairly common phenomenon of ghostly encounters. A
Swiss theologian named Ludwig Lavater attempted to solve this cosmological

(17:13):
problem in his fifteen sixty nine book Despectus. I just
picked up my copy a few weeks ago and had
been going through it, and it's a lot of fun.
The full English title was quote of ghosts and spirits
walking by night and of strange noises, cracks, and sundry
fore warnings which commonly happened before the death of men,

(17:36):
great slaughters, and the alteration of kingdoms. Pretty cool stuff.
Two of my favorite consecutive chapter titles are quote what
hath followed this doctrine of the Papists concerning the appearing
of men's souls, followed by testimonies out of the Word
of God, that neither the souls of the faithful nor

(17:57):
infidels do walketh upon the earth after they are once
parted from their bodies. So that kind of gives you
a look at the writing style of this entire book.
Despecters became massively influential. It was widely translated. Shakespeare was
reading this as he was writing Hamlet. More importantly, the

(18:17):
text took off across many Protestant circles and became the
backbone of the cultural conception of ghosts in the soon
to be United States through such Protestant sects. Instead of
ghosts being wayward specters of dead humans who escaped from purgatory,
Lavater proposed a great many explanations for spectral experiences, including

(18:39):
many non mystical causes. He lists illness, insomnia, psychoactive substances,
sleep paralysis, and grief as being common causes of ghostly hallucinations,
an opinion now shared by many psychologists and doctors. Definitely,
the closest thing I've ever seen to a ghost was
during a sleep paralysis episode. Lavator writes, quote, Melancholic persons

(19:02):
and mad men imagine things which in very deed are
not fearful. Men imagine that they see and hear strange things.
Men which are dull of seeing and hearing imagine many
things which in very deed are not so. Unquote. He
also cites pranksters as another common cause of perceived spectral activity,

(19:22):
but most interestingly, in an attempt to bash the Catholics,
the Protestant Lavater also lists low level clergy trained in
exorcistic magic to summon demonic spirits in an achromatic fashion
as possibly producing some supernatural phenomenon interpreted as ghosts. Now,
Lavater does believe in spirits, but his thesis is that

(19:45):
genuine ghosts spirits bumps in the night, those strange cracks
and noises which we now might refer to as politgeists
are almost always demons that are torturing people. He wrote
that devils can quote appear in different shapes, not only
of those which are alive, but also of dead men
as well as a peer in the likeness of a

(20:07):
black dog, a horse, an owl, and also are able
to bring incredible things to pass unquote. Levater did admit
that in the rarest of cases, God may send angels
or the spirit of a dead person to Earth for
a very specific task, but due to demons a nature trickery,
there's really no way to trust that a ghostly presence

(20:29):
may be from God. So he recommends that one should
always assume that a specter is demonic. God may even
allow demonic spirits to appear as a form of punishment
and a sign that one should repent for wrongdoing. Lavater's
theologic work on ghosts were part of a larger Protestant
Christian campaign to literally demonize all spirits. Right, the only

(20:53):
thing you can really talk to is Jesus or God.
Anything else is probably just a demon. This is the
version of ghosts that I grew up with as a kid,
the idea that basically, if a ghost appears, it's probably
a demon trying to scare or trick you. This concept
that spirits and spirit contact were predominantly demonic, changed the

(21:15):
nature of many witch trials, since when cunning folk listed
their familiar ghosts or fairies, they were basically admitting to
trafficking with demons. The next evolution in ghost lore came
in the form of Emmanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish theologian and scientist.
In fact, he was one of the first to postulate

(21:35):
the existence of the neuron. As Christians in Europe were
dealing with this messy assortment of spirits that you really
shouldn't try and interact with, but if you do, you
better make sure they're angels, Swedenborg was about to shake
up this whole entire cosmology. In the seventeen forties, he
started having quote intense mystical experiences, dreams, and visions unquote,

(21:58):
which led him to believe he was in contact with
a spirit world and entities that he described as angels, demons,
as well as other spirits, including ones from extraterrestrial planets.
This is like one of the first guys to do
the spirits I'm talking to are actually aliens, which is
pretty cool. In seventeen eighty five, he published a book

(22:21):
titled Heaven and Hell, based on his experiences of the afterlife.
According to Swedenburg, once humans on Earth pass on to
the spiritual world, they enter a intermediate realm in between
heaven and hell and eventually either become beautified into angels
or twisted into demons, and then respectively pass on into

(22:44):
either heaven or Hell proper. While his depiction of spirits
were obviously influenced by his Christian beliefs, the variety and
breadth of his spirit world was broader than just the undead.
Swedenburg's writing was one of the early influences on spiritualism.
Core tenants of which are there being multiple levels of

(23:05):
the afterlife and that an individual's awareness persists after death
and may be contacted by the living, which is pretty
similar to what most people now would probably describe as
ghosts if you were to ask them what a ghost is.
While Swedenborg actually recommended against attempting to contact spirits, he

(23:28):
had a lasting influence on American spiritualism for creating an
explicitly Christian based system where spiritual entities worked as mediators
between humans and God. Coming out of Upstate New York
in the decade before the Civil War, spiritualism brought to
the other aspects of the Radical Quakers with Swedenberg's idea
of spirit intermediaries who could bring messages to the living.

(23:52):
The spiritualist movement formally began on March thirty first, eighteen
forty eight, when the Fox Sisters made their fraudulent clases
of contacting a spirit who could communicate through knocking noises.
Starting initially in Quaker communities, mediumship and seances immediately took
off across the United States, including the White House as

(24:12):
the Lincolns were graving the loss of their son, showing
that interest in ghosts and seances were not just a
parlor trick for commoners, they were also a parlor trick
for the president. The fact that the rise of spiritualism
coincided with Civil War deaths and gruesome battlefield photography certainly
helped fuel the drive to communicate and receive messages from

(24:35):
the recently deceased. Due to its Quaker roots, the spiritualist
movement was abolitionist, and its belief in an egalitarian afterlife
prompted its members to advocate for social change here on earth.
Even the messages that mediums claimed to relay from the
dead were often progressive. In eighteen fifty two, the medium

(24:56):
Isaac Post published a collection of messages supposedly channeled from
such people as Voltaire, Thomas Jefferson, and other famous figures
who urged the living to push for radical social change.
The book, entitled Voices from the Spirit World, included a
passage claiming that the ghost of George Washington became an

(25:19):
abolitionist after death. And I don't know the idea that
the ghost of Jefferson and Washington suddenly became abolitionists after death.
Although I understand its utility at the time for trying
to push people towards becoming an abolitionist, it does kind
of read as a little bit gross, considering how that

(25:39):
was very much not their opinions when they were actually
living humans. New to the spiritualist development of ghosts was
not just the idea of regular spiritual contact, but evidence
that the spirit world could be shown to the physical
scientific world. Basically, the precursor to modern ghosts emerged between

(26:01):
the Civil War and World War One. In London. Multiple
ghost clubs and psychic or paranormal research groups were founded
in the mid to late eighteen hundreds aimed at scientifically
investigating ghosts, hauntings, and the claims of spiritualists. Similar groups
for investigation opened up in the United States, and around

(26:23):
this time is also when we start to see the
use of technology to assist in capturing alleged evidence of ghosts.
In eighteen sixty one, amateur photographer William Mumler was developing
a self portrait when a shattery apparition of a young
girl appeared on his developing plate. Mummler knew this to

(26:44):
be a simple mistake of reusing an improperly scrubbed photography plate,
what we now would call a double exposure, But upon
showing this photo to a very excited spiritualist friend of his,
he realized the lucrative opertune tunity that lay before him.
Thus was born the business of spirit photography. Sir Arthur

(27:06):
Conan Doyle of Sherlock Holmes's fame was a fan of
spirit photography. He became a member of London's Society for
Psychical Research and eventually became a spiritualist himself. The recent
inventions of the phonograph and telephone were hoped to be
utilized to create evidence of spirit contact. According to Ghosts
of Futures, Past Spiritualism and cultural politics of nineteenth century

(27:29):
America by Molly McGary. Thomas Watson, famed assistant to Alexander
Graham Bell, experimented with the telephone as an aid to
spiritual communication. Decades later, Thomas Edison sought to develop a
quote unquote spirit phone, telling American Magazine in nineteen twenty quote,
I've been at work for some time building an apparatus

(27:51):
to see if it is possible for personalities which have
left this earth to communicate with us, not by a cult, mystifying,
mysterious or weird means, but by scientific methods. Quote. Edison's
spirit phone never really turned out, and we have very
little information about it. It seems Edison thought that elements

(28:12):
of our personality or memories existed in a form of
like almost particles that could be measured and amplified by
vibrational sensing equipment, but not much is recorded of his
actual attempts to build this spirit phone. By the end
of the nineteenth century, newspaper is reported on ghosts and

(28:32):
hauntings along with other regular news. A twenty eighteen New
York Times article on the paper's own history of reporting
on ghosts said, quote Paulette D. Kilmer, a cultural historian
and professor at the University of Toledo scoured the paper's archives.
Her research turned up nearly three hundred ghost stories in
the times between the founding of the paper in eighteen

(28:54):
fifty one and the early twentieth century. Unquote. While news
coverage of hauntings dropped off during the twentieth century, the
ways in which people attempted to understand ghosts only got
more complex. The mediumship of the spiritualists has combined with
the ever growing field of paranormal research, New Age beliefs,

(29:15):
and pop culture fascination with poltergeist, spirits and UFOs, along
with the resurgence of Evangelical Protestantism into an overlap of
conflicting ghost cosmologies and what it means to contact the
spirit world. To cap off our first night at the conference,

(29:42):
we signed up for our very own ghost investigation at
the Starry Night Inn, a quaint little house just a
short walk from the convention center. We got to the
inn right before midnight on Friday evening before we ventured
out on our hunt for ghosts. We were split into
two groups of five, with one starting in the inn

(30:03):
and the other in the outdoor bathhouse. We got acquainted
with the ghost hunting tools we were going to be using. First,
we were given a popular EMF meter routinely used for
ghost detection, called a K two meter. It's supposed to
measure electromagnetic fields and features colorful light up LEDs. I'm

(30:25):
going to read a quote from the lead investigator we
were paired with. Quote. If a K two meter spikes
without reason, if it's not put next to anything powerfully electrical,
then we can consider that paranormal. Consider that a spirit.
When our body dies, we leave behind our energies. Our
energies is EMF, and this starts to pick it up. Unquote.

(30:51):
Among the paranormal skeptic community, the K two meter is
notorious for giving off false positives. With its unshielded sensor
is able to be set off by cell phones, radio waves,
and even nearby batteries. The other device we were using
is something called a rempod. Essentially, it's a small, horrible

(31:12):
sounding junior theoremy with some LEDs attached. An antenna creates
an electromagnetic field. If something conductive gets close to the antenna,
it forms a capacitor between the object and the antenna,
and the pod will light up and make some noise,
or if it's electromaenetic field gets disrupted by something like
say cellular or radio frequencies, it will also make a

(31:36):
horrible beeping noise and light up. I'm going to read
another quote from our lead investigator quote when our energies
are around, the pod will react to any energy field
that comes close to its antenna. So as we invite
spirits in, we can tell them how they can interact,
and we can tell them, hey, if you walk over

(31:56):
to that light over there and touch it, it'll light
up unquote. There is something funny to me about telling
a ghost to walk over somewhere, just a little it's
just a little amusing. My group of five intrepid investigators
were sent out to the bathhouse, which we were told
used to be a carriage house and horse stables that

(32:19):
got damaged in the nineteen twelve Seaside fire. The lead
investigator started by informing any possible spirits that we do
not mean them quote harm or intrusion, and that we
would just quote like to talk. He then informed any
ghosts in the vicinity that if they quote unquote walk
up to any of the devices with LED lights and

(32:41):
quote unquote touch it, it will light up. Quote, go ahead,
use your energy and touch all those lights for me.
That way we know you're here unquote. Potential specters were
also informed that if they speak into an electronic recording device,
us corporeal humans could hear their voice when we play

(33:03):
back the audio. This is called EVP, or electronic voice phenomenon.
More on that on the next episode. The lead investigator
then asked any nearby ghosts what their favorite food is,
which seems like a cruel question to ask a ghost
because they can't eat anyway. A barrage of questions then

(33:25):
flooded out, can you tell us your name? What are
you wearing? Who is the president? Not exactly all things
I would ask a spectral anomaly if I was given
the opportunity. But after a few minutes of silence, the
rempod is started to light up very faintly. The lead
investigator starts talking to the presumed ghost and suggests that

(33:46):
they play a game to find out what the ghost's
name is. This is how it works. Someone recites the
alphabet and if the rempod lights up on any of
the letters, that means the letter is in the ghost's name.
We first got the letter N and then the letters
O and D. Then I started going through the alphabet
and it lit up on the letter I. Then it

(34:08):
let up on the letter I again, and then the
letter R. At this point, the lead investigator decided that
the ghost's name was Ronnie. As we were about to
leave the bathhouse, someone who worked at the end came
in and told us that there was a stableman with
the last name Norris who died in the fire. So
now the ghost's name became Norris. Next we moved to

(34:31):
the basement. One person in our group was a little
spooked and elected to stay outside. None of the rempods
or anything lit up in the basement, but the person
from the inn, the one who told us about Norris,
joined us in the basement. When down there, they said
they saw a ghost that they were familiar with, named Cassandra.
They then turned to me and said that Cassandra likes me.

(34:54):
Cassandra was reportedly trying to give me a hug and
said that she wishes me quote all the well beings
in the world unquote. Now, Cassandra was also apparently trying
to tell me about a Grandpa John, which I don't have,
So if any of you have a Grandpa John who
needs to tell me something. Just let me know.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
All right, back inside the house part of the inn,
and we're about to go tour upstairs. We just went
down into the basement and just got out of there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
Once back inside the inn, we went into the upstairs bedrooms.
People set up their EMF detectors, but there was also
some new equipment. One of the rooms had a security
camera and a grid projector to record any irregular shadows.
And I was given a spirit box. A spirit box

(35:54):
is a handheld radio tuner that sweeps through AM or
FM frequencies at a high rate. You mostly hear a
sort of grating, staticky white noise with small bits of
words or music slipping through from radio stations. I guess
it's sort of the modern incarnation of the spirit phone.
The idea is that ghosts can somehow manipulate the radio

(36:17):
waves to speak complete words or sentences as the box
is cycling between frequencies. Basically, spirit boxes are supposed to
act as an electronic radio medium for spirits to communicate.
The lead investigator thought that the spirit box was telling
us to leave, but words weren't really clear in my opinion.

(36:39):
For example, here is a clip in question.

Speaker 1 (36:47):
In the room.

Speaker 2 (36:48):
There was also some flickering lights and high EMF ratings,
which mostly just got me concerned for this bedroom's electrical wiring.
The second half of the investigation was pretty uneventful, and
around two am we called it a night and I
recorded a little debrief on our way back to the hotel. No,
I do find it super interesting how people try to

(37:10):
like the way they interpret electual readings as you would
a conversation, and they they assert their reality on it,
being like if this happens, this means you say yes, right,
so then so then the abs of the thing also
becomes an answer. It's it's it is a very interesting
process of people like crafting their own reality as things

(37:31):
are happening.

Speaker 5 (37:32):
No, it was definitely them crafting their own reality.

Speaker 2 (37:34):
But also I'm like, like, probably some of it's like interesting,
but there's still a whole bunch of points where you
like make a decision, be like this is the thing
that I heard, right, Because like even when they were
doing the name game thing, a lot of times the
light would light up and they would like still kind
of keep moving on.

Speaker 3 (37:52):
So yeah, like there was an f and and I
that it went off for the.

Speaker 2 (37:59):
Yeah, so there's this a whole bunch of very very
peculiar things that had that like go into crafting what
the idea of reality is going to be?

Speaker 1 (38:11):
Stop making a thing? Then making a thing, and then
it starts again.

Speaker 2 (38:14):
You're like, oh, no, you're not supposed to do that,
and it's like it's a very it's a very very bizarre,
bizarre process to watch when putting together these two episodes.
This last October, Elaine and I once again conversed to
share our thoughts on our first ghost hunting experience. Okay,
now that it has been over six months since you
and I were at the organ Ghost Conference, I'm curious

(38:38):
to see how our debrief now may kind of differ
or be expanded upon from our debrief literally minutes after
we left this investigation at the Story night in and
you know this this day was This day was interesting
because we had the ghost Detective class like right before
this investigation. We were able to have these two kind

(39:02):
of ideas of what a ghost investigation looks like kind
of play off each other, which I think led to
a pretty fun holistic experience in terms of the many
kind of diversity of investigators that were at this event.

Speaker 5 (39:18):
I think just the most notable thing was they didn't
do a single thing that the forensic ghost Hunting class suggested,
just like literally, yeah, we could have gone down the
list of every single thing that the forensic ghost Hunting
class suggested to do, and not one of those.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
Was done, like completely the opposite.

Speaker 5 (39:35):
Record keeping of what phenomenon occurred did not happen.

Speaker 2 (39:39):
Logging any data yeah.

Speaker 5 (39:41):
Did not happen. Investigation of the structures, yeah, did not happen.
Doing a history of the structure didn't occur. The only
interviews we had with someone was the person who said
they were a medium who lived there.

Speaker 3 (39:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (39:55):
Even just like questions like how long have you seen
things here? Didn't occur.

Speaker 2 (40:01):
No, it wasn't very interesting just in terms of how
like the ghost hunt at the end was literally just
the exact opposite of all of the sorts of procedures
that the ghost detective class was trying to lay out,
which we attended just like literally hours prior.

Speaker 5 (40:16):
Well, I think one thing that you can really see
between the how to do a ghost Investigation class and
then the ghost investigation itself is the how to do
a paranormal investigation class doesn't assume you know what you're investigating,
and so it really is a lot about doing, you know,

(40:38):
background talks with people, like talking to sources what phenomena.
It's not assuming that there was anything paranormal in the
first place, and it's an investigation of whether or not
something paranormal has occurred. And when you go to the
ghost hunt, specifically the ghost hunt that we went to,
everyone there was a assuming that paranormal things were occurring

(41:04):
just as a baseline.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
They were interpreting readings from their specialized ghost hunting equipment
as proof of communication with some kind of paranormal force.

Speaker 5 (41:16):
There's a lot of implicit assumptions made. First off, if
you start talking to phenomenon, you're assuming that there's phenomenon.
You're assuming the phenomenon can hear you, You're assuming the
phenomenon wants to interact with you. And if you say,
if you can hear me, touch the light, all of
those are very implicit assumptions. It's not investigating what phenomenon

(41:41):
there is. You've already framed what you expect the encounter
to be and how whatever you're encountering will interact with
a whole mess of like ideas.

Speaker 2 (41:53):
Yeah, my favorite thing about that from the experience at
the at the starting night in is like we were
basically with this like middle aged man who just kept
yelling at any like prospective ghosts that were around the vicinity,
And like, why would a ghost want to follow the
commands of like a middle aged man.

Speaker 5 (42:12):
I mean I didn't want to follow the commands when
he would say everyone needs to be quiet. I wanted
to like start yelling or muttering just out of sheer obstinence.
Because of the way that he was instructing things, I
can't imagine a spiritual entity, if it was a ghost,
even the way he's conceiving of it, would somehow not.

Speaker 2 (42:31):
Yeah, I have this little exchange laid out here where
he was. He was addressing what I guess he assumed
was a ghost, saying, quote, make the lights stop, back away,
back away, good good. Now get closer, thank you, thank you,
one more time, get closer all right, now make the
light stop.

Speaker 1 (42:52):
Ah.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
I didn't tell you to get closer, back away, back away,
back a way good. Okay, now now get closer good good.
The only thing that was changing throught that back and
forth was that occasionally a little lightwood kind of go
on and that was it, right, like, but he's able
to weave this whole story in between this light going

(43:13):
on by saying back up and then the light turns off,
and then saying okay, now come closer. You wait like
ten fifteen seconds the light turns on. He's able. It's
it's it's crafting this whole like timeline of this ghost
like doing this thing when really this is just a
flickering light like that that, but through the way that
he has this like uh, this like commanding voice, it's

(43:36):
making it as if the ghost is like following these
instructions and then being being like rewarded for following these
instructions by saying like good, good, good good, or if
they don't follow instructions, then the ghost is like scolded.
So it's it's just a lot of a lot of
interactions like that.

Speaker 5 (43:52):
I mean, I've gone through the same narration when I
stare at a candle flame like a little bit high like,
but it doesn't mean that the candle is necessarily responding
to me.

Speaker 2 (44:03):
Both activity on the rempod and the lack of activity
are taken as a sign of spirit communication. Questions will
be framed as if you want us to leave you alone,
light up, so if nothing happens, that itself is taken
as an actionable answer. Whoever is leading the quote unquote
investigation gets to either intentionally or even unintentionally, craft the

(44:26):
meaning of the experience based on how the questions are framed,
when questions are asked, and how the group responds based
on the activity or lack thereof, of the EMF devices.
The rempods often go off erratically or in seemingly random intervals,
but when their activity happens after someone just asks twenty questions,

(44:48):
it's assumes to be related to whatever the most recent
line of inquiry was. It all operates on correlation versus causation,
with people mostly jumping on the ladder. No matter when
pods light up, the results can be turned into a
meaningful sign if the investigator is talking frequently enough. These
sorts of ghost hunts are primarily a form of entertainment.

(45:10):
It's a novel experience you can have with your friends
and family to have a fun time together over the
course of a few hours and maybe get a little spooked.
I wasn't expecting a rigorous scientific investigation at midnight and
seaside Oregon, nor do I think that's even a useful
way of getting at the heart of the phenomenon. Rather

(45:31):
than viewing ghost hunts as objective inquiries into paranormal activity,
I think for most people they operate more as a
way of inducing paranormal experiences, the same way occultism seeks
to induce mystical experiences, and religion strives for a connection
with God. All of these are practices of constructing meaning

(45:52):
and finding patterns, and that's not to discount them. They
only are a problem when they become exploitative and harmful
to yourself and others, which is what we'll be talking
about in the next episode. So stay tuned to hear
about warrior angels tasked with vanquishing demons, how mendel illness
is a sure sign you're possessed by an evil spirit,

(46:14):
and how abortions and the Internet are opening up portals
in our world to demonic forces. See you on the
other side. It could happen here as a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or Wherever you listen

(46:37):
to podcasts, you can find sources for it could happen here.
Updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.

Speaker 5 (46:44):
Thanks for listening.