Mindblogging

After returning from Chicago all I wanted was a restful night of sleep. Unfortunately last night was not one of those. It seems our ghost “friend” is still hanging around and made himself known last night with a vengeance.

Things trended towards the unusual beginning with our return from a local neighborhood music event. We had crated our dog at 7:45 PM and returned for him at 9:30 PM. At that time our dog was quite agitated – far more than he normally would be for a night with no thunderstorms predicted (and none anywhere nearby). I chalked it up to him being a bit skittish and didn’t think much of it.
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We haven’t had much activity with our ghostly visitor lately and I’m wondering why. That strange feeling that sometimes occurs upstairs is no longer present. Nor has our IR detector signaled a presence in the attic. Aside from the faint whiff of men’s cologne I smelled two weeks ago while cooking dinner, I haven’t noticed any unusual happenings.

In hindsight, I wonder if the ghostly visits were related to the sudden passing of my close friend, Gerry. Gerry checked out of this life on March 1st when a truck plowed into his car. For weeks before that event and a few weeks after the ghost activity was most intense. Now it’s mostly gone.

Even so, there might be other factors. It’s now much lighter in the morning as spring is well underway. We went through a time change for Daylight Saving Time. Also, our week away for vacation in Sedona might have been enough to drive our invisible visitor away.

It’s a shame: my curiosity is still there but the mystery guest apparently isn’t. I hope I didn’t miss my chance to learn more.

Sometimes I wonder if my home is becoming Ghost Central. This evening when I let the dog out the back door, I caught a strong scent of cologne just outside the door. The wind was howling (and has been all day) and there was no one around. The smell quickly dissipated.

I’m baffled as to why the cologne smell was so strong, especially considering the wind was blowing at about 20 MPH tonight. I have a habit of smelling phantom scents, strange as it may seem. Could this be another instance?

Ooooookay. Things around the Turner household turned a bit for the weird this month when a ghost apparently took up residence in our attic. I never expected that to happen in a house less than five years old, but it apparently did.

On the afternoon of Saturday, January 9th, the kids and I were out shooting baskets in our driveway. It was clear and sunny at the time. As I was about to shoot another basket I caught a whiff of a familiar smell: gasoline!

I stopped and immediately asked the kids if they smelled anything. “Yeah, gasoline!” they responded.

I looked all around for potential sources of the smell. There were no cars passing by (we live on a dead-end street), no neighbors were mowing or trimming their lawns, no planes were flying over, and no gasoline was stored in our open garage. That got me wondering if the smell might not have been a physical one. I was reminded of the phantom gasoline smell we had in our home on March 3rd, 2009. Was our ghost back?

The smell quickly dissipated and we continued playing. Everything seemed normal. That is, until that Monday morning, January 11th!
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Former First Lady Nancy Reagan told Vanity Fair that sometimes she ‘sees’ her late husband, Ronald Reagan.

“At night time, if I wake up, I think Ronnie is there, and I start to talk to him… And I see him,” she told the magazine.

One afternoon last week I came home to a bustling home as usual. As I put away my work things, Kelly asked me if I smelled anything. I took a few whiffs and smelled something, but couldn’t readily identify it. She thought it smelled like natural gas, but I was in the midst of a cold and wasn’t the best judge of anything at that point.

We turned our attention to dinner and then put the kids to bed. As she and I were in the den, we again smelled the smell. Befuddled, we both searched the house for all the usual suspects. Our dishwasher is notorious for stinky smells, so I bravely stuck my head into it to find it wasn’t the culprit. I searched the garage (the home of our water heater) and came up empty. Ditto for the gas fireplace. Checked the dog but he wasn’t it. The smell was in our bedroom, so I searched around there, but nothing. I even turned on the heat and sniffed the vents.
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Last night the Rhine had a panel discussion on Electronic Voice Phenomena, or EVP. George Matthis, president of the National Society of Paranormal Investigation and Research, Inc. and Steve Baumann, Ph.D. with the Rhine Research Center presented some interesting examples of EVP.

What one hears in an EVP is subject to broad interpretation. A few examples were played for the audience and – while intriguing – opinions differed on what was actually being said. Many clips had that watery sound of early cellphones.

As I heard it I knew right away what is needed: better recording equipment! Many of the clips were recorded on handheld digital note-taking devices. These devices are designed to record voices perhaps a foot away from the microphone. They are also designed to compress as much audio onto their flash chips as possible. This severely distorts the sound quality, resulting in gobbledygook from even the live human beings they record.

While the sounds I heard suggest speech, it will take far better recordings to make a convincing case.

The family and I were on the grounds of the North Carolina State Capitol two weeks ago for a festival. Our daughter Hallie ran into some friends from school and I chatted with their father while they played.

“Look up there, ” he told his kids. “That’s one of the most haunted buildings you’ll find.”

Naturally that got my attention. I asked him what he knew about the place.

“I do commercial painting jobs,” he said. “We were repainting the inside of the dome one night when we smelled this cigar smoke out of nowhere. We heard noises in the rest of the building, too.”

I laughed and told him I’d experienced the same thing on my Capitol ghost-hunting trip.

Don’t believe in ghosts and want to see for yourself? Attend the Capitol’s Scare on the Square event on the night of October 25th. From 5:30 to 9:30 PM there will be tours of the grounds and building, complete with actors portraying famous North Carolina personalities. Inside the Capitol you might also experience the phantom cigar smoke for yourself!

I hope the activity this night is as good as (and hopefully better than) the stuff I experienced. I also wonder how a large crowd might change the atmosphere; if the ghost or ghosts will feel like performing. Another concern is that with so many people wandering the building, its next to impossible to rule out a “living” cause for a noise.

While we’ve got a lot going on that day (its Travis’s birthday), I hope to get back to the Capitol and say hello again to the ghost of Zeb Vance.

Sunday night I was cleaning up the kitchen after a nice meal. The kids were in the den playing with toys and Kelly was in the office doing a little work. As I was loading the dishwasher, the smell of smoke practically knocked me over.

“Kelly, I smell smoke again!” I yelled as I put dishes away. “It’s back and it stinks!” I said, my voice rising with the recognition that this was actually happening.

The smell was stronger than I’ve ever smelled it. It was as if my clothes were saturated in smoke, like I’d just spent hours at some smoky club. In that respect it was different than the faint whiff I’d smelled before.

Kelly got up from the office and walked over to me, sniffing the air. Just as suddenly as the smell arrived, it vanished. I find that even stranger than the smell’s arrival! How can a smell be simply turned off, with no trace left?

I checked the obvious choices, sniffing the disposal, the dishwasher, and the gas oven behind me. None smelled of smoke. Also curious was the total lack of any psychic feelings of ghosts: no hair standing on end, no feeling of being watched, no feeling of another presence. That tends to favor a logical, physical explanation, though that explanation is just as elusive.

“Damn it!” I said, stomping my feet as Kelly returned to her work. “I want to know why that happens!”

Thinking back on it, the one thing that comes to mind is the relaxed state of mind I am in when I’m doing dishes. I think that state of mind is conducive to psychic receptivity. The first amazing time Kelly’s mind was read by our young Hallie, Kelly was standing at the sink absent-mindedly doing dishes. I was in a similar frame of mind during my smoke incident: my hands on autopilot while my mind drifted.

I am also called back to the first time I smelled phantom smoke – at the ghost hunt at the North Carolina State Capitol two years ago. Has Zebulon Vance been inviting himself to dinner?

When I participated in last year’s ghost investigation at the N.C. State Capitol (parts 1, 2, and 3), the most remarkable experience I had was strongly smelling pipe smoke in the Treasurer’s room and in the hallway outside. There was no visible source of the smoke, nor did it irritate my sinuses as real smoke tends to do. It made camping out all night in that old building worth it.

For the past few weeks we’ve had a similar occurance in our house. Kelly will be in the kitchen area and suddenly announce “I smell cigarette smoke!” One night she was so certain that she asked me where’d I been. After smelling my clothes, she ruled me out as the source.

I usually can’t smell it, but that changed today. She had just finished washing dishes from lunch when she smelled it. I was nearby and this time did catch a whiff of it.

Our first thought was to suspect our next-door neighbor was out smoking. Stepping onto the porch we could see no sign of him. It was raining at the time so in all likelihood if he wanted to smoke he would be standing in his garage on the other side of the house rather than on his front or back porch.

I’m a fanatic about energy efficiency and as such our home is sealed pretty tightly with little if any air leaks. For use to be inside and somehow smell cigarette smoke blowing into our yard from 50 feet away strains credulousness.

After personally witnessing mystery smoke last year in the Capitol I have to wonder if our smoke is perhaps from a world other than our own. If so, who do we have to thank for this? I know of very few people who could be our smoking ghost (if that’s what we’ve got). Kelly’s also at a loss for who (or what) it could be.

Stay tuned.