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Jeremiah, LPI lead investigator and founder, spoke with a preacher one time, who told about a group of men who lived in Arkansas many years ago. They were "business men", so to speak, con artists would be a better name, and they got very wealthy off of the poor supersticious hill folk of the Ozarks.
You see, to these poor people, a haunted house or farm was worthless to the point that the banks would not lend money on them. These men, who claimed to be ghost hunters, would travel around to these reportedly haunted farms, and "get rid of the spirits", for a hefty fee, of course. If the farmer didn't have the fee, the "businessman" would still do the job for 60% of the farmers next years crops.
These businessmen had an ace in the hole. They knew that the vast majority of all hauntings were just natural occurrences that were mistaken for ghosts. They would send the owner away, find out what this natural occurrence was, fix it in the homeowners absence, and claim that they had sent the ghost on it's way. No one was ever the wiser. In fact, this preachers uncle was one of these ghosthunters for 25 years, and he said he never found any real ghosts. He said if he would have, he would have quit that business and moved away from the Ozarks. In fact, he almost did once:
He came to the aid of a farmer once who claimed to have a ghost in the attic. Every night the ghost would walk slowly but loudly across the raftors, from above the kitchen all the way to the other side of the house. The farmer said he would have kept it to himself, except that he routinely had boarders in the spare rooms at night and they would usually leave at first light because of the noises. They were beginning to talk in town and it was just a matter of time before the banker found out.
So our ghost hunter sat there, night after night. He had a kerosene lantern and a .22 caliber rifle loaded with birdshot. As soon as he would hear the "ghost" bumping across the raftors, he would sneak up the ladder, open the attic access and... there would be nothing there. Then he tried camping out in the attic, the noises would never happen. He was there almost a month, and no matter what he tried, he could never catch what was making the noise. He was just about to hang it up and retire, thinking he had found a real ghost. But he decided to give it one more try. He took the attic door out. turned out all the lights in the house and sat atop the ladder with the lantern and the rifle. It took longer, this time, for the noises to start. He waited till they would have been just about two raftors away, and he jumped up through the hole, aimed and shot a large rat that was rolling a potato across the raftors.
He said evidently that rat would crawl from the attic down into the potato bin, drag a potato up into the attic, and roll it across the raftors to the wall on the other side of the attic where his nest was.
The moral of the story is that there is a natural, logical explanation for vast majority of all alleged hauntings or paranormal activity. It could be anything from pests like we saw in the story above, to settling foundations, and from air in the pipes, to abnormally high EMF (electromagnetic field) caused by unshielded or faulty wiring. The key to finding these things is to be a skeptic, and look for the cause. Once these causes are found, most people will find there is nothing at all to be afraid of. |
