Paranormal Research
I spent my late-night in an unoccupied, 100 year old apartment staring into darkness while asking the empty space whether it was a boy, a girl, an adult, and whether they remembered a fire.
Ambiance aside, this is the first time I’ve ever assisted in a paranormal research group. It was intense, but not at all unsettling–at least until we started our hour and a half drive home and nearly hit 2 separate pairs of deer, a fox/coyote (I said: too big for a fox! He said: it’s too fluffy for a coyote!), and an oppossum. Harrowing, I know: add these near-misses to a gathering lightning storm in the distance, and I was thoroughly shook up by the time I got home.
The guys I worked with, Jeremy and Rob of the Anomalous Research Center, are pros. Jeremy’s been doing this investigation thing for over sixteen years, and has recently decided to drop some major cash on new equipment, including a FLIR thermal camera–although he hasn’t purchased it yet. He’s passionate about what he’s doing, too–pursuing a degree in psychology and a masters in parapsychology–while working a day job as an IT professional.
This building had an interesting construction: it was once (apparently) a Church, but after a major fire fell into ruin until someone bought it cheap and converted it into an apartment complex. If you were to go into the basement of the building you could see the charred rafters still in place: it’s a little eerie nobody removed the beams entirely. It has four spacious apartments–two on the first floor, two on the second–and the majority of these apartments is a long, poorly-lit hallway. The windows are old (a few ’30′s, a few ’70′s, and only a few modern, ’80′s+), the floors are all creaky hardwood covered in carpet or tile, and the wiring is so out of date, the ambiant electromagnetic fields are in the .5 range, with active wiring in the walls emitting up to a 9.4.
I enjoyed it. It was exactly what I expected it to be, with a bunch of dedicated people enjoying themselves while doing research. The setup was top-rate, and the two of them knew exactly what they were doing. Solid.
Although I personally found nothing paranormal about the place, I did have a few instances where my eyes played tricks on me and I second-guessed my senses. Perhaps something happened, perhaps not. Time, and studying the evidence, will tell.
~x