Night Recording Results from May 14th, 2008

Date Recorded: May 14, 2008.
Analysis Started: 9/3/2008 4:26pm
Analysis Completed: 10/22/2008 11:59am

Results:

Clip #1, 2:10 am, 0'17'' Noise filter applied.
I don't know how to quite explain this one. It appears to sound like some sort of bird. It's too loud to be outside. It's definitely in the house. This is also not the first time I've caught this sound.

Finally!! Night Recording Results from May 13th, 2008

Date Recorded: May 13, 2008.
Anaylsis Started: 9/3/2008 4:26 pm
Analysis Completed: 10/9/2008 3:48 pm

Results:

I tried my hand at using some Audacity tools, namely Noise Removal. I did this because the first sound I caught was a whisper that you can barely hear over the background noise. This whisper is pretty dramatic, and the first clear voice I have caught since the first night I ever recorded.

So here is the original recording:

Clip #1, 2:23 am, 0m 10s No filter.
A whisper, "It's quiet inside."

Clip #2, 2:23 am, 0m 10s Noise filter applied.
A whisper, "It's quiet inside."

Clip #3, 2:41 am, 1m 36s Noise filter applied
Knocks, then a series of bumps that sound a lot like footsteps.

Shelby is getting touched by a ghost

The first time she reported this to me, I dismissed it. But tonight Shelby came down and brought to my attention a new form of activity.

Shelby is being touched.

The first time was on Dec 26, 2009. She had a friend over, and while they were in the dark, talking to each other before going to sleep, Shelby felt something touching her forearm softly. The touch "walked" up her arm before stopping.

It weirded her out, but I dismissed because it could have been several things. A hair, whatever.

But tonight, as I was inventorying some board games I received today, she came downstairs and told me more touching just occurred. She was painting in the kitchen, which is right above my head, and felt something softly grab the back of her shirt, and pull. it only lasted a few seconds. Sophia was the only other person with her in the room, and Shelby verified that Sophia was next to her and not behind her.

I asked Shelby to demonostrate to me what it felt like, and she pulled on my shirt softly. It almost tickled.

"Are you sure that you felt a pulling?" I asked her.

She was sure.

Voice while we watch TV. Voices in the night.

Girls are asleep, doors shut. Around 12:00am Holly and I were watching the season finale of Survivor. Holly heard a very distinct child's voice to our left, which is at the foot of the stairs leading upstairs. The voice didn't say anything in particular. Just a vocal sigh. I heard something at the same time but didn't quite peg it to be a child's voice. Holly was positive it was a vioce.

Also, two nights ago, Holly had gotten up toin the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and laid back down. She heard a voice say "What?" from somewhere downstairs.

The little girl lets the cat out

Each one of my daughters has a cat. And each one of those cats live full time in their respective owner's bedrooms. When you have 3 dogs and 3 cats, and the two species don't really mix, you have to draw political lines. Therefore, the cats live upstairs and the dogs downstairs.

Last Friday [12/4/2009], my wife went into Shelby's room, a location that has hosted some activity in the past, to give Shelby's cat Smokey, some water. She did that task without incident and when she finished, Holly remembers closing the door.

Now closing the door is essential with cats in these rooms because if you don't close the door, the cats venture out of their rooms and wander downstairs and by crossing the set political line, become fair game for the dogs, causing all sorts of ruckus and chaos. (Why Holly was watering the cat and not Shelby is a cause for further discussion that is beyond the scope of this blog.)

About fifteen minutes later, Holly and the girls were downstairs talking about their day,. The dogs started running over to the stair landing and barking. This caused everyone in the room to look over at the stair landing to see Smokey peeking his head through the rails and looking at everyone in the room.

Shelby also saw something else: she saw a little girl also looking through the rails at everyone in the room. Shelby saw that the girl has long brown hair and a pale face, but little else since Shelby was looking at her across the room and through a set of bannister rails. And then she was gone.

No one besides Shelby saw the girl.

Theory on residual hauntings

Many of the paranormal experts seem to thing residual haunting are like VCR tapes. They are energy memories that play out over and over again. For example, if someone sees an apparition that walks through a wall, the experts label that as a residual haunting because at some point in history there was most likely a door or a portal of some kind where people used to walk through.

I have a problem with this explanation. What causes these "memories" to trigger? Where is the memory even stored? Where does the energy needed to manifest such phenomena come from? It seems too random and I don't accept the "it just happens" answers.

In July 2009, my oldest daughter Sarah saw an apparition. It was a farmer that was walking up our hill, next to the driveway. She watched him until he basically walked into a large bush and disappeared. The fact that he did not try to avoid the bush means he would be classified as residual activity.

This got me thinking long and hard about residual hauntings. Here is my theory: residual hauntings are memories of events that the spririt is remembering at that moment. Have you ever day dreamed or remembered something that happened in your past? I believe spirits still have this ability, and remember things that happened in their past life.

And the moment they remember it, the memory actually takes physical form, playing out in the exact spot that the actual event occured in the past. Imagine if you could store your memories, then play them like a hologram any time you wanted. I think spirits have this ability.

I almost got some recordings up

Last night I attempted to hook my IC recorder up to my computer and transfer some of the 30+ samples I have from my night recordings over the past year to the blog.

However, I just recently moved my computer to the Ubuntu OS, and for some reason Audacity is not picking up the recording from the input line very well anymore. After some research, some say to plug the wire from the recorder to the Line In jack in the back of the computer and see if that's any better. Hopefully I'll have something up soon!

Shelby tells me about her bathtime visitor

I was working on my computer downstairs in the unfinished basement yesterday evening when Shelby came downstairs after her bath to tell me about a visitor she just had.

She claims that a white shape kept darting in and out of the bathroom doorway . She kept seeing it out of the corner of her eye, but every time she tried to look at the doorway nothing was there. This happened she said for a about a minute, then stopped.

The movie "Paranormal Activity"

Holly and I saw "Paranormal Activity" at the movie theater a few weeks ago.

It was an entertaining movie, and I was impressed early on with the activity that was going on in their house. However, it quickly grew to things that were a little hard to believe.

HOWEVER, I can relate 100% to the first few nights of the movie. Taps on the walls, doors closing, and audible footsteps are all things I've encountered in my house, and have all been documented in this blog.

A light passes right by me as I'm getting dressed this morning

So I wake up this morning, bleary-eyed, and go into our walk-in closet to start getting dressed for work.

At one point I'm trying to unfurl a white undershirt so I can put it on, and this little ball of light zips across me at just about chest level. It flew right over my arms, which were held at a level where my elbows were bent at 90 degrees. It flew from the right to the left across me into the bathroom, and I tried to follow it with my eyes into the bathroom to see where it went, but it was gone.

It was far away enough from my eyes as it passed me that I could look at it quickly. It didn't have a form. It was fuzzy, and soft white in color. The whole experience lasted only a second or two.

Was it a bug? Or was it something more paranormal? I don't know. The purpose of this blog is so I can record everything that goes on in this house that I can't explain.

It definitely made no sound as it flew past me. It was too small and too white to be a housefly. I went into the bathroom to finish getting ready, and there was no bug flying around the lightbulb.

A very loud bang last night

Last night, something in my room went "BANG" and made me jump out my sleep. This was much louder than the normals bumps and taps that normally occur. I lay there for a few seconds, trying in my half-asleep daze to figure out what made the noise, but fell asleep again.

Of course, I haven't been doing any night recordings lately, so I wasn't able to record it. Based on what Shelby told me this weekend about the voice calling her name, and this, I'm going to record tonight.

Shelby tells me someone calls her name at night

While on the way to the in-laws today, Shelby told me in a real matter-of-factly sort of way, that last night someone was calling her name and it woke her up.

She said it was a little girl's voice that repeated her name a few times. She woke up and said, "What?" thinking that it was Sophia calling her name and it was time to wake up or something similar. But Sophia was asleep and there was no one else in the room.

Shelby then told me that this had happened once before, a few months ago, and that she forgot to tell me.

Sarah sees a farmer walk through our yard

Yes, I know. It's been a long time. Really, there's been nothing significant to report. I still have to get the remaining night recordings up on the sight, but work has been keeping me very busy, and to be honest, I want to spend as little time on the computer when I get home as possible.

But last night, something significant did happen. The rain was coming down in sporadic torrents. There was lightning aplenty, even when it wasn't raining.

The entire family was spending an evening together, watching a re-run of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on ABC Family. We ate dinner in front of the TV, made popcorn, and even baked cookies. At some point Sarah realized she didn't know where her Zune was and went out the back door to look for it. A few minutes later she was frantically knocking at the back door.

Initially I thought nothing of it because earlier that day one of the other girls was complaining that the door knob gets stuck. I assumed Sarah was going through the same problem. A bit irritated, I yelled at her through the door, "It's open, just turn the handle."

It only took a few seconds before she did get the doorknob unstuck. When she walked in it was obvious something had spooked her. She explained she was on the back deck and saw a "farmer" walking up the hill in the rain through our property. It was light enough that she saw what he was wearing, and that he had a straw hat on, and that a piece of straw was sticking out of his mouth. He was skinny, wearing a a old white tank top, and ratty pants that looked like old blue jeans that were cut off and only came down to his knees. He was also bare foot.

She saw him walk up the hill for about 3 seconds, then he disappeared. This freaked her out enough to make a beeline for the back door. I went outside with her and made her explain in great detail where she saw this farmer, what he looked like. She stood on the deck and I walked over to where she said he was, and faced the direction she claimed he was walking. I was only 10 feet away from a huge overgrown cluster of bushes and brambles. He would have walked straight into this mess before he disappeared.

Inactivity and a voice after a long hiatus

Things have been very quiet here, which is a good thing in my opinion. I contribute this to the fact we have cats now. Three of them to be exact - one for each of the girls. A lot of noises at night I have no choice but contribute to them. Only the obvious things would I be able to really question now.

So we've had the cats since November, and I've not made any new recordings since then. But last night Holly and I retired to bed around 11:30 and were reading. Around 11:45 I heard a girls voice say one word. I thought it was the word "Ouch" but Holly says she distinctly heard "Hello?", which is very strange. The words don't sound anything alike. When we heard the voice we immediately looked at each other and gave each other the "What was that?" look. I got up to check on the girls, and all were asleep. I'm going to record tonight and see if I can pick up any more voices.

I still haven't transferred my backlog of older recordings up to this blog. Sorry folks for the delay.

More night recordings coming

I have a ton of night recordings that I have gone through. I just need to upload them and create blog entries for them.

Ernie is now sitting on my desk

Ok, so I just bit the bullet, and went rummaging through the boxes here in the basement to find the Great and Terrible Ernie. He is now sitting on my desk, facing me.

Come battery malfunction or sensor malfunction, every time he states "I feel GREAT!" we are going to be looking each other in the eye from now on.

Bring it on Ernie, bring it on.