Some more thoughts on the Grey Ghost Paracon aboard the USS Hornet. This is the just the second time I’ve been to a “haunted” place since I’ve come out of the closet about the paranormal, both to myself and to world at large, and allowed myself to notice and feel whatever there was without discounting it. The evening “investigation” tours took all the attendees, in small groups, to many of the shipboard hot spots. My group was led by a woman who was an intuitive, and was a member of an investigation team that is based on on the Hornet. She had many personal stories to tell, which I find more interesting than the second hand ones.
The first stop was CIC. Though somewhat technically interesting, it was also hot and stuffy. I felt there was zippo activity there and the tech people got nothing as well. I the next stop was a Ready room, I think. This was the most interesting for me. There I had impressions of two people, one in the hall, outside the room, and one inside the room. It also seemed to me that these entities were less than full-fledged personalities, they just seemed two-dimensional, somehow. Perhaps these were what are called “residuals,” more like recordings than spirits.
The one in the all seemed to me to be a cook. He was sweaty and dirty and a little angry about something. He was stuck in the hall because he wasn’t allowed in the room, officer country, maybe? The other person was at the other end of the room from me. He was wearing a flight jacket, but he wasn’t a pilot. It took a while to sort out the impressions, but finally I realized that he was dressed more like a WWII Army pilot, not navy. He was extremely angry about something “she” had done.
The tech seemed to react more here than anywhere else. Near the end of our allotted time, I felt both impressions leave. A little while later the guide suggested that we move on, and I spoke up, for the only time on this tour, to vote yay because the entries had all left.
The next notable spot was one of the emergency generator rooms. The guide had a great story about what she, and others, had seen and felt in this room. All the interesting stuff happened on one place, but I couldn’t see where that was, because of the dark and all the people and equipment blocking my view. After she finished her talk and had answered questions. I wondered about the general area and got strong chills in one, particular, spot. I don’t know if that was “the” spot or not. (I’m not too worried about being “right” these days, I just want to experience what I can.)
Sick bay was the last interesting spot. This consists of a suit of rooms including offices, and a variety of examining, operating, testing and treatment rooms. It was interesting because of all the equipment and other details of the era, and because of a general feeling of the place. I had strong chills when I first looked into the entrance, and occasional “bumps” in various places.
I have now accumulated several first-hand accounts of ghost encounters aboard this ship. Most of them seemed perfectly ordinary, except that the “person” vanished, inexplicably. They happen to people alone in the dark, and on the hanger deck, in broad daylight, with hundreds of people present. Most often the ghost was seen by only one person, but sometimes more than one. I can’t help but wonder if many more people see these things, but just never realize it. I mean, how would they? If you saw a “sailor” on a ship with lots of veterans and others wearing various kinds of uniforms, would you notice?
This is an idea that has been forming in my head for a while. If the paranormal exists, then it’s part of nature and it’s happening all the time, all around us, the effects are just too subtle to notice, as a rule. On the other hand, we don’t want to notice this stuff, so it’s easy to edit it out of our experience. We chalk it up to inattention, confusion, wishful thinking or coincidence. Many great scientific discoveries have been the result of someone noticing a series of anomalous events, errors, odd things that were considered not worth explaining, and “connected the dots” to realize that there was a pattern here that said something new about the world.
Right now, the whole paranormal/psychic phenomena area is a mishmash of weird stories and scientific data points. All very confusing and mostly anecdotal, with no clear rules to sort the wheat from the chaff. By far, most investigators and ghost hunters are out to find cool stuff, so that have a good story to tell. It’s not really about advancing understanding, which really isn’t too surprising. I guess we are still waiting for a Newton or Einstein who makes the one, critical, observation that begins to make sense of it all.
Showing posts with label ghost hunting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ghost hunting. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
Monday, August 10, 2015
My visit to Grey Ghost Paracon 2015, Part I.
A Paranormal convention. This was something that wasn’t even on my radar six months ago, and here I was a vender at one. I honestly don’t know what to expect, so I guess then it’s hard to be disappointed. This convention took place on the aircraft carrier Hornet, in Alameda, California. Originally commissioned in 1943, the Hornet served from WWII through the Apollo program, and was decommissioned in 1970. This ship saw a lot of action and is famous for being haunted.
I had never been there before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in the ship itself, so I’m going to have to go back there sometime when I have the time to look everything over and go on the tours. I had first heard about the convention through a couple I had met through my MeetUp group on reincarnation. They had worked on the ship, and so I was able to hang with them and other docents at meal times, got a little peak behind-the-scenes and some of the inside dope on some of what goes on there.
The convention started with the usual stuff, vender tables and presenters giving talks for about two hours, then dinner, and then we were all divided up into “investigation” teams, each with a couple of guides, that toured the ship’s hot spots. After these tours were finished, about 1:30 am, people were free to wander the open areas until 3. I quit at the end of the tour. I was really tired and had seen enough.
During vender time, I set up a table for my services and immediately started learning. The first thing I noticed, is that everybody else had a banner that they hung from the front of there table. I didn’t. Next time I’m going to have to look into that. The other thing I got, was that almost nobody seemed to understand what I was all about. I suppose that I assumed that people really into ghost hunting and the paranormal would, at least, know about releasing spirits and de-possession, but apparently not. Or they only were acquainted with it in a peripheral sort of way, it really didn’t have anything to do with what they were interested in. In fact, the whole concept of de-haunting might actually piss them off a bit, I mean, they’re into investigation, if we clean out the haunted places they’ll have nothing to do.
It seemed like a lot of the conventioneers were from various investigation groups. Now that I think of it, I should have spent more time talking to the different groups and finding out what they did. What little it did pick up showed me that there are many different approaches and goals for these groups. Who knew that there were so many? There was also a group with t-shirt messages I won’t repeat here; Any convention attracts all kinds, I suppose.
I haven’t watched too many ghost shows. I have seen some, but they didn’t prepare me for what I ran into at this con. I really hadn’t realized how much the paranormal world was divided into Sensitives and Techs. (I made up these names, but the division is quite real.) The TV shows I’ve seen give short-shift to the sensitives. (Probably because there’s not much to see there.) There is also a third category, the pure scientist, who is less interested in ghost hunting, per se, and is focused on parapsychology and the science behind the whole phenomenon. I only saw one person in this last group, who I’d already seen at HCH Institute, where he teaches classes. The Sensitives tend to focus on developing their intuition, and so don’t pay much attention to the tech, and the Techs seem to pay little attention to their senses, so the groups seem to have an uneasy partnership, each not really sure what to make of the other.
It seems logical that there should be crossovers, intuitives that also know their tech, but I didn’t meet any. One of the presenters was a fellow that apparently has created and built most of the devices that are out there now. He makes his living selling these devices and doesn’t really have anything to say about whether ghosts exist or not. He just builds stuff that people like and looks good on TV shows. At least, that’s what he says.
For me, this raises a question. I’m capable of building whatever hardware might interest me, but I’m also an intuitive. I find it easier and more interesting to depend on my senses than to depend on a bunch of cranky and clumsy devices to detect and communicate. On the other hand, tech is completely objective and creates a record, so there is that to consider. But, what would happen if the engineers and intuitives got together and built devices that detected what the intuitives felt? I have read up on the tech, to some extent, and it seems that most of it is based on the idea of looking at random signals or input and looking for non-randomness, that is then translated into output. Presumably, the spirits are able to influence the random signals in order to communicate. What if you, instead, searched for things that are sensitive to psychic energy in the same way that other instruments are sensitive to light, heat, x-rays, ultra-violet light and other forms of radiation?
One of these days I’m going to have to seriously sit down and consider this whole idea. It seems to me that all the people building tech are not sensitive, so they have no way to reality-check their ideas. It’s like blind people trying to design and build a camera. How do you develop the science and technology of optics for lenses, for example, if you can’t see? My theory is, that any device or detector that you can buy, has already been de-sensitized to the paranormal as much as possible. Because these influences are pretty much everywhere, all the time, it’s just that most people don’t notice them, except when they’re unusually strong, or they’re unusually open to it.
My idea, if anyone wants to fund it, is to investigate sensors and circuits and devices of all kinds that are generally avoided because they “don’t work right,” or exhibit, seemingly, random behavior at times, to see if any of them react to the paranormal things that I can sense. It’s like when scientists that stumbled across x-rays, and had to figure out how to image and control this new form of energy that nobody had ever seen before. I’m sure that there are methods of objectively detecting paranormal “energies,” for lack of a better tern, but these methods have all been discarded by technologists because they appear to be unstable and unreliable by people who didn’t recognize what they are actually responding to. If anyone wants to fund this, let me know. ;)
Paracon: To be continued. There’s lots more to talk about.
I had never been there before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in the ship itself, so I’m going to have to go back there sometime when I have the time to look everything over and go on the tours. I had first heard about the convention through a couple I had met through my MeetUp group on reincarnation. They had worked on the ship, and so I was able to hang with them and other docents at meal times, got a little peak behind-the-scenes and some of the inside dope on some of what goes on there.
The convention started with the usual stuff, vender tables and presenters giving talks for about two hours, then dinner, and then we were all divided up into “investigation” teams, each with a couple of guides, that toured the ship’s hot spots. After these tours were finished, about 1:30 am, people were free to wander the open areas until 3. I quit at the end of the tour. I was really tired and had seen enough.
During vender time, I set up a table for my services and immediately started learning. The first thing I noticed, is that everybody else had a banner that they hung from the front of there table. I didn’t. Next time I’m going to have to look into that. The other thing I got, was that almost nobody seemed to understand what I was all about. I suppose that I assumed that people really into ghost hunting and the paranormal would, at least, know about releasing spirits and de-possession, but apparently not. Or they only were acquainted with it in a peripheral sort of way, it really didn’t have anything to do with what they were interested in. In fact, the whole concept of de-haunting might actually piss them off a bit, I mean, they’re into investigation, if we clean out the haunted places they’ll have nothing to do.
It seemed like a lot of the conventioneers were from various investigation groups. Now that I think of it, I should have spent more time talking to the different groups and finding out what they did. What little it did pick up showed me that there are many different approaches and goals for these groups. Who knew that there were so many? There was also a group with t-shirt messages I won’t repeat here; Any convention attracts all kinds, I suppose.
I haven’t watched too many ghost shows. I have seen some, but they didn’t prepare me for what I ran into at this con. I really hadn’t realized how much the paranormal world was divided into Sensitives and Techs. (I made up these names, but the division is quite real.) The TV shows I’ve seen give short-shift to the sensitives. (Probably because there’s not much to see there.) There is also a third category, the pure scientist, who is less interested in ghost hunting, per se, and is focused on parapsychology and the science behind the whole phenomenon. I only saw one person in this last group, who I’d already seen at HCH Institute, where he teaches classes. The Sensitives tend to focus on developing their intuition, and so don’t pay much attention to the tech, and the Techs seem to pay little attention to their senses, so the groups seem to have an uneasy partnership, each not really sure what to make of the other.
It seems logical that there should be crossovers, intuitives that also know their tech, but I didn’t meet any. One of the presenters was a fellow that apparently has created and built most of the devices that are out there now. He makes his living selling these devices and doesn’t really have anything to say about whether ghosts exist or not. He just builds stuff that people like and looks good on TV shows. At least, that’s what he says.
For me, this raises a question. I’m capable of building whatever hardware might interest me, but I’m also an intuitive. I find it easier and more interesting to depend on my senses than to depend on a bunch of cranky and clumsy devices to detect and communicate. On the other hand, tech is completely objective and creates a record, so there is that to consider. But, what would happen if the engineers and intuitives got together and built devices that detected what the intuitives felt? I have read up on the tech, to some extent, and it seems that most of it is based on the idea of looking at random signals or input and looking for non-randomness, that is then translated into output. Presumably, the spirits are able to influence the random signals in order to communicate. What if you, instead, searched for things that are sensitive to psychic energy in the same way that other instruments are sensitive to light, heat, x-rays, ultra-violet light and other forms of radiation?
One of these days I’m going to have to seriously sit down and consider this whole idea. It seems to me that all the people building tech are not sensitive, so they have no way to reality-check their ideas. It’s like blind people trying to design and build a camera. How do you develop the science and technology of optics for lenses, for example, if you can’t see? My theory is, that any device or detector that you can buy, has already been de-sensitized to the paranormal as much as possible. Because these influences are pretty much everywhere, all the time, it’s just that most people don’t notice them, except when they’re unusually strong, or they’re unusually open to it.
My idea, if anyone wants to fund it, is to investigate sensors and circuits and devices of all kinds that are generally avoided because they “don’t work right,” or exhibit, seemingly, random behavior at times, to see if any of them react to the paranormal things that I can sense. It’s like when scientists that stumbled across x-rays, and had to figure out how to image and control this new form of energy that nobody had ever seen before. I’m sure that there are methods of objectively detecting paranormal “energies,” for lack of a better tern, but these methods have all been discarded by technologists because they appear to be unstable and unreliable by people who didn’t recognize what they are actually responding to. If anyone wants to fund this, let me know. ;)
Paracon: To be continued. There’s lots more to talk about.
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