These days the airwaves are alive with ghost busters exploring cemeteries, abandoned hospitals, asylums, forts and prisons looking for the ultimate thrill, unmistakable evidence of life beyond the grave, namely a ghost or an entity. It definitely makes for interesting television especially as we move into the season of Halloween. Unfortunately the glut of television shows compress hours and hours of waiting into 60 minutes of seemingly crazy adventure. In real life, the situation is usually far from this glamorized ideal.

While I have always had somewhat of an interest in the paranormal, my brother's experiences with the "beyond" over the past 13 years has definitely opened me to the distinct possibility there is more to the world than what we see. My family actually represents most of the stances of people toward ghosts. My mother is practical and skeptical. A ghostly brigade of specters could accost her on a sidewalk and she would simply point them in the direction they want to go without batting an eye. She would probably remark in the end they just looked pale.My father I think is skeptical but a bit more open to the possibility of ghosts although I don't believe he can cite a particular strange occurrence that would mark the origin of a belief in ghosts. My brother is a believer having experienced all types of phenomena in the past decade from bumps in the night to encounters with ghostly figures in his home in Reigelsville.So where does my belief lay with regard to ghosts? I must admit that while at one point I was skeptical about ghosts, I really think there is a world beyond what we can see that exists beyond ours. I think there are things that occur that we cannot explain and we write off to imaginations or hallucinations.It's so easy to just accept science as our baseline and agree with the premise that if it cannot be duplicated in a laboratory than it does not exist. Most scientists and skeptics just dismiss any anomaly out of hand because they cannot recreate it. There are things that are once in a lifetime events never to be duplicated again. Does that mean if they are so incredible as to defy the imagination and we cannot duplicate them, they never happened? That is a rather simplistic approach I think.Does our mind create things we wish to see or hear or sense? Absolutely. Does it do it all the time? I'm not so sure. If wishful thinking could make ghosts materialize, then I would be seeing them all the time, but I do not. In fact to be quite honest, I'm not sure I can state I have ever seen anything that I could definitively say was a traditional ghost. With that said, I also cannot say I have not seen a ghost.Case in point was a recent trip to Gettysburg. I was at LIttle Round Top with a friend and fellow investigator. It was dusk and we were on the top of the hill. I began to walk toward what was the front where the Alabamians attacked and were repelled by Colonel Joshua Chamberlain's 20th Maine. I stopped to just drink in the view when Danny yelled to me that he saw something beside me. I turned to the right and saw nothing, but as I turned to the left what I saw shocked me momentarily.Moving across the ground only a few feet from my shoe was a man-sized shadow crawling quickly over the ground before disappearing by a nearby tree. I blinked and looked again and it was gone. The whole thing happened in a matter of a second or two, but it was enough to make my jaw drop and then question what I saw.The strange part of the whole incident was Danny saw the same thing I did, but from his angle above me, he placed the shadow a little lower than what I witnessed. So what was this image? The rational side of me is saying that my imagination got the better of me for a second and I imagined the shape, yet how could I have imagined a shape Identical to what Danny saw before Danny told me what he saw?Could it have been a trick of the dusk? Sure, but it was not pitch black. It was still rather easy to see around me and this hulking image was black and solid for the few seconds it was visible yet I cannot prove it was there. The only proof I have that the possibility of something being there exists is that I have some elevated K2 and EMF readings in the vicinity for several minutes before and after this sighting.If the environment is what helped to create this illusion or stored the energy to recreate this alleged encounter, then how could we ever duplicate it in a laboratory. The answer is, we cannot. My criticism of traditional science though is that while they accept empirical data collected in the field for other disciplines and then analyze this data in the lab, they refuse to even look at data related to anything paranormal. What exactly are they afraid of finding? Perhaps their fear rests in the inability to explain away everything or the possibility of failing to account for empirical data. What do you think?Til next time…