3 Day Weekend Workshop

Workshop will be held on May 24th, 25th & 26th (Memorial Day Weekend)

• A built in six line display for words.

• Operating modes Including: Dictionary, Graphic Dowsing Mode, Spirit Drawing Mode, Energy Display and Phonetic Modes.

• Built in Word Display for Dictionary mode.

• Built in Thermal flashlight reads using an IR sensor that changes color to indicate different temperatures.

• All settings can be accessed through the screen and 3 button interface. No USB or EXTERNAL ports needed.

1. Investigators in their room heard the doorknob rattle and a woman ask a question.  They immediately checked and there was no one in the hallway.  Reports match with similar experiences of previous guests that involve a nurse checking on an elderly woman.

2. Multiple full-body apparitions and human shaped shadows were seen walking across hallways, from one room to the next (or even into walls)

3. Investigators were leaving a room and heard a disembodied voice say "Wait" and immediately the PX (which had been quiet the entire time) said "Wait".  Then the PX began to tell a fragmented story that matched details of a "Christmas Massacre" in downtown South Pittsburg.

4. Investigators witnessed a door open and no explanation could be found.

5. Highly interactive K-II session (see video below) that lasted about an hour with what is expected to be the spirit of Casey, a young girl who passed away in the room being investigated.

6. Disembodied voice (thought also to be Casey) who replied to a question by an investigator while in the ER.  See the Friendly Ghost website link below to listen to the audio clip.

 

Robert Rose videotaped a K-II session using his new Raggedy Ann K-II meter that he likes to call "K-II Annie".  This is the full unedited K-II session (hour and twelve minutes) at Old South Pittsburg Hospital.  Tracy Glover holds the doll while we were in the 3rd floor Operating Room, which is where a girl spirit has been frequently encountered.  We will get it cleaned up for final posting, but thought some of you might be interested in one of our experiences while at the hospital.

 

Sean Dudley has posted a page on his site with several bits of evidence he has already collected from the trip.  You can check out the page here:

http://www.friendly-ghosts.com/old-south-pittsburg-hospital/

And you can watch a "Best of" video of Sean's EVPs here:

Staff Reports

Published: Wed Oct 03, 2007

The South’s Finest Chocolate Factory (http://www.chocolatelovers.com)

Tucked away in World’s Fair Park is what most people refer to as the Chocolate Factory. For over 25 years the chocolatier has been churning out thousands of pounds of candy. But the history of the Chocolate Factory dates back even further to the late 1800s when the Littlefield and Steere Company started making chocolates and other treats. Nearly a decade after the shop opened, a devastating fire demolished the company’s store.
But the company was able to rebuild a factory to produce chocolate once again. Soon, it began to expand the menu and made more than 20,000 pounds of candy per day. When the candy factory closed, the building became a storage space for the next 50 years.
When the World’s Fair came to Knoxville in 1982, the building became a shopping center, housing several restaurants and boutiques. Once the fair left, the South’s Finest Chocolate Factory moved in and the business flourished. Now, it ships all over the U.S.
The Chocolate Factory is known for pecan–caramel turtles, butter creams and double chocolate fudge, though it makes over 100 different candies in-house.
“The one thing I really like about it is (that) I’ve been going there since I was little and it brings back memories,” said UT sophomore Sarah Varandoe. “They have really good chocolates too.”
The shop makes its famous chocolates nearly every day from morning until night.
“We hand-make our chocolates and use the best quality chocolate and nuts, and it’s fresh,” said employee and former customer Charlotte Culvahouse.
The chocolates have no preservatives and a shelf life of over four months. Aside from its main location at World’s Fair Park, just below the Sunsphere, the Chocolate Factory has another location on Kingston Pike.

Bijou Theatre (http://www.knoxbijou.com)

One of Knoxville’s most beloved landmarks is the Bijou Theatre on Gay Street. The theater, Knoxville’s fourth oldest building, is now 98 years old. Though it was closed briefly in 2005 because of financial issues, the theater is back in all of its glory.
“The (Bijou) is beautiful because it’s been there for so long and it’s cool to see the architecture,” said Elizabeth Cox, a UT graduate. “It’s very charming.”
The Bijou opened in 1909 as part of the now defunct Lamar House, a hotel and tavern built in 1817. Its first performance was the musical “Little Johnny Jones.”
When Knoxville was segregated, black members of the audience could only sit in the uppermost balcony of the theater.
Besides bringing in diverse productions from local jazz groups to big-name musicians, the Bijou is also visited by ghosts, according to local legend. There have been enough reports of paranormal activity from employees and stage crew that the East Tennessee Paranormal Research Society decided to investigate.
The ETPRS investigated the Bijou in 2006 and found some eerie instances. For example, the society claims to have recorded “conversations” on the fourth floor and in the basement, where a Civil War general is said to have died. When asked a question, a smoky, floating ball would appear, but it only appears when asked a question, according to investigators. The ETPRS has also captured several pictures of the balls and apparitions in the aisles and stage of the theater. The photos and audio are posted on the web site, http://www.tnseeparanormal.com/Knoxvillebijou.html.
This month the Bijou will feature Hanson, the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, Elliott Yamin, Guster and comedian Henry Cho. The theater will also host this year’s Fall Festival of Arts, a seven-act series of musicians and performers from all over the country.
“It’s a cool old theater with great acoustics — the best acoustics in the state, from what I’ve heard,” said Tom Bugg, a Bijou employee.

The Tomato Head (http://www.thetomatohead.com)

The Tomato Head, formerly known as the Flying Tomato, fits right in with the local businesses in Market Square. It is known for turning first-time customers into regulars with its pizzas, sandwiches and baked goods.
“We have a pretty strong group of regulars that come in almost everyday,” said Trace Bateman, a Tomato Head employee.
It all started back in 1990 when the Tomato Head was originally set to open as a French bistro, but it became much more when owner Mahasti Vafaie found a pizza oven that had been left behind.
Though Tomato Head is mainly a restaurant, it is also part art gallery and artistic venue. Musicians, poets and performance artists occasionally come to perform.
The Tomato Head comes up with its own T-shirt designs that feature the signature “pizza gal” or its own version of the Sunsphere, with a tomato mounting the top.
Walking in, it is hard to miss the artwork showcasing local artists covering the walls. All the artwork is for sale and changes every month.
The Tomato Head now has a 40-member staff and a new location in Maryville.
“Tomato Head is the one place I always take my friends from out of town,” said Holly Lucas, senior in studio art. “The service is good, the crowd is varied and the food never disappoints.”

Posted by Michael Williams on October 26, 2011 - 8:11pm

Tagged in

• East Tennessee Paranormal Research Society
• Ghosts
• Sevier County

   On occasion, people call Tracy Franklin to discuss stange occurances happening in their homes or businesses. Perhaps, the home owner or business owner has heard voices from unseen individuals or perhaps they have seen the ghostly image of someone in the midst.

  Franklin is well qualified to investigate such matters. Franklin is the president of the East Tennessee Paranormal Research Society. The group investigates reported paranormal activity.

  When most think of ghost hunters they think of the movie "Ghostbusters." But, the popular move is comedy science fiction at best. In reality, paranormal investigators use high tech audio recording devices to record ghostly voices frequently undetected by human ears.

  In one instance, the group was investigating a haunting at Greenbrier Restaurant in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Typically, the members of the ETPRS split up into pairs and enter various rooms searching for evidence of paranormal activity. The investigators ask questions of the spirit in hopes of recording a response on the audio recorder.

  According to local lore, the ghost of the Greenbrier is that of a young bride named Lydia. According to lore, the Greenbrier was a private home before being converted into a restaurant. Lydia lived in the home and was waiting for her fiancee to take her to the chapel to get married. He never arrived. Deeply despondent, Lydia committed suicide by hanging herself. She died unaware that he had not jilted her. In fact, he had been killed earlier that day by a bear in the Great Smoky Mountains.

  Members of the ETPRS investigated the restaurant and recorded the voice of the ill- fated woman.

  "One of our members asked 'Lydia, do you know you are dead?' Franklin said. "When we listened to the tape recording later we heard a woman respond 'I'm not dead.'"

 During their many investigations, the group has complied not only audio recordings of the voices of the dead but photographic evidence as well. 

  At an abandoned Union County school, the image of a dead child appears in a window in one photo. the child was not there when the photo was taken.  In another, taken at an abandoned mental asylum, the image of a ghostly specter seems to be peering around a wall. In a grainy photo taken outside the gymnasium at the school, there appears to be a man's face prominently seen in a haze of dark fog.

  These images are frequently not visible to the naked eye but appeared in the photographs providing photographic proof of the sightings.

  Do ghosts exist? judge for yourself.   

By James Brooks
Press Staff Writer
jbrooks@johnsoncitypress.com

Who ya gonna call?

Say that to members of the East Tennessee Paranormal Research Society and you’ll likely get a groan.

According to Amy Chapman of the Tri-Cities chapter, ETPRS is involved in investigation of paranormal phenomena using scientific methods and measuring equipment.

“We only investigate and submit everything we find to debunking,” Chapman said. “Nine out of 10 investigations turn out to be inconclusive or lacking in evidence of paranormal activity.”

They’d rather be called ghost debunkers than ghost busters.

“We don’t base our analyses on feelings expressed by psychics or sensitives, and we don’t do exorcisms,” she said. “If we find a place to be haunted and the property owner wants to be rid of paranormal activity, we recommend they contact a clergyman.”

Conducting an investigation can be a spooky experience, but the paranormal investigators take exceptional steps to ensure that their objectivity and safety is not compromised.

Equipment includes a flashlight, tape recorder, video camera and digital camera. Precautions include removing camera straps (which can look like a vortex if dangled in front of the lens), banning smoking or wearing of perfume or other odor-causing solutions and avoiding weather conditions that can create mist or fog.

“Electronic Voice Phenomena are tape recorded sounds not heard by human ears because they are of such high frequency (above 20 decibels), but they can be captured on a tape recorder,” Chapman said. When taking photos, investigators first ask permission, partly to elicit a vocal response on their tape recorder.

Recordings range from audible to somewhat garbled to simple noise, which is discounted. One example on their Web site (tricitiesparanormal.org) was an EVP recorded at White’s Fresh Foods Warehouse in Johnson City, where car dealer Roy Faircloth was murdered in 1962. An investigator asks, “Do you know you have died?” and a slightly garbled voice replies, “I wish.”

Even so, the conclusion reached by the investigators was, “We could not find any evidence to prove activity.”

A hotter prospect is the Long Island of the Holston in Kingsport, used for new investigator training, where photographs were taken of what appears to be an apparition (a whole or partial human form) floating between two trees, and several other photos of orbs, an unexplained paranormal occurrence in the form of a colored bulb.

Here the conclusion held out some hope: “We have come to a general consensus that Long Island in Kingsport is not haunted, but does have minimal paranormal activity. We will, however, be conducting further investigations to ensure a more precise conclusion.”

A similar conclusion was reached regarding the Sensabaugh Tunnel in Kingsport, where local lore says a baby was murdered and 16 immigrant workers were killed during construction. Here an EVP recording captured the word “Sebastian” when asked for a name. Sensabaugh is currently listed as “limited paranormal activity.”

Chapman is involved in recruiting new investigators in the Jonesborough area and has a couple of investigations under way in Limestone.

“We don’t use animals or children, but we are excited about the new tool of thermal imaging. It has limited application because it records a picture based on body heat, and paranormal activity is usually cold,” she said.

Although some churchgoers might regard paranormal investigation as devil worship, Chapman disagrees. “I am a religious person and I believe God sent his son back as the Holy Ghost,” she said.

She said she first got interested when she had a recurring dream of a woman on a porch, seated in a rocker, reading a Bible. In other manifestations of the dream she saw a woman who lost her husband, a pond set on fire by kerosene poured on it and a white foundation. While driving on Hog Hollow Road with her husband she said she got physically ill when they passed a certain spot. Although she got sick when she tried walking back to the place, she said she found a burnt-out house with a Bible with singed pages lying in front.

The recurring dream stopped. “Sometimes during an investigation I feel a presence, but I don’t get ill anymore,” she said.

The Web site includes a membership application for future investigators.

© 2001-07 Johnson City Press and Associated Press All Rights Reserved
This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

by Mike Gibson

Metro Pulse

 

Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in hauntings and poltergeists and voices from Beyond? Do you believe that there is much in this world that is forever beyond the ken of our mortal understanding; that sometimes spirits of the dead may wander our earthly plane restive and yearning for the peace eternal, for their release from nameless torments which the living might only glimpse in darkest dream?

Or do you think it’s all treacle; the fatuous imaginings of soft-skulled nincompoops suffering under the duress of acid flashbacks or not enough brain oxygen or too many games of D&D?

If you fall into the latter category, then put this story down right now. Go on, do it. Put it down and go watch Dobie Gillis reruns on TV Land, or whatever weak-ass thing you do for shits and giggles on a dark and stormy night. Because this story is for believers, and we don’t want you here. Not to be rude or anything, but the spirits are sensitive, sometimes, particularly to inflexible non-believing anal-retentive jackass-cynic types such as yourself. You’d only spoil the mood.

Marshall Dudley believes, and he’s a former nuclear design engineer. So does his wife, Donna, and his son, Sean, a computer hardware salesman. When Sean was an inquisitive lad, but eight years old, he walked into his father’s study upon a dark evening, saw a disembodied white hand floating in the air, float all the way across the room and pull open a drawer in the ancient mahogany desk that had belonged to his long-dead great-grandfather nearly a century past.

Donna was just 12 when she came home from school one late afternoon, strolling past the old cemetery a few blocks down from her house, as she had done so many times before. Only this time, Something followed her home; Something or Someone, the figure of a woman, as ephemeral and shimmering as a morning mist, came into her room where she lay on her bed. The woman seemed to cry and wring her hands, Donna says, before fading into the ether.

And Marshall, he’s always had a sense. He’s never seen a ghost—though he has seen a UFO, when he was in college, one that flew past him and then hovered in the air and landed behind a huge tree scarcely a quarter mile away—but his sister did; she had the gift. She was a chaplain in a children’s hospital, ministering to the sick and dying. She often watched, silent and knowing, as their little spirits hovered between here and hereafter.

“They would resuscitate a dying child, and the child would say ‘I saw my mother and father, they came and greeted me before you brought me back.’” Marshall recounts. “The doctors would say, ‘Oh, that’s just your brain doing this, dah-dah-dah.’ But my sister would be standing there, and she’d seen them too. Of course, she never said anything to the doctors about it.

“More people have the gift than you might think. And a lot more have experiences of some kind. But they have either dismissed them, or they’ve learned not to talk about it.”

Seated in the living room of Marshall and Donna’s lovely home in far West Knox County, the Dudleys seem just like any other sweet, slightly eccentric upper-middle-class Farragut family, save for the fact that all three are dressed in pristine new black East Tennessee Paranormal Research Society (ETPRS) T-shirts. Ghosts and paranormal goings-on are a source of consuming interest for the Dudleys, as they are for 65 other members of the ETPRS.

People like Mike Case, a 36-year-old pharmaceutical insurance salesman from South Knox County, who says the spirit of his deceased father never left his childhood home. Or 32-year-old Tracy Franklin, a Greeneville welder and president of ETPRS, who was bitten and clawed on the shoulder—still has the scars to prove it—by an unseen entity in the supposedly haunted attic of his best friend’s home.

Founded in 2002, disbanded in 2005 but resurgent this year, ETPRS is a loose-knit coalition of mostly Knoxville-based paranormal enthusiasts whose collective aim is to “gather, assimilate, and collate data that will lead to the better understanding of spirits and hauntings.”

In other words, they’re ghost busters, of a sort. Or ghost hunters at any rate. Paranormal investigators, to be more politically correct. At the request of property owners, ETPRS investigators visit suspected centers of paranormal activity, scour the grounds armed with digital recorders and infra-red cameras and other tools of the trade, looking for the unexplainable, usually in the form of orbs or ghost-light pictures (photographs that capture light phenomena that may represent disembodied spiritual energy) or recordings of EVPs.

EVPs—Electronic Voice Phenomena—that’s the really creepy stuff. King-hell spooky. You make a voice recording—preferably with a digital recorder, the reason for which has something to do with the electret microphone and modulating the electric field and lots of other things that someone like Marshall Dudley can explain, but would make most people’s heads throb, blow apart and splatter gray-matter all over the living room carpet… You make a recording, and you listen back, and if the recording was taken someplace fraught with restive spiritual energies, you’ll hear voices that shouldn’t be there, voices that aren’t your own. Sometimes they’re garbled and affectless and weird, and sometimes the things they say don’t make any damned sense. But they’re unmistakably voices, inaudible to the naked human ear except via digital playback, crying out from somewhere… Check out the tnseeparanormal.com website for a sampling, or else Sean Dudley’s own website at friendly-ghosts.com.

In this year of their organizational rebirth, investigators from ETPRS have been mighty busy, chasing down leads on supernatural phenomena all over the region, the most notable of which have been from the Pressmen’s Home community in Hawkins County, and from the historically remarkable building in downtown Knoxville known to us as the Bijou Theatre. The group’s first public showing of video capturing possible evidence of a Bijou ghost will appear on local TV news, WBIR channel 10 on Halloween.

Maybe you haven’t heard of Pressmen’s Home near Rogersville, but there’s small wonder the ETPRS folks chose it for their first official investigation of 2006; it is a certifiably weird place. Former headquarters for the International Printing Pressmen’s Union of North America, and former home to a sanatorium for pressmen come down with tuberculosis, the once-immaculately picturesque little burg is now a sub-Appalachian ghost town, overgrown with ivy and fescue and its buildings abandoned and fallen into soulless disrepair.

And there are rumors, too, of shady business—men with big guns who now own the old buildings, scarcely seen except when they materialize to guard them zealously from curious trespassers; some say they’re white supremacists or dope fiends or just violent gun freaks, maybe some kind of twisted paramilitary organization. Hints of murder and arson… and ghosts, too. Spirits left behind from the old sanatorium, or maybe from an early 19th-century plantation, long disappeared, and the oppressive rows of slaves’ shanties that had once surrounded it.

But the family who contacted ETPRS about the home on the outskirts of the Pressmen’s area said they were living there contentedly enough, until the voices came, EVPs that began showing up on home recordings made by the young man who shared the rent with his mother and sister.

“The guy had been taking audio notes or something, playing the tape back and hearing these voices that didn’t belong,” Sean says. “He started asking questions, doing it all the time. He got hooked on trying to capture more EVPs.”

“They evidently had problems with a poltergeist, too,” says Marshall, noting that the women who lived there reported seeing apparitions and shadow people and objects that mysteriously flew across the room. “They wanted someone to come out and document it, tell them they’re not crazy.

“We can’t say whether they’re crazy or not, but we can say that place certainly had a lot of activity.”

When the Dudleys visited the home along with ETPRS president Tracy Franklin on a sunny afternoon last April, the first thing they noted upon exiting the car was the air, which was suffocating, heavy with some ominous portent. “There were vibes,” says Sean; “Oppressive,” says Marshall; “It was creepy,” says Donna.

“I could feel myself closing down, to keep stuff out,” Marshall adds. “Moreso than anywhere I’ve been before. I had the feeling of some sort of evil presence.”

They deployed, Sean setting up his high-definition Sony infra-red video recorder on a tripod in the back bedroom of the tiny home, Franklin and Marshall wandering the grounds with still cameras and digital audio recorders, and Donna sitting down to interview the principles. From the residents, Donna heard an awful story about a man named Edgar who had supposedly owned a home that once sat on the same plot of ground, a man who was believed by many to have shot his wife and children in cold blood, then torched the house to hide the crime.

Franklin fell sick one point at one point in the investigation, so overtaken by the place’s disruptive psychic vibrations that he had to walk outside. After 90 minutes, the four from ETPRS packed up their equipment and headed home for analysis and sober reflection.

Most of the results from the Rogersville trek are posted on the ETPRS website. Some may take issue with how the Dudleys interpret the spirits’ oft-distorted otherworldly murmurings, but it’s hard to dismiss the aggregate heft of inexplicable, seemingly psychic phenomena—EVPs that seem to speak of sex and hate and children’s rhymes, and of someone named Edgar, who maybe has a gun.

Most compelling to the Dudleys is the veritable maelstrom of psychic activity that followed their traditional investigation-closing invocation, a prayer in-the-round inviting any wayward spirits to seek the freedom of the Light. “Our feeling is there was probably an evil presence, maybe a demonic presence, keeping the other spirits under control,” Marshall says. “We told them there’s no way he can keep them, that they can go to the Light and he cannot stop them. Then we got all these EVPs, all of them talking about going to the Light, seeing the Light.”

That night, long after Franklin and the Dudleys left, family members at the Rogersville home reported that objects began to hurtle through the air like guided missiles, seemingly of their own accord, until they fled in terror. Sean suggests it was the violent retaliation of angry demonic presences, lashing out at those who would dast rescue lesser spirits from their malign sway.

The most notable haunted house in the Knoxville vicinity is arguably downtown’s Bijou Theatre, née the Lamar House, a 200-year-old construct (or nearly so) that has been at various points in its long and storied history a hotel, soldier’s quarters, wartime infirmary, bordello, and playhouse. Says Marshall Dudley, “On the list of places you’d really like to investigate around here, the Bijou is up toward the top. There’s a lot of reported activity.”

Paranormal enthusiasts believe that hotels and old theaters are popular points of congress for spirits who linger on the earthly plane, and the Bijou was both of those things and more.

“I think what happens is that when people die, their spirit still has a free will, and spirits tend to migrate to areas where when they were still alive, they enjoyed themselves,” says Marshall. “Maybe a hotel where they spent their honeymoon, or a theater where they performed or saw a show. Or in the case of the fourth floor, a bordello, either because they worked there or they went there… for fun.”

In its first incarnation, ETPRS saw several of its investigators visit the Bijou back in 2003. Mike Case remembers that “there had been experiences of people getting touched and poked (at the theater.) We went and picked up lots of orbs (spirit lights) on camera, but not much else. We wanted to go back again, this time with more people and better equipment.”

The rejuvenated ETPRS did just that on July 21 of this year, when nine of its members equipped with digital cameras and digital recorders and infra-red video cams joined seven Bijou employees for a marathon six-hour evidence collecting spree spread through all four floors of the building, beginning at 8 p.m. on a proverbial dark and stormy night.

It was indeed a fine evening for chasing spirits, according to Marshall. “The storm may have aided things, because sometimes electrical fields (from a storm) can energize a place,” he says. “Everyone felt something that night.”

In four groups, the investigators and their Bijou escorts combed the floors, and Sean says they didn’t have to wait and review the tapes to discern that strange things are still going on in the old building that hosted countless stage performers, countless more hotel guests, and a pair of gutshot and dying Civil War generals in its two centuries of existence.

“While we were there, several people said they got touched by something unseen,” says Donna, “people from our group as well as people from the Bijou.”

“One of the other (ETPRS) guys and I climbed up to the attic area above,” says Sean. “When we were climbing back down that eternally long ladder, he all of a sudden yelled up, ‘Don’t freak out if something grabs you, because something just grabbed me.’”

On the second floor balcony, and in the men’s room on the second floor, Marshall noted feeling “some of the same vibes as in Rogersville,” an observation that would later prove frighteningly prescient.

Combing through hours of digital audio days later, the investigators heard a host of new EVPs on all floors, most of which are posted on the aforementioned websites. “It seems there’s two groups, or societies of spirits there,” Marshall says. “One of them related to the bordello on the fourth floor, and another as you come down the stairs related to the stage, the actors and actresses and performances.”

Unlike many of the Pressmen’s Home EVPs, the Bijou gatherings are often plainly heard, relatively free from confounding distortion. In one instance, the voices of a man and woman seem to discuss the advisability of taking a shower up on the fourth floor, where Marshall says showers were once located; yet another fourth floor spirit seems to exhort visitors to “Get Back!” in a voice that’s as harsh and shrill and sudden as a wildcat’s howl.

Yet another voice, captured in the first floor auditorium, seems to make a request for someone to “Call Paige… Adrienne, too.” Paige and Adrienne happen to be the names of two former Metro Pulse arts writers, by the way, both of whom are particularly fond of theater. But we’re sure that’s just a coincidence.

But the most intriguing discovery from that late-night, late-July Bijou expedition comes in the form of a video, soon to be aired on WBIR-Channel 10 and posted on the ETPRS website, a video so compelling and seemingly inexplicable through the agencies of reason and sober analysis that Mike Case calls it “the Holy Grail of paranormal evidence.”

As Sean’s camera pans slowly across the toilet stalls in the second floor men’s room, it appears, a luminous white hump in the lower right-hand corner of the lens. It rises as it darts across the lower half of the frame, reaching its highest point as it reaches square center, looking not unlike someone’s hand might, or else maybe the head of a small child, were it to dart across the frame draped in a white sheet or pillow case. Except that once it passes mid-frame, the image starts to morph, expand and nearly bifurcate and then begin to dissipate as it moves leftward, disappearing at frame left before it loses the last vestiges of solidity.

Though ETPRS investigators make no definitive claims about any of their findings, Marshall Dudley believes whole-heartedly that the footage is bona fide evidence of a Bijou Ghost. “I think he came up through the floor, and basically got caught by surprise at Sean being there, and immediately took off,” Marshall says. “I think it was trying to change shape, as it took off, trying to hide by becoming more ethereal.”

Now I’m no psychic, but I’m reasonably certain that at least half of you who’ve come this far in this little story don’t believe a word I’ve set to page; you didn’t stop reading, like I told you to, way back in the third paragraph. And now you think I’m lying, or the ETPRS folks are lying, or both. Or you think we’re all demented fools who’d do well to give up whippets and stop watching so many old Vincent Price movies on late-night cable TV. After all, the whole thing is just a bunch of overheated gibberish, half-truths and hearsay and hack reporting backed up by nothing more than some sketchy website photos and scratchy MP3s.

And you’re just about ready to stop reading now, I’ll wager, ready to throw this story aside and line the catbox with it, or else wrap some day-old fish and then never, ever pick up another issue of this stupid and contemptible rag again.

But I’m here to tell you that would be the wrong move for you, bubba. Contempt Prior to Investigation, I believe they say. There’s even a special Latin phrase for it—which doesn’t come to mind right now—but trust me, it’s a bad, bad thing. Because you never know where the truth lies.

And you never know when some rogue Pressmen’s Home poltergeist will turn up rattling in your pantry, tossing around kitchen implements like lawn darts, raising other spirits and generally making things go bump in the night. Then you’ll only wish like mad hell for some gently eccentric former nuclear design engineer turned ghost hunter like Marshall Dudley to come and help bail you out of the pretty fix you’re in. Minds are like parachutes, bubba. Enjoy your Halloween.

By Tesa Nauman, SevierCountyNews.com staff writer

Friday, February 23, 2007 8:07:17 AM

Does the ghost of a bride who killed herself on her wedding day haunt The Greenbrier Restaurant? The owners think so, and now they may have proof.

A few weeks ago, Greenbrier owner Dave Hadden hosted members of the East Tennessee Paranormal Research Society as they investigated his restaurant for signs of Lydia, the restaurant's resident spirit, and any other paranormal activity.

The restaurant, which overlooks Hwy. 321 in Gatlinburg, has a long history of usual happenings, most centered around the legend of the ghost of a young woman.

According to Hadden, in the late 1930s a woman named Lydia lived at what was then the Greenbrier Lodge. On her wedding day, she went to the church in Gatlinburg to be married to her fiancé, but he never arrived. Distraught, Lydia returned to the lodge and later hanged herself from the rafters.

Several days later, the body of her fiancé was found in the Smokies. He had been mauled by a mountain lion. Locals claimed he was killed by Lydia who, angered at having been jilted, took the form of a cat and took revenge.

Hadden said when his parents bought the restaurant, there were always cats around the building and one, in particular, who only came around Christmastime, for a couple of years in a row.

Several additions have been made to the building over the years, but sightings of Lydia only take place in the original part of building, often near where she hanged herself, Hadden said.

While Hadden doesn't promote the restaurant's haunting, he doesn't deny it. If people don't believe it's haunted, that's fine with him. However, from time to time, customers and staff will report seeing the form of a woman in the restaurant. Hadden and his family also have experienced and seen things that have them convinced Lydia exists.

"I've been here 26 years, and I've seen a lot of stuff," Hadden said. "I thought I saw someone once; a girl. At first thought somebody had broken in," Hadden said. "My wife was here, also. We were closing down the restaurant and had all the doors locked."

Hadden pointed over to the tables where he was sitting at the time. "I was sitting right there and had these doors propped open and I saw a person walk from that side to that side. I hollered, 'Call the police! Someone's broke in,' and my wife hollered, 'What?' and I came running back here and there was nobody there."

Apparently the previous owners also were aware of Lydia's presence, because they had a photograph of what appears to be the ghost of a woman in the dining room area. The torso and head are visible and the rest of her form fades away among the tables and chairs. Could this be photographic proof that Lydia exists?

Hadden's father found the photograph, which today sits on the fireplace mantle in the dining room, after he bought the building in 1980. It was in a dresser drawer in former owner Blanche Moffett's upstairs bedroom.

If Lydia isn't who he saw walk across the hallway in the restaurant when no one else was present, it might have been Moffet's ghost he saw. He saw the apparition on Sept. 26, 1993, the 31st anniversary of Moffett's death.

Lydia isn't the only spirit who's been seen at the restaurant. Hadden's father, also named Dean, was seen in the restaurant shortly after he died in 1991, Hadden said.

Steve Brandenburg, a good friend of the elder Hadden, and the restaurant's caretaker were in the restaurant's bar and heard a noise. "They turned around and swore to me that they saw my dad standing there, about 10 days after he died," Hadden said. "They said he was just there for a second. I asked them what was he doing, and they said he was just smiling. He was in his chef's uniform, his checkered pants and his coat, and then he was gone."

Seeing the elder Hadden after his death wasn't the only strange experience the caretaker had. Several years ago, while living alone in the building, he kept hearing a woman's voice in the middle of the night saying, "Mark my grave. Mark my grave." Finally, he couldn't take it anymore. He knew the spot where Lydia is supposedly buried and in the middle of the night went there and fashioned a cross out of wood from a tree and hammered it into the ground. After that, he never heard the voice again, Hadden said.

The paranormal investigative team, led by Society President Tracy Franklin, met at the restaurant recently around closing time on a late-January evening and spent several hours hunting for the "haint." Using digital audio recorders and cameras, they went from room to room, taking pictures and asking whatever "ghosts" might be present if they'd like to say anything.

ETPRS members Brian and Lynda Perry had been to the restaurant several weeks before and took pictures at that time that captured some unusual light patterns. They also saw what seemed to be the form of a man in the window, wearing an Abraham Lincoln-style stovepipe hat.

During the investigation, ETPRS members took pictures of some interesting light anomalies, called orbs, and captured several EVPs, electronic voice phenomena, on audio recorders. EVPs are disembodied voices not heard by the human ear that are picked up by recording devices. The phenomena tend to happen in places that have supposed paranormal activity.

Probably the best EVP recorded during the investigation appears to be the whispering voice of a young woman. On the recording, investigator Donna Dudley says, "God bless you, Lydia. I'd be happy to hear from you, if you'd like to speak to me."

Immediately after, the voice says, "Then I'm not dead."

Could that be the voice of Lydia, and if so, does she continue to roam the Greenbrier because she doesn't know she's dead? Investigators hope maybe one day they'll be able to definitively answer those questions.

By Sarah Foust

Article Written in Hiwassee College's Spring 2007 Tigers Tail (http://hiwasseecollege.org/ac/newspaper/hiwapr2007.pdf)

Whether or not ghosts are your fancy, there is always an element of intrigue when it comes to the unknown. This intrigue is what inspires the members of the East Tennessee Paranormal Research Society to seek that which is a mystery to us. Their search led them to our campus. On December 23,2006, ETPRS members and our own Dr. Allen set out to see if the rumors of Hiwassee being haunted were true. On March 10, 2007, they revealed their findings. Several EVPs (Electronic Voice Phenomenon -- term used to describe voices of spirits caught on tape) were found throughout the campus. Some were chilling, while others were comical or kind. Regardless if you are a believer or a skeptic, what ETPRS has found will either chill or thrill you. So, next time you are visiting a friend in Brock Hall, hanging out in the Chapel’s bell tower, or thinking of breaking into Brunner, just remember…you are not alone.

There are many interesting links that lead you to a better understanding of ETPRS and what they do. You will even learn how to capture your own EVPs on tape! This proves possible due to the fact that EVPs deal with electrical fields. When a “pop” or “snap” sound is heard, it is believed to be a spirit trying to speak. The sound is most likely due to the disturbance within the electric field. It is often heard before and after they speak. EVPs are also ranged in clarity from A-C (“A” is the loudest & clearest). However, if you would rather go straight to ETPRS’s findings at Hiwassee College, go to http://www.friendly-ghosts.com.

If you would like to learn more about ETPRS, visit their website at www.tnseeparanormal.com.

 

Anyways, I feel like I've been neglecting my ETPRS page so this madman is gonna ramble on some purely hypothetical, even delusional ideas.  I have a lot of feelings.  They are usually like flea bites, by which I mean they're irritating and they distract me from the present.  As much as i've tried to kill them all, they eventually pop up again and the same scenario plays out over and over (just like with fleas).  So I wonder to myself why, regardless of how good or bad I am as a person and as people are in general, why actions seem to have little to know influence over what happens in the world around me.  Here's my evidence:

People love a story about sick kids getting help from the kindness and generosity of others.  However, the degree of the child's problems seems to be unrelated to how the child was chosen to receive such generous charity.  Some kids whose problems will probably just go away after a few years end up getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in charity while some kids who are going to die in a few months, but may have a chance if they could just get a little help beyond their family's means slip through the cracks and into the grave.  What universal force is at work here?  Is death a blessing?

Or, if a person with little to no education just happens to possess a mind that can "figure things out" and starts ranting about his/her ideas, a trip to the MHU is inevitable but if someone with enough money or education has same ideas and the resources to maybe actualize what was once only seen in the mind, said person can easily make millions of dollars or get international recognition for their genius.

I try to figure such things out in my head and can only postulate a few narrow values that create this stark contrast.  Firstly, there is no truth or meaning.  The problem with this idea is that A) it contradicts everything we've been made to believe our whole lives and B) it would make people impossible to govern.  Also C) it would make it much harder to control society through trade and commerce.  Unfortunately, that's where things usually go wrong in society.  When one person or group decides that they need to control or force their will on the rest of us "for the greater good" which ends up being their greater good and we end up being fuel for their greater good machine.  That's a God complex and I believe that's where the God concept was born.  A person or group of people decided that their "greater good" was so much more important than anything else that they needed to fabricate an all powerful, angry, omnipotent being to be the mall cop of the world.

For those of us who can see through these walls and boundaries, we're forced to wonder why we can't bring everyone else over to our side and have a New World Order, so to speak.  We answer this question with our own insight which reveals that it only takes one smart person with impure or poorly executed intentions to put us right back here or worse, because it's much easier for many people to follow rather than feel no need for leaders and different tiers and classes in society.  They seem to think that without these things they would be stuck in a catatonic state, unable to make any kind of decision for themselves, unable to breath on their own.  They will follow the strongest person, regardless of that person's disposition, as long as they feel safe and secure from thought and discomfort.  Again, I can only guess what's going on because I don't know what life is like for anyone but myself.

And all of this ties into the paranormal/supernatural/preternatural/spiritual realm for me because I've seen lots of evidence.  Much of this evidence can tie in to established religious beliefs and practices and can help us, as humans and inhabitants of this earth understand each other and this reality we find ourselves in.  It could even open up so many possibilities for us to evolve as a species.  But such truths are inconvenient for the established way of things. So they will be explained or discredited with accepted science and pushed into dark corners where people might not even notice themselves staring into the face of eternity.

And that's fine, for most of us.  But being the type of person I am, I'd just like it to be acknowledged so for once in my life I could feel something with confidence instead of shame.

You can find the list of EVPs here: Friendly Ghost: Best of...

Go over and check it out.

There was an issue with a few of them as they were marked Private.  That has been fixed.  If anyone finds any other issues, feel free to email me at drew@etprs.com

Here is an example of one of the recent posts:

 

I have been refactoring the presentation of our evidence.  In addition, I have revisited some of our older cases and am catching up with those posts.  I will continue updating them and adding them to the site.

Evidence Page

Thank you,

Drew

 

Would you participate in a Paranormal Support Meeting, held regularly (probably monthly) in a public location?