real pics

The Brown Lady

This portrait of "The Brown Lady" ghost is arguably the most famous and well-regarded ghost photograph ever taken. The ghost is thought to be that of Lady Dorothy Townshend, wife of Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount of Raynham, residents of Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England in the early 1700s. It was rumored that Dorothy, before her marriage to Charles, had been the mistress of Lord Wharton. Charles suspected Dorothy of infidelity. Although according to legal records she died and was buried in 1726, it was suspected that the funeral was a sham and that Charles had locked his wife away in a remote corner of the house until her death many years later.

Dorothy's ghost is said to haunt the oak staircase and other areas of Raynham Hall. In the early 1800s, King George IV, while staying at Raynham, saw the figure of a woman in a brown dress standing beside his bed. She was seen again standing in the hall in 1835 by Colonel Loftus, who was visiting for the Christmas holidays. He saw her again a week later and described her as wearing a brown satin dress, her skin glowing with a pale luminescence. It also seemed to him that her eyes had been gouged out. A few years later, Captain Frederick Marryat and two friends saw "the Brown Lady" gliding along an upstairs hallway, carrying a lantern. As she passed, Marryat said, she grinned at the men in a "diabolical manner." Marryat fired a pistol at the apparition, but the bullet simply passed through.

This famous photo was taken in September, 1936 by Captain Provand and Indre Shira, two photographers who were assigned to photograph Raynham Hall for Country Life magazine. This is what happened, according to Shira:

"Captain Provand took one photograph while I flashed the light. He was focusing for another exposure; I was standing by his side just behind the camera with the flashlight pistol in my hand, looking directly up the staircase. All at once I detected an ethereal veiled form coming slowly down the stairs. Rather excitedly, I called out sharply: 'Quick, quick, there's something.' I pressed the trigger of the flashlight pistol. After the flash and on closing the shutter, Captain Provand removed the focusing cloth from his head and turning to me said: 'What's all the excitement about?'"

Upon developing the film, the image of The Brown Lady ghost was seen for the first time. It was published in the December 16, 1936 issue of Country Life. The ghost has been seen occasionally since.

Why Are Ghosts Seen Wearing Clothes?

A QUESTION THAT ghost researchers often are confronted with concerns the fact that ghosts are most often seen wearing clothes. It is also a question that skeptics raise to support their argument that ghosts are figments of the imagination. But it’s a perfectly legitimate question. If ghosts are human spirit energy, why do their manifestations include the manufactured convention of clothing? After all, clothes are not part of our bodies, our spirits or our “souls”.

Or are they? I posed this question to a number of respected paranormal researchers.

16 signs that ur house is haunting

You hear heavy footsteps in the upstairs hallway when you know no one is up there. Doors slam unaccountably. Commonly used items disappear and reappear without cause. The kitchen light turns on by itself. There's the unmistakable scent of a strange perfume in the air.

These may be indications that your house is haunted. True hauntings are rare occurrences, and it may be difficult to determine whether or not any strange phenomena you are experiencing in your home might be due to a haunting. For one thing, no one really knows what a "real" haunting is - what causes it or why it starts. There are many theories, of course, which we have discussed in this space in the article "Ghosts: What Are They?" But if you think your house may really be haunted, what can you do about it?

The Signs of a Haunting

The first step is to determine, as best you can, whether or not you truly have a legitimate case of a haunting. Not all hauntings are alike, and they may exhibit a variety of phenomena. Some hauntings feature a single phenomenon - such as a particular door slamming shut that occurs repeatedly - while others consist of many different phenomena, ranging from odd noises to full-blown apparitions.

Here's a partial list of phenomena that might indicate that your house is haunted:

• Unexplained noises - footsteps; knocks, banging, rapping; scratching sounds; sounds of something being dropped. Sometimes these noises can be subtle and other times they can be quite loud.
• Doors, cabinets and cupboards opening and closing - most often, these phenomena are not seen directly. The experiencer either hears the distinct sounds of the doors opening and closing (homeowners get to know quite well the distinctive sounds their houses make) or the experiencer will return to a room to find a door open or closed when they are certain that it was left in the opposite position. Sometimes furniture, like kitchen chairs, are perceived to have been moved. Very rarely will the experiencer actually witness the phenomenon taking place.
• Lights turning off and on - likewise, these events are seldom seen actually occurring, but the lights are switched on or off when the experiencer knows they were not left that way. This can also happen with TVs, radios and other electrically powered items.
• Items disappearing and reappearing - this phenomenon, which we have dubbed "the DOPler Effect" (DOP = Disappearing Object Phenomenon), has been examined in the article "The DOPler Effect." Others have called this "the borrowers" phenomenon, and it's the familiar experience of not being able to find a regularly used item - say, your set of car keys - which you believe you placed in a spot you routinely place them. But they're gone and you look high and low for them with no success. Some time later, the keys are found - in exactly the place you normally put them. It's as if the object was borrowed by someone or something for a short time, then returned. Sometimes they are not returned for days or even weeks, but when they are, it's in an obvious place that could not have been missed by even a casual search.
• Unexplained shadows - the sighting of fleeting shapes and shadows, usually seen out of the corner of the eye. This phenomenon has also been discussed in some detail in "Shadow People." Many times, the shadows have vaguely human forms, while other times they are less distinguishable or smaller.
• Strange animal behavior - a dog, cat or other pet behaves strangely. Dogs may bark at something unseen, cower without apparent reason or refuse to enter a room they normally do. Cats may seem to be "watching" something cross a room. Animals have sharper senses than humans, and many researchers think their psychic abilities might be more finely tuned also. (See "Animals and Ghosts" )
• Feelings of being watched - this is not an uncommon feeling and can be attributed to many things, but it could have a paranormal source if the feeling consistently occurs in a particular part of the house at a particular time.

Those are some of the most common experiences of those who think their houses are haunted. Yet even stranger things can happen...

ghosts

THE GHOST PHENOMENON has become so closely associated with the instinct of fear that it's almost a given that, if asked, most people would admit that of course they would be frightened if they encountered an apparition. Even many seasoned ghost investigators have been known to run like scared rabbits when they see or even hear something unexpected.

Why? Have ghosts really earned the reputation of being harmful to humans?

If you were walking unarmed in a dense tropical jungle that you know is inhabited by tigers and large snakes, you'd undoubtedly be petrified. The threat to your life and well-being is quite real and your fears justified. Tigers and snakes can and do kill.

Now place yourself alone at night in a house that has the reputation for being haunted. Most people would probably experience the same fear. Yet, according to most authorities on the subject, the fear is not justified. Ghosts, by and large, are harmless. The true behavior of ghosts, as evidenced by many thousands of investigations and case studies conducted by paranormal experts, overwhelmingly contradicts the common idea that they are to be feared.

Maligned ghosts

Veteran ghost investigator Hans Holzer, in his book Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond (Black Dog & Leventhal, 1997), emphasizes “...the need to forget a popular notion: that they are always dangerous, fearful, and hurt people. Nothing could be further from the truth.... Ghosts have never harmed anyone except through fear found within the witness, of his own doing and because of his own ignorance as to what ghosts represent.”

Loyd Auerbach, another respected ghost hunter of many years, agrees: “In many cultures and religions around the world, ghosts are thought to harbor ill will towards the living. This is unfortunate, since the evidence from thousands of cases...suggests that people don't change their personalities or motivation after death... nor do they turn evil.” (Ghost Hunting: How To Investigate the Paranormal, Ronin Publishing, 2004.)

Roots of fear

So why do we fear them? There are probably two main reasons.

Fear of ghosts – also known as spectrophobia or phasmophobia – most obviously stems from our fear of the unknown. This is a deep-seated fear that is hard-wired into our genetic makeup. The primitive parts of our brain that respond to instinct – a holdover from our cave-dwelling ancestors – flushes our bodies with adrenaline when we encounter a threat, preparing us to fight or flee. And when that threat is something unknown that might leap out of the darkness, we'd just as soon flee.

There's another component to this fear when that something in the dark is perceived as a ghost. After all, a ghost is the manifestation of a person who is dead. So now we are confronted not only with what we think is a threat to our lives, but a representative of death itself. Not only is it an entity that we don't understand, it is also a resident of the place many of us fear the most – the mysterious land of the dead.

ghosts

IT’S FRUSTRATING BEING a ghost researcher. At least it is for me at times. With all the ghost research societies, ghost hunter groups, and ghost investigative teams that have materialized in the last several years, there are more people examining the realm of the haunted than in any other time in history. We also have an array of technologies to help in the hunt, from digital recorders and EMF meters to infrared cameras and ghost boxes. There are even scientists and universities trying to find rational explanations for ghost phenomena.

For all that, however, we are no closer to really understanding what ghosts are than we were 100 years ago. We’ve gathered more evidence, developed new tools, and offered revised theories, but we still don’t know with any certainty what the ghost phenomenon is, what causes it, or how and why it manifests. We have evidence, perhaps, but we have no proof.

So why isn’t the evidence we have good enough?

THE EVIDENCE

Photos – There are some compelling photographs, to be sure, and we have some of them posted in our “Best Ghost Photographs Ever Taken” gallery. (Also see “What Makes a Great Ghost Photo?”) The skeptics dismiss them as tricks of light and shadow, double exposures, reflections, natural phenomena, photographic errors, or outright fraud. Ghost researchers are more open-minded about them, of course, but without highly detailed information about the circumstances under which the photos were taken, we cannot in all honesty determine what they show either. And in today’s age of digital image editing capabilities, we can’t trust photos at all. Yes, they could show genuine ghosts, but we cannot prove it.

Anecdotes – Reports of ghost sightings are plentiful. In fact, they have been reported since the beginning of recorded history. This website alone receives hundred of such reports every month. Many of those are compelling as well. We can only assume that there are thousands of alleged sightings every day around the world. The phenomenon is part of the human experience. The skeptics say that people are notoriously bad witnesses, and that the senses are easily fooled by illusions of light and shadow or electrical fields. For those who have seen ghosts with their own eyes, however, no amount of “reasoning” can dissuade them from their conviction about the reality of their experience. While the sheer volume of sightings strongly suggests ghosts are out there in the dark, these experiences, unfortunately, don’t give us anything to look at, listen to, or touch. The stories are as ephemeral as the spirits themselves.

Film and video – A moving image can often be more revealing and convincing than a still image. But film and video suffer from the same drawbacks and doubts that photos do. Seeing is no longer believing. Additionally, really good videos of ghosts are exceedingly rare.

Physical effects – Objects disappearing and later reappearing without rational explanation. Lights and appliances turning on and off by themselves. A vase flying off a shelf and crashing 12 feet across the room. They are puzzling and sometimes scary occurrences. Skeptics wave them off as the products of overactive imaginations. For researchers, such activity is not only relatively rare, it’s nearly impossible to document since, like almost all ghost phenomena, it cannot be produced on demand; it happens spontaneously, seemingly on its own whim. So most of this type of activity falls into the category of “anecdotes.”

Even on the extremely rare occasions such activity is caught on video, can we conclude it was caused by a ghost? This kind of physical phenomena is often called poltergeist activity. Although “poltergeist” literally means “noisy ghost,” a large number of paranormal researchers think that it is not attributable to ghosts at all. Because the activity almost always centers around an individual, it is theorized that poltergeist craziness is psychokinetic; that is, caused by the minds of the person or people involved. So as dramatic as it may be, it may have nothing to offer in the way of ghost evidence.

EVP – Electronic voice phenomena might be the strongest stuff we have in the way of evidence for ghosts. All of the skeptics’ explanations of EVP being nothing more than stray radio programs, cell phone calls, ham radio conversations, et cetera have been disproved. But what these disembodied voices are remains quite a mystery. Are they the voices of ghosts? Could they be from other dimensions? Or, like poltergeist activity, do they arise out of the minds of the participants? Yes, the variety and textures of EVP (I’m talking about the Class A EVP here) are of astonishing variety, from those that sound like old men to those that sound like children. But if the human mind can cause heavy objects to levitate and sail across a room, could it not also imagine into reality such voices? Again, EVP could be very strong ghost evidence… but we’re not quite sure.

aura

Vampires among us

Contents: Vampires among us describes so-called vampyres in the subcultural context of the Goth culture (mostly in the U.S. and Germany). Vampyric Symbols, blood fetishism, crossover of different scenes, and the self-perception of members of the community are topics of the short text. An extensive interview with a female vampyre as well as a bibliography is included.

EXCERPT: Vampires exist. They are alive, good looking and usually have blood and necks on their mind. The older ones among them are shady fi Contents: Vampires among us describes so-called vampyres in the subcultural context of the Goth culture (mostly in the U.S. and Germany). Vampyric Symbols, blood fetishism, crossover of different scenes, and the self-perception of members of the community are topics of the short text. An extensive interview with a female vampyre as well as a bibliography is included.

EXCERPT: Vampires exist. They are alive, good looking and usually have blood and necks on their mind. The older ones among them are shady figures or corporate execs. The younger ones, however, tend to be sexy (quite sexy actually). And they have one thing in common: They are lacking energy - energy they seek to obtain from others.

The most likely place to happen upon a vampire is a club (Fig. 1). This is where they are on the lookout for donors - those with a surplus of energy. While some vampires may be content to imagine sucking in energy through a hole in the aura of their victim, others are more physical, meaning they are into blood. But since the bite of a human is very painful and can transmit germs just as deadly as those of a lion [8,33,35] f1, pros settle for exchanging blood using a canula [15].

The tedious part of this needle business is the fact that energy seekers must "pick up " their donor (also referred to as kitra or source) first. And this requires charisma - which, luckily, the creatures of the night have plenty of (Tab. 1). However, even blood acquired in a sterile fashion should not be consumed in exorbitant quantities. Also, to minimize the risk of contracting diseases, the smart vampire will restrict her activities to a limited feeding circle [13,14] f2.

But there are also those who enjoy simply spilling and wasting blood. And these blood players don't much care for measuring out blood with silly medicinal tools (Fig. 6). Better yet if you're a vampiric half blood. Half bloods are able to consume the precious red juice through the unscathed skin of their victims, saving them the hassle of puncturing energy auras or resorting to surgical measures [29].

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f1 Item of interest: In some parts of Central Africa, women sometimes bite their partners into the lower lip during arguments concerning polygamy [28].

f2 People from the German regions Rhineland and Thuringia are well aware that blood can make for a tasty meal, as is evidenced by their regional specialty, the so-called "blood sausage " (made from blood mixed with bacon (or straight lumps of fat) and spices). In England, blood pudding ("black pudding ") is well known; in Finland, a pancake baked with blood is a common meal even in schools [34a], etc. For more on eating blood, see also [32]: p. 116-118.gures or corporate execs. The younger ones, however, tend to be sexy (quite sexy actually). And they have one thing in common: They are lacking energy - energy they seek to obtain from others.

The most likely place to happen upon a vampire is a club (Fig. 1). This is where they are on the lookout for donors - those with a surplus of energy. While some vampires may be content to imagine sucking in energy through a hole in the aura of their victim, others are more physical, meaning they are into blood. But since the bite of a human is very painful and can transmit germs just as deadly as those of a lion [8,33,35] f1, pros settle for exchanging blood using a canula [15].

The tedious part of this needle business is the fact that energy seekers must "pick up " their donor (also referred to as kitra or source) first. And this requires charisma - which, luckily, the creatures of the night have plenty of (Tab. 1). However, even blood acquired in a sterile fashion should not be consumed in exorbitant quantities. Also, to minimize the risk of contracting diseases, the smart vampire will restrict her activities to a limited feeding circle [13,14] f2.

But there are also those who enjoy simply spilling and wasting blood. And these blood players don't much care for measuring out blood with silly medicinal tools (Fig. 6). Better yet if you're a vampiric half blood. Half bloods are able to consume the precious red juice through the unscathed skin of their victims, saving them the hassle of puncturing energy auras or resorting to surgical measures [29].

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f1 Item of interest: In some parts of Central Africa, women sometimes bite their partners into the lower lip during arguments concerning polygamy [28].

f2 People from the German regions Rhineland and Thuringia are well aware that blood can make for a tasty meal, as is evidenced by their regional specialty, the so-called "blood sausage " (made from blood mixed with bacon (or straight lumps of fat) and spices). In England, blood pudding ("black pudding ") is well known; in Finland, a pancake baked with blood is a common meal even in schools [34a], etc. For more on eating blood, see also [32]: p. 116-118.