Disillusionment and Evidence? at Oak Alley Plantation

This weekend found Silverfox and myself in the rare position of having both no kids and no plans. The kids were with their respective bio-dads, and we simply had nothing planned, so we decided to do a little ghost hunting/debunking... but I'm getting ahead of myself.

Last Wednesday, the Sci-fi Channel aired an episode of Ghost Hunters where the TAPS team went to the Oak Alley plantation in Vachiere, LA. It isn't very often that they do an episode that's in my proverbial backyard, and that I have a decent knowledge of the layout of. As I watched the show, and their "evidence" mounted I found myself thinking that TAPS wasn't doing a very good job of looking for the non-paranormal explanation. In particular, there was one scene where Jason says he sees a flash of light move past the window, I was sure that that window he was looking out faced River Road.

But I wasn't sure... it had been years since the last time I had been there, and I could be wrong. When I asked Silverfox what she thought, I was surprised to find that she had never been there. So, With a full tank of gas and no young'uns we headed up River Road this past weekend with the notion of putting TAPS to the test.

By my list, the evidence presented by TAPS amounted to the following:

1) Moving shadows seen outside the house on the verandas.
2) A thermal hit in the master bedroom.
3) Cold Spots.
4) a flashlight turning on by itself.
5) an Electromagnetic Field spike on the first floor.
6) a "EVP" of a clanking noise.
7) The flash of light seen outside by Jason

While on the way up to the plantation, Silverfox an I talked about the episode, and realized that with the Air Conditioning on in the house, (as evidenced by TAPS own thermal evidence) any unfamiliar draft could be a cold spot, and if the A/C was on, it was generating an EM field intermittently throughout the night. this would easily explain 3 and 5... possibly number 6 as well. (the thermostat in our house makes an audible click when it kicks on) #2 was probably a reflection of one of the investigators against the thick glass in that room. We would concentrate on the shadows, the flash of light, and the flashlight.

Silverfox and I arrived at Oak Alley around 4pm. We decided to do the tour because she had never done it before, and we were hoping it would give us a chance to hear some of the stories for ourselves. We waited in the shade of the house while waiting for it to start, and Silverfox started taking some pictures...

I love this next Picture... Silverfox calls it "Big Tree, Little Rob":
One thing that struck me as we were waiting for the tour that I had not remembered from my previous visits is that a few of the trees practically brush the house.
Could the local wildlife be responsible for the movement TAPS saw on the Verandas? Definitely a possibility. There are also smaller trees just beyond the veranda on the east side of the house that could move easily in a breeze. In the darkness, and through the wavy leaded glass of the old house, it could easily be mistaken for something moving on the veranda itself.

As our tour started, the first thing we realized is that the Producers of Ghost Hunters got a lot of their history wrong, and that the tour that the TAPS guys were given left out some of the most interesting parts of the house. (Our guide freely admitted all this... apparently it stuck in her craw a bit.) We were also told that there was no photography allowed in the house, but that didn't stop Silverfox from snapping pics whenever she had the opportunity. Things of note on our tour:

The plantation owners would have a slave stay up all night to guard the sleeping children from the local wildlife which would come in through the open windows. The wildlife includes opossums, raccoons, and other climbers. Any one of these are curious enough to look in a window...

The floors are a little spongy in the lavender room (where the flashlight incident was) and transfer vibration well. If the flashlight was rigged to light up at the slightest touch (as Grant says it was in this episode) any flexing of the floor would cause it to come on. this would also explain why the light goes off as Jason approaches it.

The room that Jason saw the flash of light in does indeed face River Road, and on a weird enough angle that it would not be immediately obvious that it was the headlights of a southbound vehicle.

One of the rooms TAPS missed was used to hold wakes for the recently dead. Talk about a missed opportunity.

In short, TAPS did some shoddy work on this one, and I was really disappointed... for all the good TAPS has done popularizing the field of paranormal investigations, they seemed to have missed some pretty obvious stuff for ratings. We left feeling that while the plantation may indeed be haunted... the Ghost Hunters had failed to provide any evidence of this.

We however, had better luck.

When I had the chance to review the pictures Silverfox had snapped, I found that my lovely wife had actually captured two anomalies in the master bedroom. Keep in mind, I have not doctored these photos in any way... The first anomaly I spotted in this picture:
There is an unaccounted for blue light in the middle of the picture next to the dress. I've enhanced the area in this photo:It's not a glare or a reflection as near as I can tell, and I threw every filter at it I could think of in Photoshop to try to explain it/eliminate it. I also went back and reviewed her other pictures taken in the room to try to find the source, and to my surprise found a second anomaly in this picture, near the crib:

here is the same photo focused on the area in question:
Again blue, again unexplainable, and almost exactly the same height off the floor. I'm not saying it's a ghost... but it's definitely something.

Cerio Family Paranormal Investigators: 1, TAPS: 0.

Opening the paranormal can of worms… maybe I should catch some paranormal fish.

For those of you that don’t read the comments left on each post, you may have missed this absolute gem of a comment about my last post:

Robert, I am surprised at you!
Seeking a purely "scientific" explanation of "paranormal" phenomenon! I would have thought you had enough exposure to entities such as "Whitney", (for one) to consider ghosts more than random glimpses of a parallel universe... And how would you explain Cousin Edward?

Personally, I don't like the term "paranormal". Anything the human mind is capable of IS normal - no matter how profound or far from our societal "norms". To be "paranormal", or METAphysical, the event would have to be something of which the human mind is NOT capable. With the current state of the psychological arts in our society, I think we would have great difficulty determining whether any particular event is something of which the mind is not capable.

Ladies and gentlemen… to me, this comment is proof of something that I have been saying all along… my Mother reads my blog. I say this for two reasons… One, there is nothing paranormal about the way someone’s neck hair stands up when their parent uses their full first name; two, no one else would know the “Cousin Edward” story. While not particularly surprising that Mom reads this stuff, it may surprise many of you to find out that my Mom is one of the major driving forces behind my interest in the paranormal, as well as my open-mindedness on the subject.

Throughout my life, Mom has manifested signs of latent psychic ability. (Although she would probably take exception to the term ‘latent’) One of the most compelling proofs of this ability to me was the “Cousin Edward” story. When I was in my late teens, My Mom’s cousin Edward was going through a rough time… he had an inoperable brain tumor that doctors said was going to eventually kill him. Eddie was a trooper though, and hung in there for a very long time through chemotherapy, surgery and everything else the doctors tried. He was only a few years older than I was, and it was very tragic. When we got the phone call that he had lost the fight and passed away, I was the one who picked up the phone. My memory is a little fuzzy on this part, but I think it was my aunt telling me that Eddie had passed away. I went to give the phone to my Mom, telling her that she may want to sit down first. She looked me in the eye and said “Edward passed away, right?”. “Yeah.” I said, “How did you know?” “He came to visit me last night and told me.” Mom said, without batting an eye.

This definitely rated a 9 on the weird-shit-ometer. Even for Mom.

The “Whitney” story is something else entirely. Whitney was the name my Dad gave the ghost that we believed haunted our house, and some of the surrounding area. Whenever a set of keys went missing, but was found later somewhere that we had already looked, it was invariably blamed on “Whitney”. Mom actually saw a man in a three-corner hat standing in our backyard one afternoon, but when she looked again, the man had vanished. "Must be Whitney" we all agreed.

Yeah, Jay and I still joke that Mom is a “Weirdness Magnet”. Believe me, these tales are just the tip of the iceberg.

Buuuuut…. Knowing now what I didn’t know then, I would classify the “Cousin Edward” story as an example of Mom’s latent clairvoyance, not Ghosts. “Whitney” on the other hand was indeed a haunting… and fits pretty well with my quantum intrusion theory, thank you very much… particularly if one is to posit that these alternate quantum states have some level of physicality in our plane of existence. Missing keys aside, I have seen some evidence to support the idea that ghosts can manipulate physical objects.

Unlike Mom, I do like the term “Paranormal”. It means, (according to the dog-eared Webster’s Dictionary I keep by my computer) “Not explainable by current science”. I certainly prefer it to terms like “supernatural” or “metaphysical”, which tend to have more magical and spiritual connotations in the popular culture. I also believe that science can explain most things in the universe if science is willing to keep an open mind to that which it does not currently understand. The sciences devoted to discovering some of this more wondrous stuff are Parapsychology and Paraphysics. Most people think of these as “fringe” sciences, stuff best not discussed in serious scientific forums. But remember, the cryptozoologists that discovered the existence of the giant squid were once “fringe” guys as well.

Science’s view of the universe is constantly under revision, and it is through these revisions that great breakthroughs in how we see the universe are born. It may be closed-minded to think that someday science will explain many of the things we currently do not understand, but it’s just as closed-minded to believe that some things are impossible for us to understand.

On the paranormal...

Recently, my buddy Melinda reviewed a book on her blog called "The Skeptic's guide to the Paranormal". Toward the end she mentioned a theory I developed about the nature of ghosts and such, which I have yet to put into print, or even comment upon outside of the occasional dinner party.

Fact of the matter is, I have said very little here about the time I spent working as a Paranormal Researcher, even though it was probably the coolest job I will ever have. For those of you that don't know, I spent some time working for some folks that were doing an ongoing study of a haunted property here in New Orleans Pre-Katrina. It was something I don't talk about unless pressed to, and never here in fear of tainting the research we were doing by having people read about my experiences. Part of the research was to see what would happen when people who knew nothing about what we were doing were brought onto a haunted property for the first time, and coming across my blogs about it could have made people biased. ("Well, this must be where Rob said on his blog he saw that ghost so my imagination will start playing tricks on me at this point and... HOLY CRAP, IT'S A GHOST!") So understanding why (at the request of my boss) I should say nothing about stuff that happened to me, I kept my fool mouth shut.

I may have to start changing that... I'd desperately like to get involved with the paranormal stuff again and maybe do more research. I think a good way to start that would be to share a little of my personal beliefs and experiences on the subject, starting with crackpot theory #7...

The Truth about Ghosts.

First off, let me start by saying to all the skeptics out there that I am one of you. I looked at everything that happened to me with a disbelieving eye, and it generally took a lot before I would label something that happened to me as "Paranormal". Having said that, I would ask that anyone reading these pages do so with an open mind... I know that a lot of the 'proof' generally put forth about ghosts and like phenomena is very subjective, and difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce. For the purposes of this article though, I would ask that you take my word for it that my experiences were indeed valid and yet defied conventional explanation.

My experiences in the field have convinced me of this, if nothing else... Ghostly phenomena is real. Something is happening to the thousands of people that encounter ghosts every year that is beyond our current science to understand. I will also state unequivocally that nothing in my experience has convinced me that ghosts are the immortal souls of the dearly departed. The truly sad thing is that because this is generally the accepted notion, no one is offering an alternative explanation. Heck, Freud once said "As for ghosts, there is scarcely any other matter upon which our thoughts and feelings have changed so little since early times."

So, If ghosts aren't the spirits of the dead, then what are they? Well, first lets take into account what I know of them through my observation:

-Ghosts can manipulate electric and/or magnetic fields, as evidenced by magnetometer (emf reader) results.

-Ghosts can be seen, but not easily. There are many ghost pictures on the Internet, but few that truly defy explanation to a serious photographer. many of the "orb photos" I've seen are quite obviously dust. However, I have indeed seen one, and the shadow of another as it passed. this means that ghosts can, under the right circumstances, reflect light.

-Ghosts can have shapes, but this shape can vary. Many Observers report translucent human forms, others report mists. I have seen both.

Now, things within the realm of science that generally can accomplish all three of these tend to be sub-atomic particles, and (more importantly) fit into most current quantum theories. My theory is that on an unconscious level, we are sensitive to minute changes in sub atomic and quantum fluctuation, and perceive this phenomena as ghosts.

So, sometimes, what we're looking into with this sense is an alternate reality intruding upon our own, which is why we interact with "humans"... it's entirely possible that on the other side of the dimensional barrier, the "ghostly encounter" is perceived by whatever sentient life forms are there in an entirely different manner.

Of course, I have no idea how to go about testing this... I know just enough physics to be dangerous... if anyone out there has an idea about how to measure or prove this theory, let me know.