Collegiate Times

After thoroughly checking my shorts, we checked the camcorder footage from inside the room.  The camcorder revealed that, as Patti walked through the door, two pieces of bed frame, standing upright behind the door, had been responsible for the slamming door.

The two pieces then fell to the floor, explaining the two other crashing sounds. The footage also revealed, and this survives on digital video to this day, that immediately after the frame pieces fell, a dark shadow moved across the top of the video screen from the location where the frame pieces originally stood, across the screen and out of view... in a room that I could vouch contained no living beings. I could easily see how one could rig some heavy bed frame pieces to fall behind a door, but to create the shadow would have been a much higher-level hoax.

As quickly as it had begun, our hunt was now over. We retreated upstairs, all of us unhurt, and at least one of us still very confused. Patti led a closing prayer, thanking a higher power for our safety and for what we had seen.

My personal prayer sounded something more like "Take that, Vincent Price!" Safely buckled in my car moments later, I decided to check my camera before leaving. Image after image turned up nothing, causing me to consider the possibility that overzealous ghost-hunters somehow altered the other cameras we had used.

And then I came upon it -- a roundish, white (some would say "ghostly") image appears right in front of Patti in one of the random shots I had taken while in the laundry room. There were no mirrors in the room, nothing reflective that could explain away the image. I snapped it myself, on my own camera.

I left the ghost hunt like I left my undergraduate days -- amazed and confused by the experience, but glad I did it. I didn't leave scarred for life, nor did I physically see or hear anything that proved beyond the shadow-of-a-doubt the existence of life beyond death. But was something going on that I couldn't explain? Absolutely. I discovered that, when the time comes for me to tell my son not to be afraid of ghosts because they don't exist, I'd be saying it just as much for my own benefit as for his.

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