1/14/13

1/14/13 - This week...I'm taking the easy way out! If you've read "A Ghost Hunter's Journal" and "We Believe You..." then this is going to be old news. If not...and if you have a Kindle...then you're really going to enjoy this. "A Decade of Shadows" is the Kindle release of both novels combined with some new and updated information mixed throughout. Enjoy the intro... Long before I ever put pen to paper with the ‘Taste Of Home’ trilogy, I began chronicling my adventures as a paranormal investigator. This was not only a way to make some sense out of what I was experiencing…but a way to complete my first book in order to share these thoughts with the rest of the world. This is a Kindle exclusive containing bits and pieces of my first two novels “A Ghost Hunter’s Journal” and “We Believe You…A Ghost Hunter’s Journal Continues” that were originally printed by Publish America Publishing years ago. Because these are based on journal entries of our daily lives, it is written in the same manner in which I speak…so try not to get too uptight about the rules of the English language. Some of this is going to be just as painful to me by re-reading it as it is to you reading it for the first time. After all, I wrote about every single thing going on in my life at the time…good or bad. The last ten years of my life have been full of interesting adventures that I’d never thought possible when I first started making my journal entries…but they’ve also been full of heartbreak. Welcome to a look into a paranormal investigator’s life. It has been a decade of shadows…but it has given me hope in believing that the great adventure doesn’t end when we leave our bodies behind. Enjoy. “The Converted” In the beginning, I didn’t believe her. Sure, I had my share of unexplained events that had occurred around me, but I could always find plausible explanations such as alcohol, illegal drugs, sleep deprivation, or second hand information. For instance, an uncle of mine witnessed my deceased Great-Grandmother floating above him while he lay sleeping. A mere five seconds later, a house not more than fifty yards away from us exploded due to a gas leak or a drug lab…take your pick. Did the house really explode? Yes, as a matter of fact, I witnessed the aftermath with my own eyes on several occasions because they took their sweet time cleaning up the debris. They later rebuilt it and rented it out. I always wanted to go inform the new tenants just to scare the living hell out of them. Next question, did my uncle see a ghost? Who knows! Explanation: He was quite the little expert when it came to the subject of the exploration of the effects of illegal substances. Hey, man, it was the eighties! My next unexplained experience came when I was but a young lad with my hormones raging and stupidity at an all time high! My best friend and I, probably no older than fourteen if I recall correctly, were lying on our backs in a drainage ditch waiting for my latest conquest’s parents to go to sleep so that I may venture through an open window and lay waste to the spoils of their daughter. O.K., you win, I was a virgin and only wishing that the above mentioned scenario would play out identically to the way I had dreamed it up. All jokes aside, we were lying on our backs, staring blankly and lethargically up at the midnight sky when suddenly we began to bear witness to an awesome meteor shower. The freaked out part about this particular event was the fact that there was one object, among the thousands that were streaking towards our atmosphere that was a lot larger, significantly brighter, and moving at about half the speed of its celestial brothers. Suddenly, the object stopped dead in the middle of its decent and hovered completely motionless while the remainder of the heavenly debris continued to plummet all around it. Without warning, the hovering object shot skyward in the opposite direction and out of sight. Needless to say, the only things remaining in our site of temporary refuge were the shape of two young boys that remained in the flattened grass. Was it a UFO? I can’t say. I had only seen stars “fall” before, not change their minds in mid-drop and return home. Explanation: We were drunk as skunks! The two of us had raided an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels from his parent’s liquor cabinet and had easily consumed at least half of it before we began the trek. Shortly upon our return, we ascended his ancient childhood tree house and accidentally caught it on fire with the remainder of the whiskey. Man, most people never have friends like that again. We are still friends to this very day and equally as crazy. We skip ahead in time about four years from that fateful night in which I unexpectedly got to try my luck at performing the duties of an amateur fire fighter, to find myself in my senior year of high school. Living with my grandparents in the same house that my uncle had witnessed the floating apparition, strange noises and things of that nature were a pretty regular occurrence. I thank the powers that be everyday that those unexplained noises in the night were not being emitted from my grandparent’s bedroom, causing some type of repressed erectile dysfunction that would probably still effect me to this very day. My uncle and his girlfriend were sitting in the living room with me when we began to hear footsteps in the hallway coming towards us. My only thought was that my grandmother had been removed from a dead sleep either by the sound of a blaring television or the ear-piercing chuckle of our female companion. When the footsteps reached our location, we simultaneously turned towards the doorway to receive our latest scolding and to be reminded of what time it was, regardless of how may clocks were contained in that particular room of the house. We were pretty awestruck to discover that we were blankly staring into the darkness of the hallway. Our puzzled stares were quickly transformed into frightened faces as a bluish colored, transparent hand reached into the room as though what remained of this being lay in waiting around the corner. The girl screamed and the hand was no more, now being replaced by my real grandmother who was cutting us to the bone by an evil gaze for taking her away from whatever childhood backwoods farmhouse of a dream that we had inadvertently awoke her from. You can never quite forget the unmistakable scent of Menthalatum, cold-cream, and unconditional love. I miss her, too. Since her death, my grandfather has re-married and, at one time before an awesome renovation took place, had put the house up for sale. It was offered to me just to try to keep it in the family, but I refused it. I no longer can tolerate a Texas summer without central air conditioning, and quite frankly, as much as I would love to, would absolutely hate to be summoned into the kitchen late one evening because the ghost of my grandmother had whipped me up her famous meatloaf, fried potatoes, red beans, and cornbread. I take that back…two wives later and I still can’t get a woman to duplicate her awesome cooking. She was loved, and she is missed. The question that weighed heavily on my mind was: Did the three of us just have a supernatural encounter? Were there spirits running amok somewhere in the quaint and quiet dwellings of my grandparent’s home, deep in the dark and eerie nights when only a select few could possibly discover their presence? After all, if you catch an old person awake at midnight, they’re not your average, ordinary old geezer and probably have some interesting tidbits of life saving information that could possibly assist you in your whirlwind of a life, if not save it someday. This being the case, immediately snatch up this vessel of ancient wisdom and entertain them with some type of alcoholic beverage, for they have earned it, two or three times over. But, to the question at hand: Did we see a ghost? Explanation: We were stoned out of our ever loving minds! Will I ever be able to explain the unexplainable without blaming it on the effects of controlled substances? Just wait, there’s more! We jump ahead five more years and I’ve become someone’s ex-husband and the father of the world’s most beautiful little girl. Then, I accidentally get the rebound girl pregnant, and BLAM, I am the father of two of the most beautiful girls that I have ever had the privilege of laying eyes on. As if I didn’t have enough joy in my life, the rebound girl had a daughter already. I was in love with this one from the first day I saw her. (The daughter, not the rebound girl, to hell with the rebound girl!!!!) She was so tiny and adorable, and she crapped all over a fifty dollar silk tie that I happened to be wearing at the time. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is! In my early twenties, with three daughters and no wife, I made an irreversible, drunken decision that would change the course of my life forever. Not only did I wake up one morning in the Army, but I awoke more confused and lonely than I had ever recalled being before. In times like these most men turn to God…and so did I. Military church was not at all like I expected. I had attended service to find shelter, advice, and possibly some kind of loophole in the whole military experience that could provide for me a way out of this voluntary hell hole. All I got in return was a “holy” explanation as to why God wanted me to follow the orders of my superior officers, straight to my own death if they so desired it. I believed exactly at that moment that God let me down. Spiritually lost, I mentally wandered desperately seeking answers into the unknown. Then in a fateful turn of events, I came across a fellow soldier sitting on a stone wall staring with undivided attention at a small patch of ground. When I asked him what he was doing, he informed me he was studying an ant bed. Being the jerk that I was, I inquired as to why in the heck someone would want to burn their free time by watching insects? He told me that it made him understand nature better, and that it helped him to better understand the way of the goddess. He later loaned me a book titled “Wicca, For the Solitary Practitioner” by Scott Cunningham (Llewellyn Publishing). All at once, my entire life seemed to fall into place and the next thing I knew, I was watching ants also. I found the drive, strength and courage to remain in the Army, but with one major drawback. I came home and married the rebound girl. Enter Ft. Huachuca, Arizona. A beautiful yet rustic military installation nestled deep in the valley of the Huachuca Mountains, some fifteen minutes away from Tombstone. I was in a nature lover’s heaven! With nature, however, comes the presence of spirits and spirits, in the hands of a young, curious and inexperienced student in the ways of Old, can be a dangerous combination. The thing that needs to be noted about the nature of spirits is their origin. Ft. Huachuca was the home base of the Buffalo Soldiers in the late 1800’s and they are famous for their courageous duty during the infamous Mexican and Indian wars. There were a lot of lives lost in that desert, and psychic energy built up over time can be a tempting lure. Ft. Huachuca had more domestic violence incidents and divorces than any other military installation in the world. A lot of people believed it was due to the simple fact that all of the military housing was located on land that was used for both the living areas and burial grounds of the Indians that were eradicated from that area. Now, the thing to be noted about witchcraft is that its user thirsts greedily for knowledge, for with knowledge comes power and with power comes the ability to accomplish awesome feats of the supernatural. Eventually, the beginner books no longer satisfy. Midnight, Halloween. You can see where this is all leading, even if you’ve never watched the movie Poltergeist. Reading through some advanced incantation, something was set free in my home. Over the next year, it continued to scare my young daughters and the rebound wife even claims to this very day that a female apparition materialized and actually spoke to her crying desperately for help. Using the power of the ancient religions, did I actually conjure up some dangerous and evil spirit? Explanation: Little children have awesomely vivid and powerful imaginations and my wife at the time was on some serious drugs. Long after I’d given up on the partaking of illegal substances, my immature military buddies found companionship in the form of my young burnout of a wife which, in fact, stayed pretty much baked out of her bleached blonde mind on a daily basis. Of course frickin ghosts were talking to her! Now you can plainly see why I had remained a bit of a skeptic for so many years. I never had tangible evidence to back up any of the paranormal experiences that had occurred in either my own life or in the lives of my friends and family. I stopped practicing the craft; however, I remain a faithful holder in the beliefs of natural co- existence and conservation. Another child, another divorce, and a failed career later, something amazing happened. I ran into a girl that I had not seen in years. A girl that had been an intricate and very special part of my life for as long as I could possibly remember. Recently weathering the storm of a romantic relationship gone horribly wrong, we clung to one another for sanctuary. Anyone who owns half of a brain and believes in romantic fate can figure out the rest of that storyline, but what I would like to do now is skip far away from the details of my past because I think you can gather the type of person that you’re dealing with by now. If not, stop reading because this is actually where it begins to get complicated. The “her” that is mentioned in the very first line of this work of literary lunacy is, in fact, my girlfriend. One night, after she had moved in with me, she began to tell me a story. According to her, she had been stalked by a spirit over the course of her entire life. Nothing more than a large shadow in the shape of a man, it had followed from her youth in California, to every home she had ever settled in locally. Imagine my surprise to discover that this, by all means, was not a part of her creative subconscious. Our spiritual houseguest first appeared to me late one evening while she and I were camped out for a cozy evening on the sofa, watching whatever visual junk that was being offered by our local cable distributor, when she whispered for me to look in the doorway of our bathroom. As a bolt of frightened energy strategically worked its way from my feet to my spinal column, I came to the eerie realization that my uncle had at one time witnessed my long departed great grandmother floating inches from his face, that I could have possibly witnessed an unidentified flying object while lying in a ditch down a country road, that myself and two others had once been on the receiving end of a ghostly handshake, and that I, quite possibly released an evil spirit into my old house that threatened my children and had conversations with my ex wife just by reading a few simple verses that can be found on the pages of witchcraft books that are sold by the thousands in bookstores nationwide. Not to mention that I, one hundred percent stone cold sober was staring at an actual ghost! So, being the man that I am, I mustered up the courage to do what any red blooded figure of masculinity would do given a similar situation. I threw back my shoulders, tightened my arms, and ran towards the entity! However, as I arrived closer to its location it was no longer visible. When I reached the exact spot in which the bastard had spiritually taunted me, a sudden feeling of extreme and bitter cold came over me causing every hair on my body to stand at electrical attention. Now, armed with my trusty vacuum cleaner, I swore at the now empty corner promising to suck him up if he had the balls to show himself again. He did, time and time again, over the period of a year. Sometimes, he appeared during some highly awkward situations. I’m here to tell you from first hand experience that seeing a ghost during the course of committing unspeakable acts can make you lose concentration faster than if your girlfriend’s mother had walked in and caught you…depending on how hot your girlfriend’s mom is. When we relocated to a larger apartment on the opposite side of town, I was curious to see if our shadow stalker would again follow suit and travel alongside her to our new dwelling. Without missing a beat, the sightings began within a week but this time there was an added bonus (if you consider strange phenomena a bonus). After finally getting unpacked and settled in I was wakened one night by the feeling of being touched by small cold hands, accompanied by an innocent and childish giggle. When I had finally taken all I could stand, I sat up in my bed and yelled loudly “For Heaven’s Sake, Will You Fucking Stop!!!!!!!” No sooner had I done so, the meanest sounding and loudest evil hissing noise that I had ever experienced came from the direction of the giggling like I had just stomped on the tail of the world’s largest cat. In the far corner of the bedroom stood a small shadow, half the size of the other, cowering like a scared child. Suddenly, the shadow jumped and disappeared through the ceiling. Where did this one come from? One of my developing theories is that the spiritual energy of our shadowy hitchhiker somehow woke a sleeping entity that had lay dormant in the new place in which we were living. Or, perhaps, the spirit was already there before we arrived, and is possibly lending strength to our original buddy because of the fact that he is no longer lurking in the shadows but de- materializing when I get too close. Recently, I’ve witnessed him darting down well-lit hallways and materializing close by me, unexpectedly, just to make sure that the living daylights are officially scared out of me. To boot, our young child spirit, which has now been recognized as a female, is no longer a shadow but an illuminated being with recognizable features that enjoys making appearances at the foot of our bed. I swear…I’m not making this shit up! Why is this happening to us? Why were the two of us being chosen to play the part of some type of paranormal magnet? Somehow I’m going to find out. I needed answers. I never meant to take things this far. After having my first unexplained paranormal experience, we decided to start ghost hunting as a hobby. As far as the writing goes, it was always a way to pass the time and express my feelings through twisted little short stories and poetry. I never knew I’d go public with it because, when I first began, I never really had any subject matter to write about that could hold a person’s interest. I honestly don’t recall at exactly what point it all got out of hand. My name is Chad. I am a ghost hunter. What you are about to read is the documentation from the journal that I wrote during my first years as a paranormal investigator. None of the following information has been altered and none of the evidence we uncovered has been falsified or exaggerated. When I first co – founded the group that I belong to, P.R.I.N.T. (Paranormal Research and Investigations of North Texas) it was originally meant to be an unusual and cool way to pass the spare time. At first, even though I had encountered a paranormal event that couldn’t be explained by alcohol or drug usage or even severe exhaustion, I was still convinced that all the paranormal shows on television were completely full of it. I wasn’t trying to say that I didn’t believe in ghosts, I just wanted to prove that all of the televised EVP and spirit photographs were fake. I was wrong. I grew up and lived the majority of my life in the mid sized North Texas town of Greenville. It was the home of Audie Murphy (the most decorated soldier of WWII), Collin Raye (a country singing superstar) and twenty six thousand of the most conservative non believers that you’ll ever come across. Greenville was the center of the cotton industry in this area long ago during the days of slavery and beyond. We had a baseball team that played and won, I think, against the New York Yankees, burned a man accused of rape on the steps of the courthouse, and boasted a sign that hung near the town square that read ‘Welcome to Greenville: The blackest land, the whitest people’. Trust me, this place has multiple skeletons in their municipal closet that some people don’t want discovered. You figure it would be a cool place to find something unusual. My co – founder Shahnez ‘Nez’ Ragosino moved here from California when she was very young. Through some unseen circumstances we became the best of friends growing up, coming and going with other relationships until we both ended up taking things to the next level several years later. Her husband and my wife both had bad habits of sharing the cold side of the pillow with various people other than the one they were married to. You could say that we had something in common. We hated cheating, lying, and abusive spouses. It was the perfect way to start a relationship. When she moved in, she unintentionally brought along the paranormal friend mentioned above. Now, I’m hooked. The hard part in all of this was making people in such a conservative town take us seriously. According to local belief, ghosts do not exist within the city limits of Greenville. When we started out, we were scheduling places to investigate on our own. I would come home afterwards and document what we found on my web page and the few friends that I had would comment and anxiously await the next adventure. Hundreds of friends, thousands of readers, multiple radio talk show interviews, and years full of investigations later, we’re networking with over three hundred different paranormal investigation groups world wide to find the answers to the unknown. Needless to say, we don’t have to schedule our own adventures anymore. I’d like to think that we accomplished what we originally set out to do by proving to the local community that there is the possibility that things exist outside of human comprehension. Its something that has slowly came to pass with the select few but there are some minds you can never change. To these people, what we’re doing is wrong and there’s no way to make it right. We’re the epitome of all that is evil. Even if we somehow landed a television gig and became loved by millions, we’d still be loathed entirely in this town. Well, I think I’ve set you up to continue the rest of this journey on your own. I seriously hope that you enjoy reading about this little life of ours as much as we enjoyed living and writing it. Even if you’re not a true believer, maybe before it’s all said and done you’ll hopefully raise an eyebrow to the events that have occurred around us and the evidence that we’ve uncovered. We hope that the next time you visit or drive by a cemetery, you’ll ponder the fact that there might be something more going on there other than growing grass and weathering head stones. We hope that when you visit an old house that you’ll see beyond the dust and age and recognize the history and the soul of the house itself. This is a way of life and a gift that I never once asked for. My life and my beliefs changed forever suddenly and without warning. There are times when I look back on my life, a different life, and remember fondly when I didn’t have to lie to my children and tell them that ghosts and things are all in their head. There was a time when I didn’t lead a secret life and hide it from my conservative friends and family. Those times are gone forever. In the beginning, I didn’t even want Nez’s name involved in this. You’ll notice that she’s referred to as my partner, co – founder, and girlfriend for quite some time as you begin reading. To the skeptics, keep in mind that I didn’t choose the entities, they chose me. Your time could come sooner than you think when they choose you also. To the believers, keep believing. You’re the only ones who can vouch for me and prove that I’m not a complete psychopath that is suffering from reoccurring hallucinations. This is my ghost hunter’s journal. Feel free to walk in my shoes but don’t forget where you found them. Some day soon, I’ll need to strap them on again to continue the journey... In Post Production and Coming soon to Amazon Kindle!