“Family Spirit” with Leitreanna Brown on BTVN television
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
8:00 PM EDT / 7:00 PM CDT

This coming weekend I’ll be with Society of the Haunted at the “History, Haunts and Legends” event in Jefferson, Texas as we’ll be presenting to our colleagues about the haunts we’ve uncovered in Oklahoma.

Details of “History, Haunts and Legends”:

On Saturday April 14, 2012  the Historic Jefferson Ghost walk will host the Annual Spring History Haunts and Legends Event in downtown Historic Jefferson, Texas.  A fun event for the History Buff, Avid Ghost Hunter, and people with an interest for the unexplained and things that go bump in the night.  The daytime activities will be held at the Visitors Center at 305 E Austin Street from 10 A.M. to 5:30 P.M.  The night time tours and events will start at 8 P.M. with the Ghost Walk Tour. Cost is $75 per person, or for the daytime only $35 and night time only $40.  For information call 903-665-6289.   brochure can be seen for the  website at www.jeffersonghostwalk.com

I’ve also just recently signed with Haunted Entertainment to represent me for events. They’re a growing presence in the industry and I’m looking forward to this partnership. Stay tuned for more information about specific events I’ll be participating in with them.

Speaking about 'Ghosts of Maryland' in Westminster, September 2010.

Spring has sprung which not only introduces warmer weather, but also a whole season of paranormal events. I’m always open to attending and/or presenting at any number of events across the country, although I may not have done a very good job of making that fact known. So here’s what I do…

Events in Oklahoma and Maryland get their own specific presentation based on my books of their respective states, Ghosts and Legends of Oklahoma and Ghosts of Maryland. If I’m in a state other than those two my presentation is more general on how history and the paranormal relate to each other. It’s somewhat like an oral version of my article “History and the Paranormal: A Working Relationship” on Dark Media Online. I also speak with the rest of the Society of the Haunted team about every month and a half at the Oklahoma City OPERA fairs, and our topics have ranged from historic paranormal locations to evidence we’ve collected to general Q&A sessions on ghost hunting.

Here’s an upcoming schedule of events:

April 11: “Family Spirit” interview with Lei Brown on BTVN television

April 14: “History, Haunts and Legends” in Jefferson, TX with Society of the Haunted

April 19-21: In Los Angeles filming for My Ghost Story

April 28-29: Oklahoma Psychic Educational Research Association fair, India Shrine Center, Oklahoma City

June 22-24: Forensic Ghost Excavation Congress – Convention, Brunswick, MD

Whichever is closest to you, I hope to see you there! And if you’re an event promoter, please feel free to drop me a line about your event.

Ghosts and Legends of Oklahoma: EP 5 - The Book

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally finished producing the fifth episode of the Ghosts and Legends of Oklahoma video series titled “The Book.” I originally intended this episode to be released just after the book release to highlight a number of the different stories within, but then I had the tour and the holidays and Wimgo was pulled out from under me and… well, you get the idea. It’s been a longtime coming. I spent an extra day working on a new effect as well (white wispy thing during segment transitions). This episode does cover the release and subsequent tour, then highlights the book section by section. However, it’s not all-inclusive. There is plenty more within the book, including an atlas for mapping out your own ghost tour of the state. I’ll be pushing forward with the next episode that will cover the 101 Ranch in Ponca City with a renewed vigor.

Admittedly, some of this motivation comes from an agreement I’ve reached with Richard Parnell and Co. at GhostTales Television Network (GTN) to air the episodes as “Ghosts and Legends” on Tuesday nights at 9:00 PM Central. When Episode 1, “Beginnings,” aired on March 6 it bested their record for a premiere show with more than 20,100 views in the first hour! So, yes, I’m quite excited about this! The new Spiritually Raw television station has also been running a few promos for me.

In other news, we’ve been picked up for another television show episode on the Bio Channel with some of the filming to begin in April. I’m staying mum on a lot of that until everything is wrapped up, but it’s another exciting step forward for Society of the Haunted.

Signing books at OPERA on March 3, 2012.

Today, Society of the Haunted had a speaking engagement at the Oklahoma Psychic Educational Research Association (OPERA) fair which has been our custom since August, but we had been asked this time to simply host a ghost hunting Q&A session. Prior to this we’d led a more structured session with topics ranging from historic paranormal locations to types of paranormal evidence. So I wasn’t sure what to expect when everyone gathered together in the room to meet us.

It went pretty well! Questions ranged through a variety of topics from both people who had experience with the paranormal to those that had never experienced anything and were skeptics. We talked about types of hauntings and the difference between residual and intelligent haunts, cleansings and how we perform them, our first paranormal experiences, why spirits may be lingering here on Earth, animal spirits, and many other topics. We could have kept going for quite a long time, but we only had the one hour session.

With Johnny Longan of Society of the Haunted and his family.

My overall impression is that there needs to be more education about the field. I’ve heard that there are a few schools that are starting to offer classes about paranormal investigating, but I wonder how the instructors are vetted. My son’s girlfriend recently had a guest speaker about the paranormal in one of her college courses, and from her account the class tore him to shreds. Also, how does one standardize what is taught about the paranormal in the classroom? Theories are so rampant in the field and most are difficult to prove, which is one of our biggest challenges as investigators — prove what we’ve experienced. So if College A and College B both offer a paranormal course, but College A has a strictly scientific-heavy instructor while College B has a metaphysical-heavy instructor, students from each class will come out of it with vastly different views about the paranormal.

The difference between these two schools of thought is something I enjoy about our team. We take both sides into consideration. Hauntings occur in a variety of fashions and can be picked up on through a number of different methods. We utilize and teach about both. Come out and see us next time at OPERA!

I’ve been doing a lot of writing for DarkMedia’s online magazine of late, providing an article about history’s relationship to the paranormal and I’ve provided a couple articles for their new paranormal travel guide. It’s been some fun taking a break from some of my other projects to get those out to the public. Actually, I find all my writing fun. I just need more hours in the day to touch it all.

The article “History and the Paranormal: A Working Relationship” is a bit of a preview of what I’ll be speaking about at the Forensic Ghost Excavation Congress in Brunswick, Maryland in June. I’m really looking forward to this as I’m expanding the presentations I’ve been giving for the past couple years and am plunging deeper into research and methodology. It sounds like there’s the makings of a good book in there somewhere at some point.

I’m happily cruising right along with Campfire Tales of the Midwest, but I’m still open to receiving input from my readers. I’ve proposed this before and received some good feedback, so I’m putting it out there again. Please send me your suggestions of a haunted location in the Midwest that you’d like to see and why, and I’ll choose one to be represented with a guest appearance by you! I’ve already written whole or in part about Lakeland Asylum (KY), Fort Chaffee (AR), Villisca Axe Murder House (IA), Belvoir Winery (MO), and Black Bear Church (OK). My deadline for the manuscript is in July, so I’ll wrap up this little promo in the next couple months.

I’m also happy to say that I’m going to be featured with Cathy Nance and the rest of the Society of the Haunted on an upcoming episode of another paranormal show. The episode has just been picked up, so there really aren’t any details I can give out just yet, but I will make sure to update as we go through the process.

This weekend will prove to be a busy one as I’ll also be speaking with Society of the Haunted for OPERA at the Shriner’s Center in Oklahoma City on Saturday at 1:00 PM, and that night we also have a paranormal investigation. Furthermore, my youngest son’s 10^th birthday is on Sunday. I will be exhausted come Monday, but busy is better than boring.

Pictured here the Lizzie Borden framed photo before it fell.

While preparing for the OPERA speaking engagement, which will cover “unusual experiences” we’ve had, I was going through some old audio in order to find the crashing glass of a framed photograph at the Stone Lion Inn. For those that have read Ghosts and Legends of Oklahoma, you’ll recall the account in which I was walking up the stairs and another investigator had taken but a step up and between us fell the framed photo of Lizzie Borden. This made a fantastic racket over my audio recorder, but there was something else that caught my attention. This event happened only about two minutes after I caught the white wisp on camera that is pictured in the book.

One of the other noted events of the young evening was that of the bureau in the Stone Lion’s entrance hall. For some inexplicable reason, the top middle drawer was open, and we casually noted it as we walked past to the Parlor Room, which is reportedly haunted with the spirit of a man in a top hat. Within minutes we were alerted to a type of knock from back in the entrance hall, and when we ventured out to take a look the drawer was closed. Johnny whipped out his Tri-Field meter, I started snapping pictures, and the photo of the white wisp was captured (although I didn’t realize it until I started looking through the photos the next day). Two minutes later… crash.

I wonder why I didn’t realize it before. It’s not like I wasn’t paying attention to what was going on at that moment. After all, I went back through all of this when I was writing the book. Perhaps it’s one of those cases in which I was too focused on the individual events to recount for Ghosts and Legends that I wasn’t taking a step back to soak in the whole picture. It certainly makes everything that happened at that time much more meaningful, and it’s making me consider the other things that happened that night such as an upstairs door opening on it’s own and the sudden wave of energy that nearly floored me in the library. Something that night was seriously trying to get our attention.

Perhaps I’m too prideful. There are things that I did at such a young age that it seems like I should be on cruise control at this point, but I’m not. Straight out of high school I entered the military, still only 17. By 19 I was married and within a couple years we had three children. When I got reassigned to Maryland we drove out of Alaska following a snow storm all the way out into Canada and made a “side trip” south as far as Los Angeles before we finally headed east. When I left the Air Force just before turning 24 I became the Network Manager of a small company and had my own office. A year later I was on the field for a baseball tryout with the Major League Scouting Bureau. Oh, and I was working on that book that became Deadly Heirs. That question, “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” — I had my sights set high on that one. Yet, just over a decade later I find myself unemployed for the third time in three years.

I’m not going to whine here. There are far more people in this world in far worse situations than I.  I’m just frustrated that since I left a comfortable position with Howard Count Library of my own accord that I have repeatedly fallen victim to “workforce reduction.” Today I found out that after a month of working on a position that would have landed me back in my home state of Ohio it was pulled out from under me even though I had been their best candidate for the position. I’m utterly flabbergasted.

Let’s back it up a bit here. My day job is that of a web programmer, mostly PHP, some Java, been using HTML for about 16 years, and a whole bunch of other alphabet soup acronym stuff that would make most people’s heads swim. I pretty much turned myself into this because it’s much more creative than the network and systems administration work I’d been doing for years. I actually have a Bachelor of Science degree in Game and Simulation programming, but there aren’t a whole lot of game studios in Oklahoma. Something I’ve been wanting to do for years is put my detective character from Deadly Heirs, Chase Michael DeBarlo, into a computer game. However, that’s still not number one in my book.

Handling a megillah scroll in 2006.

Writer/researcher looking for work. I get the greatest thrill out of researching the past, paranormal and otherwise, and then writing about it. Traveling to historic locations, breathing in the atmosphere, cracking open the old tomes and uncovering lost truths — yeah, that’s me. Back in 2006 when I was attending Library Associate’s training for the state of Maryland, I received the rare opportunity to handle a 600 year old megillah scroll that had been recently discovered in the basement archives of Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library. Now the idea of rambling about in the basement archives is fantastic, and handling that scroll was a thrill. That day at lunch my friend Luis Salazar and I had also gone to the Westminster Burial Grounds to visit Edgar Allan Poe’s grave, so it was a heck of a day. Give me that everyday. Speaking of Luis, he and I once spent an afternoon locating the site of the old Madison Avenue Grounds baseball field, long since gone, using a map from 1870!I relentlessly dig. For many of our paranormal investigations I’ve spent hours upon hours of my personal time diving into newspaper archives, land records, and other journals searching for connections and affirmations or negations of claims. For my books Ghosts of Maryland and Ghosts and Legends of Oklahoma I can’t begin to count the time that went into those, but for those I dug into old books and court transcripts as well. The only problem is that none of this pays the bills. The little bit that I get from the books currently goes right back into marketing and promoting the books. And the job  market for “writer dude that will dig for old historic facts” is, well… does that exist? Museum curator, perhaps? How often does something like that become available? A roaming historian? If someone reading this has any ideas, please let me know.

In the meantime, with game design and programming not really an option, it’s on with the web programming to put food on the table. Oh, I could always fall back to network administration type work if I really had to, but I really don’t and it’s been a few years. I prefer being creative, and programming is about the most creative you can be with computers outside of digital graphic design. So I’ll continue following up a few other leads and see where I land. Ultimately, I hope that’s on a bestseller’s list somewhere, but in the meantime I need to put on the hat of my Wimgo moniker, the Phantom Programmer.

But I digress… it’s a new year and people become so fascinated with that flipping of the calendar that we have outrageous parties and citizens of New York freeze their butts off watching a lighted ball take one minute to drop. It’s a means to measure ourselves — where we’ve been, where we’re going — and we use it as a point to mark a new beginning and change things about ourselves. How many people have pledged to start trying to lose weight? I suppose I do that every year at New Year’s.

At the time of this writing I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Brecksville, Ohio, witnessing a white-out. Just one month ago I wouldn’t have fathomed being here at this specific moment in time. I figured I’d be in Oklahoma and starting my workout with Mick, Marcus, Kari, Billy, and Dave at the gym over our lunch break. As I’ve stated in this space before, the writing doesn’t yet pay for the bills so I keep employed as a web programmer. (Hint: If I sell more books then I can write more books and bring to everyone more of what they’ve been asking for from me.) However, my position at Wimgo and, well, Wimgo itself, are now gone. Oh, the site is still there and it still functions. But that is Wimgo essentially running in a sort of quasi-maintenance mode. The development of Wimgo and that core team has been dissolved, so I am out looking for work.

So… Ohio. The land of my birth. The state in which most of my family lives. And a place of which I have not been a resident of for some twenty years. Basically, I graduated high school in 1992 and two weeks later I bolted for the Air Force. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought of the Air Force as a sort of extended vacation, a device by which I’d get an education and learn some skills then bring it all back when I was through (and if I got deployed then, well, that what I agreed to when I signed the papers). Well, those twenty years I talked about, three states, a wife, and four children later I’m still not there. Well, that is, except for the fact that I’m sitting here in a Starbucks and witnessing the winter white-out.

Is a return to Ohio in the works? I don’t know. That depends on if I’m hired by one of the companies that I’m interviewing with. I have a few leads in Oklahoma as well, but these here are the ones that have jumped at my web programming services. Should we move from the Sooner state that does not me I will just forget it. I still have friends out there, Society of the Haunted is centrally located there, many connections and possibilities for signings and speaking engagements are in Oklahoma. I would visit it much the same as I’ve been for Maryland these past couple years. Speaking of, I could get back to Maryland much more easily from Ohio. There are pros and cons. The con of such a move always being that it’s challenging to promote and market a book when I’m not actually in the state. Fortunately, I was able to accomplish some of that while in Oklahoma, unlike Maryland in which I had to make special extended trips out there. We’ll see what happens.

On a completely separate note, Deadly Heirs is currently on a New Year’s special on both Kindle and Nook for just 99 cents. This special won’t last long, so if you’ve been thinking about picking it up on either now is the time. It will go back up to $2.99 here shortly. This is the revised second edition with extended scenes.

Excuse me for waxing poetic for a moment, but I’ve always wanted to be a professional poetic waxer. At this point, I’m wondering what that position might pay. You see, the company in which I worked for as a Senior Interactive Programmer (or the Phantom Programmer as my business card stated), Wimgo, has ceased operation. That means my primary source of income has vanished. Sure, I’d love to write full time, but it doesn’t pay all the bills at this point.

The crew at Wimgo was, as Paul Lightfoot stated on Facebook today, was an eclectic one. It was an interesting collection of personalities that made for quite a colorful team, fantastic controversial conversations, and some real kick-ass ping pong. The office culture was laid back, but that wasn’t what doomed us as everyone worked their butts off. I don’t even necessarily think it was a failed business model as I believe given another year it could have worked as envisioned. But business is business and it always comes down to the bottom line.

So where does this leave me? Oh, I’ll get some irons in the fire, and some of my former co-workers have been kind enough to point me in some directions around here. In the long run, however, my journey is all about the writing and the paranormal. I have a number of projects in the works which I believe will piggyback well off of this past year’s success. Any and all updates on appearances, paranormal or otherwise, will always appear on the website or the Facebook group.

The writing itself continues on with Campfire Tales of the Midwest and the next entry to the Chase Michael DeBarlo mystery series (not yet titled). One positive out of all of this is I can get a lot of that kind of work done. And I certainly will…

Perhaps the biggest change in the book aside from the extended scenes is the name of Chase Michael DeBarlo’s hometown, so let me explain that. When I first sat down to write this book more than a decade ago I decided on the name of Fallsburg, and that is what made it to printing. However, given that this fictional town is placed in Massachusetts, a name with Germanic origins such as “-burg” would have been more fitting in other states, not one that was predominantly English. Thus, I changed one letter of the name and Fallsbury was born out of Fallsburg. Those that have followed Chase’s subsequent adventures in the mini-mysteries that have been released in this newsletter and the short story in the Studies in Scarlet anthology may have already noticed this change. Now Fallsbury is properly named in Deadly Heirs.

Investigating with Society of the Haunted, we recently conducted an investigation at the old Frederick Army Air Field in Frederick, Oklahoma, which is now a part of the regional airport. Still standing is an old hangar dating to World War II with historic planes inside, including one that saw action during the war. This is currently maintained by the WWII Airborne Demonstration Team, which honors the WWII airborne soldier by actively parachuting out of vintage WWII planes in the same manner and style as the soldiers of the time. This is quite a unique and fantastic group!

This plane saw action in World War II, and it appears one of its navigator still resides there.

After getting over the initial awe of being surrounded by history we could touch we began our investigation with an initial walk-through of the premises. While the location was teeming with paranormal activity, there were some unexplainable personal experiences throughout the night. When we first ventured up into the barracks area on the second floor, we were greeted with a stern male voice that declared, “Hold!” We immediately stopped on the narrow plank and sought out who called out to us, but no one was to be found. Within the barracks, Chris captured an unusual green ball of light in a doorway in one of his photographs that we were unable to replicate. It was near this doorway later when I was sitting on a cot that I felt like someone was pushing me from behind, but when I had Arielle take a picture of the area behind me the pushing stopped. In this room later we heard the sound of metal scraping or clanging. Ken and Mick went out into the hangar to try and recreate the sound, but they were unable to do so, and the way the sound traveled into the room we concluded that the noise came from inside the room. However, there was nothing in the room that could have made that sound.

Our most interesting experience of the night was actually toward the end inside the plane that had seen action during WWII. We ran an EVP session with a K-II EMF meter on the floor hoping we could get a spirit of the plane to interact with us. Nothing happened for quite a while. Then, when I mentioned that the Army Air Corp later became the U.S. Air Force and I had served six years the K-II meter lit up wildly, frantically flickering up into the red. We were ecstatic as whatever  was there began answering our questions through the K-II meter. Chris had a hunch about who our mysterious visitor may have been and asked if it was the navigator. Again, the K-II lit up wildly into the red. There were a few more questions answered with smaller flickers and then it died out, and we deduced that the spirit may have expended too much energy too quickly.

It was definitely a fantastic time, and we hope to get back out there soon!