Our Eureka! moments - 12 months, 20 para investigations

This is the final in a four-part series featuring highlights of our past year's paranormal investigations. This week we share the sometimes unsettling but mostly Eureka! moments during our inquiries.

(If you missed Part 1 on anomalous photos, click here. If you missed Part 2 on ghostly voices, click here. If you missed Part 3 on video documentation, click here.)

We've always approached our investigations with optimistic skepticism, never expecting other worldly encounters -- in fact, always assuming the next site visit would prove uneventful. We've also tended to minimize pre-visit research so it wouldn't prejudice our own experiences.

To call the following moments unsettling might be a bit misleading since we've yet to encounter anything that frightened us. (Still waiting, of course, for that full-bodied apparition that whispers "Boo!" in our ear. That might elicit a scramble of retreat on our part.)

Nevertheless, the accounts below describe events that challenged our sense of reality -- even when we found ourselves at a loss at how to measure those experiences.

The Bross Hotel
Our first full-fledged investigation for the book took place in Paonia, Colorado, at the Bross Hotel.

All three above-ground floors as well as the basement have almost a century of paranormal accounts, including multiple and different full-bodied apparitions, mussed bedding, and even dramatic movements by physical objects before the eyes of surprised guests and owners. (Click here for our research into those paranormal accounts.)

We were nervous as we began -- not because we feared paranormal activity but because we doubted anything would occur. And we had a book to write!

We concentrated our initial investigation in the "English Room/Ghost Room," where the original early1900s  owner "Mother Bross" still makes appearances in the room where her son Otto died.  Otto also still makes regular appearances.

English Room/Ghost Room

We realized we were on to something when all the newly installed batteries for our equipment promptly drained and needed replacing.

We also received a series of contextual spirit box responses that described what we were doing and when -- as Mark set up the camcorder, we heard "Camera"; as Kym snapped shots of the room's interior furnishings, the box announced the several objects she photographed ("Bed," "Fan," and "Stairway," which was just beyond the open guestroom door). All promising, but none of it knocked our socks off.

The Eureka moment did arrive -- but after we'd packed up and re-straightened the room. The proprietor had just called up the stairs as we began to descend, suggesting we go back and pick up the tourist literature in that room.

So five seconds after leaving the English/Ghost Room, we walked back in ... and saw a perfect fanny print pressed into the bedding. Horrified we'd left the bedding mussed, Kym instinctively smoothed out the imprint -- and then realized the only impression should have been the rectangular pattern of our camera bag, but Mark had already flattened and erased those ruffles before we left.

A beginner's mistake on our part, to be sure, but it was still the first Eureka! moment we'd have, assuring us at least one chapter's worth of material for the book. (As you probably know by now, we eventually ended up with enough investigative material for 14 chapters!)

The Forest Queen Hotel
This one was also an early investigation, and perhaps the most unsettling, well, for Kym. Crested Butte, Colorado, was a violent frontier mining town, and most of the buildings on the original thoroughfare of Elk Avenue have reports of hauntings. The hotel is the one remaining building that comprised the one-block red-light district.

The saloon-below-and-brothel-above arrangement of the hotel still feels like the Old West -- even though the lower level is now a trendy bar and grill while the upstairs caters to winter skiers and summer bicyclists.

The premises still resonate with much of that by-gone era's drama through regular reports of paranormal goings-on. (Click here for our research into those other accounts.) We were fortunate to visit the hotel during off-season, and we had the solo run of the entire upstairs during our investigation.

We encountered a variety of phenomena on site, including invisible footfalls in the hallway as well as audio-only and spirit box EVPs. One was an EVP capture announcing Kym's name. That should have clued us in to what followed.

Note horizontal "pinch" striations

As soon as we reached the top of the steep, narrow, single-flight stairway to the second floor, Kym had the sensation her feet were shackled. With each step, she felt a tug on the opposite leg as though her feet connected through some sort of restraints. After the initial EMF sweep, we went back downstairs to interview staff and the shackled feeling disappeared. When we revisited the second floor, the feeling of restraints returned, persisting throughout our time on that floor -- but only on that floor. In fact, she pulled off her socks and boots to discover pinch marks on the inside of her left foot.

Kym subsequently "tested" her well-worn footwear, wearing the same socks, at home and on other investigations but never again experienced those sensations in both feet or any pinch marks.

Hotel Norwood
This establishment proved a hotbed of paranormal activity, examples of which we included in earlier articles in this series. We also encountered three further anomalies harder to document while we investigated.

Our first experience occurred before we'd taken three steps into guestroom No. 2 on the second-floor east wing of the hotel: A coffee cup flew off the table and hit the wall behind it. Kym’s EMF meter jumped from 300mG to 3,000mG, and two team members' spirit boxes began spitting out in rapid succession the words “Follow,” “Instinct,” “Dining room,” “Kitchen,” and “Cook.” Who were we to argue? We repacked our gear and headed downstairs to the dining room and kitchen.

The cold spot occurred
between the wardrobe
and the bed in Rm 12

During our third team member's scan for EMF baseline readings in the dining room, she stopped and asked us each to stand in front of the corner bookcase. We did, and we all three reported the same sensation -- an inexplicable heavy feeling that gave each of us goosebumps. Ironically, the EMF meter registered no elevated readings in that corner at all. (We did record an EVP that said, "Help me." Alas, we didn't hear the whisper in real time but only in later analysis.)

In our initial sweep of the building, we'd encountered a cold spot in the guestroom directly above the kitchen, so we moved there next. The cold spot was still present, a column of air three feet in diameter and extending from floorboards to ceiling, and several degrees colder than the ambient air temperature outside the column. Positioning spirit boxes both inside and outside the column, we conducted a two-way conversation with a spirit identifying herself as "Leah." (Click here for a fuller account of that ghost hunt.)

That investigation provided a whole sequence of cascading Eureka! moments.

The portal is reportedly under
the redstone building on the left.

Linda Goodman's Miracle Inn
The final Eureka! moment we'll share occurred in a follow-up investigation in Cripple Creek, Colorado, and after midnight in the basement of the Miracle Inn B&B.

We'd teamed up with paranormal investigator Shaun Crusha, who has a lot cooler equipment than we do, to check out a reported spirit portal in the substructure of the building. Shaun set up an array of devices, including a laser grid pattern that aimed a hundreds of points of light into the portal, which ran the length of the basement under the house but  beginning just beyond the stairs.

Accompanying us during this investigation were the owners, Sofia Balas and Jason Barton.

In front of the portal with Shaun Crusha's
array of paranormal detection equipment

Stationed along the array of equipment, Shaun and Mark noticed several of the laser points temporarily wink out in a sequence that seemed to approach our position. Shortly afterward, both Jason and Kym felt decisive tugs on strands of hair at the tops of their heads. (The basement didn't have much clearance, but Kym was at least a foot shorter than the beams above her.)

It felt as though something had passed through the space in front of our position and joined us on "this side."

Sofia told us a psychic had described the portal as shaped like a pentagram that originated in the basement but extended up into the main levels of the B&B. Guests often report prankish hair tugs from invisible agents, so maybe those entities use the portal to pass from the Other Side to tease the residents on this side. (Click here for our research into some of those accounts.)

The tangible encounters of that evening found a place on our accumulating list of Eureka! moments over the past year, and the cumulative effects of all the events we experienced have left us with more questions than answers.

If "Eureka!" means "I found it!", we're still not sure exactly what the "it" is that we've discovered during these moments. If anything, such experiences have strengthened the resolve to continue our paranormal journey and our investigations.

* * *

WILD WEST GHOSTS: an amateur ghost hunting guide to southwest Colorado, available now as a trade paperback from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Also available as a Kindle e-book..

We also invite you to LIKE our new Facebook page for the book, where we're providing updates on readings and events as well as notices of our continuing paranormal journey and investigations.

Happy hauntings, all!

Our Best Video Paranormal Evidence - 12 months, 20 investigations

This is the third in a four-part series featuring some of the past year's best evidence from our paranormal investigations. This week we share our most intriguing video documentation.

(If you missed Part 1 on anomalous photos, click here. If you missed Part 2 on ghostly voices, click here.)

We seemed to be slow learners.

Well, at least lazy ones at first. It took us a while to realize just because nothing seemed to be happening during an investigation, that didn't mean we should let up our guard.


Ghosts don't seem to work on our timetable. (Duh.) In fact, they often seem to respond when it suits them.

We learned the hardest lesson during one of our earliest investigations, this one at the Hotel Norwood in Norwood, Colorado. At that site, we moved our inquiries a half dozen times (lots of reported hotspots at this hotel), and toward the end we got lazy in setting up our camcorder to document findings. We'd already experienced multiple encounters during the visit, including a poltergeist incident involving a cup flying off a table (not our fault we missed capturing that one since it occurred while we unpacked), a cold spot, and EVPs that repeatedly led us from one locale to another.

Hotel Norwood

By the time we made our last stop, we were tired and sloppy. Big mistake. In the final location, we didn't set up the camcorder -- just as our spirit box announced, "Flashlight," which we hurriedly pulled from the bag and switched on. At that moment our EMF meter jumped 45 fold, from a baseline of 230mG to 10,710mG! A second later, our flashlight dimmed and then completely winked out.

A stunning correlation of spirit box, EMF meter, and flashlight -- even our new batteries drained completely. And we failed to document the incident. It'd be an understatement to say we felt chagrined. We just knew we'd never experience a similar event during future investigations. Fortunately we were wrong, and many times over. In our subsequent paranormal inquiries, we took care to record what we did and what occurred at each locale.

Although we ultimately recorded to camera eight other successful flashlight experiments during our 20 investigations, below are three experiences representing some of the strongest evidence we captured of unexplained activity -- two involving flashlights and one involving a flurry of orbs around a co-investigator.

The Beaumont Hotel

The Beaumont Hotel & Spa
The proprietor told us she couldn't think of a single room or space in this hotel in Ouray, Colorado, that didn't harbor accounts of paranormal activity, and our own on-site inquiries produced results confirming her claim for the three locales we visited, including three separate and successful flashlight experiments.

We'll discuss some of our other experiences at the Beaumont in the next article, but the following video clip is a typical response we received using a flashlight. The light we used had a switch requiring a firm, deep push and "click" to engage. Notice in the background we ran our EchoVox spirit box during the experiment, set for reverberation, and you can hear the echo effect for our own queries as well as the voices produced by the box.

Flashlight Experiment at the Windsor Hotel.

Notice the above video clip includes a clear response of "No" to our query to try turning off the flashlight. But we also invited any spirits present to simply dim the light, which they could do very well, and to dramatic effect. We were also pleased by the number auditory responses this clip captured as we coaxed spirits to interact with us.

The Vintage Inn B&B

The Vintage Inn
Our investigation at this Gunnison, Colorado, B&B produced another classic flashlight experiment -- but with a startling twist we only realized on later analysis.

This investigation was different for two reasons. First, the building certainly looked the part but had no history of hauntings. We went in on a hunch because we thought it had the look and longevity of a place that ought to hold paranormal potential. And second, the owner wanted to accompany our investigation out of curiosity. We had no objections, inviting her to help set up our equipment and even inviting her to question her invisible B&B "guests."

The following video clip once again records our spirit box (this time without reverb) and allows you to hear the interaction with the voices we recorded both before and surrounding the spirit manipulation of the flashlight. Listen especially for their polite acknowledgements of our thanks for interacting with us at the end.

Flashlight Experiment at the Vintage Inn

When we analyzed this recording later that day, we discovered something that astounded us. Listen again to the above clip for the voice saying "Good" and then Kym moments later saying the same thing, this exchange occurring from 00:26 to 00:30. And in particular, pay attention to the voice inflections, which match exactly.

What may not be apparent from this exchange is that the spirit is talking under Mark's chuckle -- he was poised very close to the experiment. But Kym was on the other side of the room at the time. She couldn't hear that spirit voice, drowned out at the time by Mark's voice. (We've amplified the spirit voice at this moment in the recording to make it easier to hear.) In other words, the spirit "repeats" Kym's voice, mimicking her inflection *before* she utters her response to the the spirit saying, "Happy" five seconds earlier in a loud, clear voice.

The implications are profound, even if illogical.

Our recording leads us to conclude the spirit mimicked Kym's inflection and response but "repeated" it back before Kym's arrow of time uttered it.

We've heard other investigators report that EVP recordings have sometimes only made sense when played in reverse. Others report receiving answers to questions before investigators ask. For such occurrences to be meaningful, spirits must not be bound by our arrow of time -- a conclusion consistent with the notion they're also no longer bound to the space-time plane of existence. Do they choose the When of their interactions with us, synching to our own arrow of time so we can understand and engage with them?

Before we wax any more epistemological, let's move on to our final evidence.

Lawmen and Outlaws
Jail Museum

Lawmen and Outlaws Jail Museum
For this investigation, we teamed up with Hotchkiss Paranormal Investigators (HPI) for a lock-down at the Old Jail Museum in Cripple Creek, Colorado. We spent half the night at this site.

It was the fourth visit to the jail museum for HPI, and that team had a harrowing encounter with a malevolent spirit that actually attacked two members of the group on previous occasions. The spirit is known as "Joe," a pedophile incarcerated at the jail until his death. (Even Zac Bagans & Co. have investigated this location and interacted with Joe for their Ghost Adventures television series.)

All our previous investigations had occurred with spirits that seemed benign or, at the very worst, mischievous. We felt a bit nervous to up our game to this level of paranormal  inquiry, but we also wanted to see what our own reactions would be under such circumstances. Turned out we were up to the challenge.

The following clip records a portion of our time in the confinement cell where Joe spent much of his time while alive and, it would seem, still does now that he's dead. The camera focuses on investigator Seth Davis, one of the HPI members previously assaulted by Joe. For this session -- and the only ones present during this filmed inquiry were Seth, Kym, and Mark -- Seth donned vintage inmate clothing the museum had on hand.

Swirling orbs in the Cripple Creek's old jail museum

We finally got our orbs, and in spades. We actually captured close to 30 orbs over the next 15 minutes but decided to restrict the video clip to the beginning minutes, capturing a dozen or so in rapid succession. That's Kym's voice behind the camera. Did you notice how cocky she gets? In the end, it never even occurred to us to be nervous or apprehensive during the investigation.

* * *

Next week, we'll share findings harder to categorize -- certainly harder to document -- ghostly touches, visual scene flashes, cold spots, aromas, and our brush with a spirit portal.

WILD WEST GHOSTS: an amateur ghost hunting guide to southwest Colorado, is available now as a trade paperback from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Also available as a Kindle e-book.

We also invite you to LIKE our new Facebook page for the book, where we're providing updates as well as continuing paranormal events and investigations.

Happy hauntings, all!

Our best EVP evidence - 12 months, 20 paranormal investigations

This is the second in a four-part series featuring some of the past year's best evidence from our paranormal investigations. This week we share our most intriguing EVPs -- what some investigators and researchers refer to as "voices of the dead."

(Our focus last time was anomalous photos we captured during our investigations. If you missed that article, click here.)

EVPs -- Electronic Voice Phenomena, or voices captured by electronic means. It's not "unheard of" (forgive the pun!) to hear ghostly voices with the unaided ear, but it's only by recording such sounds that they move from hearsay and anecdote to documented evidence.

These days, two common methods of capturing EVPs are audio-only digital recording and so-called spirit boxes.(More on the latter in a moment.)

We used both methods, and with startling results.

Audio-Only EVP Recordings

We used a digital audio recorder during portions of all our investigations, conducting interviews and pausing to see if we captured any responses that that might not have been audible except when amplified later. This final necessary step was, at times, frustrating because we sometimes discovered responses that were missed opportunities for further dialog. Even more dismaying were the several occasions where we captured "Help me," which we only discovered during later analysis.

The Forest Queen Hotel

The recorded voices are sometimes so soft it's not always certain what the words are. We tended to set those aside if we both couldn't agree on the meaning. One notable exception occurred at the Forest Queen Hotel in Crested Butte, Colorado, where we conducted a session in the room where a distraught prostitute reportedly hurled herself from the window and to her death in Coal Creek in the 1880s.

The voice we captured as a digital recording sounded like three syllables -- all in the same woman's voice -- but we couldn't make out her words. They may have even been Slavic. (The mining town included several different immigrant worker pools). See what you think she might be saying:

The voice of suicide prostitute "Liz-Liz" or "Thelma"?

Another audio-only recording we captured was the single word, "Yes," but what made it memorable to us was that it came in immediate response to a question we asked about the investigative procedures we used at the time. Ironically, this event occurred in the room of another suicide, this time a woman who had taken her life in 1906 at the Windsor Hotel in Del Norte, Colorado.

The Windsor Hotel

We were uncertain at the time whether we had accidentally disrupted our flashlight or the incident was a manipulation by an unseen presence.

The EVP we later heard under amplification settled the question unequivocally for us. (You can compare this separate EVP with the video YouTube clip of the same event, called "Windsor Flashlight Experiment.")

Here's the EVP, along with the context:

 Suicide Maud Heinz clarifies her role in the investigation

Even though we captured several other audio-only EVPs during our investigations, the above two instances
intrigued us the most.

Julia

Fariplay Hotel

Still, we have to mention just one more, an EVP we captured at the Fairplay Hotel of a prostitute named "Julia" (yet another suicide), reported to dance in the hallways at night. We conducted an audio-only session in her former room, where Mark asked her to interact with us. A very faint woman's voice told him, "I don't want to f**k with you." Guess Mark wasn't her type! The EVP is so low you need headphones and it doesn't compress well to video, so we haven't uploaded it to share. But it remains one of our favorites.

But it was through our spirit box-generated EVPs that we obtained more reliable auditory volume as well as more frequent recordings. Read on!

Spirit Box EVPs
Many spirit boxes are electronic devices configured to scan random radio frequencies (RF). The theory is that  spirits can pick out and share RF words appropriate for the conversation at hand. But many of the hotels we visited have limited -- and in one instance, no -- radio reception.

Although we tested a number of spirit boxes, the EchoVox provided the best results we obtained during our investigations. We really liked this device because it doesn't use RF at all, instead generating random sounds rather than words, which makes intelligible responses all the more remarkable. We received not only words from this spirit box but also the occasional sentence!

All EVP links we share below were generated with the EchoVox.

On later analysis of our various recordings, we noticed two recurring patterns that interested us:

1. EVPs that named individuals
2. EVPs that participated in contextual conversations

We became accustomed to spirit box voices calling us out by name -- even before we started introducing ourselves at the beginning of EVP sessions for unseen presences. For example, during our investigation at the Windsor (but across the hall from Maud Heinz's room), we recorded the following request from spirits to give them more time to answer:

Not always a need for introductions, it seems

At many of the other hotels, we captured the names of individuals present during the investigation -- or else the names of individuals we were trying to contact. For example, when we visited the Spruce Lodge in South Fork, we received an EVP of "Dee," and at the Linda Goodman Miracle Inn in Cripple Creek an EVP of "Sofia" -- the names of the two respective owners of those inns. And when we investigated the Creede Hotel in Creede, Colorado, we recorded EVPs of both "Alice" (in Poker Alice's former room) and "Bob"

Creede Hotel

(possibly Bob Ford, Jesse James's killer, who was later gunned down in a saloon while still living at the hotel). You can visit our YouTube Channel to listen to those clips.

One recurring EVP theme we noticed in retrospect to the year's investigations was the number of actual interactive conversations we recorded. A good example occurred, again, at the Creede Hotel. For this session, we used a mode of the EchoVox that boosts random sound generation, creating a burst of sounds that takes later manipulation to slow down and separate into distinct voices. Listen to the logical flow of the following conversation which includes a burst:

One of our conversations with EVPs

Hotel St. Nicholas

We wonder, as we reviewed some of our findings, why we weren't more unnerved at the time by some of the conversations we recorded.

For example, the Hotel St. Nichlas in Cripple Creek was a former Sisters of Mercy hospital and where we conducted one session in the operating-room-turned-guestroom.

A number of EVPs in that room almost sounded like conversations taking place as though we only eavesdropped. One somewhat chilling exchange involved discussion of some unnamed killing:

EVP from former hospital's operating room, now a guestroom

So far as our collective EVPs are concerned, we suppose it might be a bit misleading to call the above samplings our "Best Evidence." Perhaps better to call them "Representative Evidence" since we captured several of similar quality at the various establishments.

Nonetheless, we became increasingly impressed with spirit box EVPs because they so often provided voices that seemed spot on for context and specifics.

* * *

Next week, we'll share the evidence that impressed us most of all -- the experiments we conducted where unseen presences multiple times responded not only by voice but also by physical deeds.

WILD WEST GHOSTS: an amateur ghost hunting guide to southwest Colorado is available now as a trade paperback from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Also available as a Kindle e-book.

We also invite you to LIKE our new Facebook page for the book, where we're inviting other paranormal colleagues to also share their own experiences and evidence each week.

Happy hauntings, all!

Twelve months, 20 paranormal investigations - our best evidence

This is the first in a four-part series on our findings for WILD WEST GHOSTS, available now as a trade paperback from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. Also available as a Kindle e-book.

* * *

Twelve months and twenty investigations later – what did we come away with, what conclusions have we drawn, and do we as authors believe in ghosts? 

Last question first: Kinda, not at first, maybe, sometimes, and now more baffled than ever when we try to maintain our skepticism.

Our paranormal project began as a book on haunted hotels in Colorado, and we approached the project as trained investigative journalists with an assignment from our publisher.

Sure, we were interested in the topic. After all, we once lived in a haunted house for nine years, and we’d encountered plenty of strange activity. (See our earlier blog on that experience.) It’s amazing how much the rational mind can justify in the aftermath of anomalous events.

Our haunted house

But here we were: researching, investigating, and writing about ghosts. Other people's ghosts – well, mostly, since we decided to include in the book our own paranormal investigations at each establishment.

Drawing on our formal forensic training as field investigators for MUFON (but that's another story!), we decided to approach investigations using an Instrumental Trans-Communication (ITC) protocol –utilizing instruments to register fluctuations in electromagnetic field readings at each site, to record electronic voice phenomena, and to videotape interactions we experienced using a flashlight.

In the process, we decided to test and use a number of so-called spirit boxes, an experimental technology only a dozen or so years old and akin to high-tech Ouija Boards designed for 21^st-Century users. Plus, we tried to document much of our experience by camcorder.

Now, only a month away from the publication of Wild West Ghosts – an amateur ghost hunting guide to Haunted Hotels in southwest Colorado, it’s time to stake stock of the best evidence we collected during a score of investigations.

And it’s time to ask YOU to be the judge of what we found out.

We’re going to share four kinds of experience:

1. Photographic evidence
2. EVPs captured by audio-only digital recordings and by spirit boxes
3. Video evidence recording interactions and responses
4. Other sensory encounters we experienced but can’t explain

  For the remainder of this article, we offer several puzzling photographic exhibits.

Our Photographic Evidence

During our year of investigations, we captured three pictures that have us scratching our heads. The first was of an orb.

We’ve always had orb envy.

Lots of folks we know – both friends and paranormal colleagues – have really good luck in capturing orbs. Not us. Except during our first serious investigation. We were in the courthouse in Virginia City, Montana, in the original 1880s holding cells in the building’s basement. Missy, the on-duty dispatcher/jailer, was showing us around and letting us take readings and recordings during our initial sweep of the facility.

This orb followed the jailer
through several photos

In the basement we took a whole range of still frames using a Canon PowerShot S3 IS digital camera. But it wasn’t until we returned to base that we discovered several frames contained luminous spheres – and each time right behind Missy. We took a variety of shots from different perspectives and even some from the same perspective. But only those that also included Missy captured these orbs. 

When we later showed her the photos, she confided she regularly has the feeling someone (or something) is right behind her as she makes her rounds. When she gets that sense, she told us she sometimes turns around abruptly to see who’s following her, but she’s always alone. Or maybe not.

These have been the only anomalous orbs we’ve captured on stills but not the only anomalies our cameras caught.

During one of our earliest investigations for the book, we visited the Twin Lakes Inn in the village of Twin Lakes, Colorado, and Kym took a number of photos that contained blurry streaks. At the time, we thought nothing of it. But they were odd. They looked like motion blurs, sometimes with a single slanted striation running across the picture but others with five or six parallel streaks. However, the backgrounds were always in sharp focus. This really puzzled Kym since she’s been a long-time photojournalist and didn’t recall even taking most of those dozen or so frames.

Still, we were each trying out cameras on our two new tablets at the time, and she dismissed her photos as flawed – and deleted them! At the time it didn’t occur to us that these images might constitute “evidence.” Talk about N00bs. Sheesh. We still kick ourselves for deleting those pictures.

... in the "stretched" image?

Is that a figure in the
green image above?
And a face ...

However, Mark managed to capture an anomalous image on his tablet at that same inn but also not on purpose. It was days after the investigation that he noticed two frames that seemed odd, and for three reasons.

First, he also didn’t remember snapping either of them since they were focused on an uninteresting edge of a stripped-down bed in a room during our initial tour of the inn. In fact, it wasn’t even a room we decided to investigate.

Second, the pictures were out of sequence. Like most cameras, it logs and stores photos in the same sequence they’re taken. Always. But these two pictures were at the very beginning of the camera’s memory storage. That simply shouldn’t happen. The two pics were also only a fraction of the file size of every other picture that camera has taken. (We’re talking 45k files where all the others are the standard size of at least a meg each.)

One of the pictures shows only the corner of the mattress and part of the black frame of the wrought-iron headboard. But the other picture – for the third and oddest reason – includes a vertical swatch or strip of green superimposed over the edge of the bedboard. There seemed to be some sort of image in the green swatch, so we stretched it for a better look. The image resembles a person to us.

We’re not sure we’d have scrutinized the picture so closely had it not been for the unusual circumstances of capturing and storing this picture. Make of it what you will.

Our final anomaly on film occurred at the Spruce Lodge in South Fork, Colorado. We were conducting EVP sessions in a room on one end of the lodge’s second floor. Right before we went inside, we snapped a picture of a really cool looking mannequin in period dress posed at the end of the hall. All the while, we had the door open, not ten  feet from the mannequin.

Note parasol up

Note parasol down

When we packed up our gear and walked out the door, the parasol that had been in the mannequin’s hand now lay on the floor nearby. This photo capture is less an anomaly than a record of what we saw. The flooring was hardwood, which made for distinctive echoes with every footfall.

We never heard the parasol move or fall, and we were only a few feet away. But the lodge has repeated reports of objects moving on all three floors of the main lodge.

* * *

Next week, we move on to highlights of our EVP sessions, with YouTube links that document some of the more startling interactions we recorded during our year of investigations.