Messages from the "Other Side" - but who are we talking to?

The past year of paranormal investigations has become a paradigm-shifter for us, but we didn't realize the Other Side would start initiating contact with us!

(This is the final article in a three-part series on "When the Other Side contacts YOU!" If you missed part one, click here. If you missed part two, click here.)

Last week, we shared a strange photo that showed up on Mark's camera after an investigation at the Twin Lakes Inn in Twin Lakes, Colo. -- but he didn't take this photo. The images intrigued us because closer examination revealed several faces, particularly animal heads. We set the anomalous photo aside and continued our analyses of the many other findings we had accumulated for our book Wild West Ghosts.

Whoever -- or whatever -- had sent us that photo wouldn't be ignored.

The next conversation?

This past spring the photo reappeared, this time showing up on Kym's camera. But that wasn't the strangest part.

To the left, you see the photo from Mark's camera. To the right, you see the version that later appeared on Kym's.

It's clearly the same composition, but the newer version is, well, even stranger, and for a number of reasons we've explored in recent months. The most obvious anomaly is that it seems to have captured the reflection of a flash. But Kym didn't take it; neither of us did. It simply showed up this way. Okaaaaay.

Set that observation aside for a moment. We'll come back to it.

Next, we showed the new version to a friend who has much more experience with "spirit photography." She played with the contrast and reversed the photo to see what she could come up with. (She doesn't use fancy photo editing software, by the way, just simple freeware designed to clean up photos minimally.)

Her tinkering revealed this image:

The large semicircle on the left side is the reverse of the semicircular iron backboard grate of the bed just above the flash. If you take a few moments to scan and inspect this close-up, you should be able to see a number of faces. Start with the profile of the bearded man's head looking to your left in the upper right corner.

Then find the face looking pretty much straight on in the very center of the picture.

Next, try to ignore the centered face and re-see the "cut off" top of his head as part of the larger figure of a woman. The tip of the man's nose is her chin, the darkened cut-off are eyes looking to the right, with her cheekbone defined on the right just below the cut-off. The man's eye becomes her mouth and his eyebrow becomes the tip of her nose. The bottom of his jaw becomes a necklace or collar, with her shoulder extending along the black space descending to the lower right in the photo.

These kinds of superimposed images are similar to the green boxer shown in the previous article that also has a cat forming the right side of the dog image (by re-seeing the dog's right eye as the cat's left eye.)

Could all of this be mere pareidolia (the mind perceiving images where none exists)? Of course, and we continue to ask ourselves that question.

But that solution isn't compelling to us because of the unexplained origins of the two original photos. Someone -- or something -- sent them to us, presumably with intent.

If another investigator had shown us these images, we'd feel dubious. No offense if we've already broken your willing suspension of disbelief. All we can do is assure you these photos are genuine, playing only with  contrast and color values to highlight what seems to be there already.

Okay, we're working our way back to the flash but with one more important observation along the way.

Look again at the flash picture earlier in this article, and this time notice the smeared lines running left from the green swatch toward the flash. Over the green swatch there appears to be a backwards capital "S" -- in fact, we think that's what it is.

To the right is a close-up of that portion of the photo, reversed and false-color-altered to enhance the "scrawl." The capped "S" might be the word "Send." And other words, or at least letters, appear above and to the left of that "S." We're open to suggestions.

We're still considering what the next step should be, and we're considering the idea of writing our own scrawl on the photo and taking a picture to see if it comes back altered again.

In any event, this latest series of photo-ITC encounters has led us to a number of tentative observations:

1. The faces and images embedded in these photos suggest a sophisticated level of optical manipulation, let alone the ability to generate and implant photos on our cameras. This ability seems consistent with the history of others' reported ITC phenomena as well as our own successes in capturing audio and video recordings.
2. Both the flash and the scrawl seem to have been generated from the perspective of the Other Side -- remember we had to reverse the image to see writing, which suggests it was written *from* the Other Side and sent directly to us.
3. We may have to rethink what constitutes the "Other Side." Or at least we may be oversimplifying what constitutes the Other Side. Perhaps paranormal encounters produce results from more than one origin. Certainly, the photos we received suggest some sort of technology beyond the means of our assumption that we're only dealing with etheric, disembodies entities (i.e., ghosts or spirits).

Clearly, we got attention of someone or something, and they decided to contact us after our initial investigations. But who or what is the source of these communications?

Many of our audio-only digital recordings as well as the ghost box EVP we captured seem contextually consistent with our intended "ghost hunt" findings. However, we also seem to have established some sort of conversation that reaches outside the paradigm we assumed we were investigating.

We invite your comments and observations. We don't have answers to explain all the evidence our journey has uncovered.

Reality is undoubtedly much more complex and fantastic than we can even imagine.

* * *

We're still having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either your own armchair musings or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

Unsolicited Messages from the OTHER SIDE

The past year of paranormal investigations has become a paradigm-shifter for us, but we didn't realize the Other Side would start initiating contact with us!

(This is the second article in a three-part series on "When the Other Side contacts YOU!" If you missed part one, click here.)

The most startling encounter occurred through ITC (Instrumental TransCommunication). The interaction  described below began while researching WILD WEST GHOSTS, but the "conversation"  has continued since the publication of the book.

Read on.

In a world defined by anomalous experiences -- EVP, flashlight conversations, invisible footfalls, cold spots, ghostly touches, and all the things we've encountered on our journey -- the following "correspondence" may be the most anomalous of all.

One of the investigations we conducted for our book Wild West Ghosts occurred at the Twin Lakes Inn in Twin Lakes, Colo. The building harbors all sorts of supernatural events, including full-bodied apparitions -- two of these manifesting during a Halloween seance! (Here's the link to our investigation, and here's the link we collected about others' encounters.)

Weeks later Mark noticed two photos of the Twin Lakes premises he didn't recall taking. For one thing, the pics occurred at the very beginning of the camera's storage, separated from the other photos of Twin Lakes and way out of sequence of absolutely every other ordered shot recorded digitally for the entire haunted hotels project. The second anomaly about these two pictures was that the file size of each was only 50k; all the other pictures on the camera were closer to a meg each.

Odd.

But the biggest anomaly was that one of these two photos -- and they
were of the same boring scene -- included a vertical green swatch that seemed to have a figure in it. What was going on?

We'd had other photo anomalies during our visit to the Twin Lakes as well. Kym's camera had recorded a number of slanted and colored streaks mixed in with some of her other photos in the building. The main subjects in each of these photo compositions were in sharp focus, but the slanted streaks all looked like motion blurs. It was a new camera and we both decided these were defective shots, and so she eliminated them.

Bad decision! 

The Twin Lakes was one of our earliest investigations, and only later did we learn that photo aberrations are still part of investigative documentation. On a more recent occasion, we've captured similar streaks. These occurred in only one of several sequential shots from the same camera position and under the same lighting. Kym took several shots because her subject was a cat, which proved an uncooperative subject and kept turning its head. Nonetheless, she captured the same sort of colored streaks during the feline photo shot that we had observed in her pictures at the Twin Lakes. So this pic provides an idea of what we captured during the Twin Lakes investigation.

A friend of Kym's, who has analyzed many paranormal photographs, told us the green light in the photo was intended to convey friendliness. She also told us to take a closer look at the green swatch in particular. Only months later did we take the time, during our more careful analysis of all the data we had collected on the project.

To our surprise, the top of the green swatch seemed to display a face.
More surprising, however, atop that face is the head of what appears to be a dog, perhaps a boxer. To the left is an enlargement of the green swatch, showing the boxer looking slightly to the left of frame.

You might have to move back from the screen to see the image(s) more clearly. The more we studied this photo, other animal faces emerged, , possibly cat heads as well.

Who sent us this picture, and why? And who are these figures? We have no answers at this point. In fact, we chalked it up to one more intriguing anomaly of our investigations and moved on to other parts of our post-investigation analysis.

It wasn't until an additional variant image of the same mysterious (larger green swatch) photo popped up -- this time on Kym's camera (recall the the original photo anomaly occurred on Mark's camera) -- that we realized someone, or something, was still trying to contact us.

This time there was no mistaking the intention because the photo now contained writing across the front of the frame. And the focus of the final article in this three-part series.

* * *

We're having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!

When the Other Side contacts YOU!

When we started trying to contact the Other Side, we didn't realize some of "them" would start initiating contact with us!

The past year of paranormal investigations has become a paradigm-shifter for us, given the wide range of encounters we've experienced and the considerable evidence we've collected. But we've also had a number of interactions we didn't expect. Some of these more startling encounters have occurred through ITC (Instrumental TransCommunication), others through less conventional means.

Some interactions occurred during research for WILD WEST GHOSTS while others have developed since the publication of the book.

Our first inkling we weren't entirely in control of our investigations began when entities started referring to us by our first names. (These instances began -- but continued -- before other researchers suggested we use the protocol of introducing ourselves at the start of all our sessions.)

 How do they know?

These interactions tended to startle us at first, but by no means did they freak us out. In fact, we got used to the salutations. However, we should have realized they -- whoever "they" are -- know more about us than we know about them. Are we an open book, or do they have "notes" and somebody forgot to copy us in? Either way, it's clear that many times entities are fully aware of who we are and what we're doing even at the onset of an investigation.

In fact, sometimes they seem to know about us even before we arrive! Read on.

When Hotchkiss Paranormal Investigators (HPI) invited us to team up with them for an investigation in Cripple Creek, Colo., the group had already arranged for an overnight lock-down in the Outlaws and Lawmen Jail Museum. We knew the facility was reputed to be the residence for a nasty entity known as "Joe," a pedophile who had died while incarcerated there. We decided the opportunity could up our game with a different sort of paranormal activity than our haunted hotel experiences had provided.

When we arrived, we were psyched to spend time in the confinement cell where Joe seems to be at his nastiest. But our first watch turned out to be on the third floor of the building, which to our surprise had also served as a sort of part-time orphanage.

We saw pictures on that third floor of the matron in charge of the children, an African-American woman named Amy. We managed to conduct successful interactions with her through both our ghost box and a flashlight session. (See our article on that investigation here.)

Then Kym decided to visit the orphanage section of the facility and to invite any child spirits to play with her in their bunk-bed room. Nothing seemed to come of her invitation, and she felt sad for them and hoped they were well.

A couple of days after we returned home, we shared the particulars of the investigation with our daughter. She told us she'd had a dream the night before we left for Cripple Creek in which an African-American woman sat at our daughter's kitchen table and told her the children were looking forward to our visit.

She thought nothing of the dream -- until we told her about the unexpected use of the jail we discovered once we arrived.

In some sense, the spirits seemed to know we were coming, even though *we* didn't know why we were (really) coming! Even more peculiar was how they knew in advance and clearly understood we would be part of the different investigative team who had made all the arrangements.

But the name-calling and the dream invitation have not been our strangest encounters, not by a long shot. What happened next has extended over several months and is still ongoing -- the subject of the next article.

* * *

We're having as much fun analyzing the results of our investigations over the past year as we did conducting those investigations for our book, WILD WEST GHOSTS.

There are puzzling experiences and encounters aplenty out there, and you just may want to pick up a copy of the book for either armchair musings of your own or else as a guide for some of your own expeditions into the fascinating world of the paranormal.

You can pick up the book as either an e-read or a trade paperback. Visit our Website for the links.

In the meantime, happy hunting!