Spirit Hunters

Stanley Morganstein
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Spirit Hunters

          Darkness engulphed us when we turned off the lights. I setup a camera in the top floor of the hotel, where reports of spirits, and paranormal phenomena occurred. I began to walk the hallways, and rooms with my thermometer, and EVP device. The latter to record voices of spirits, or ghosts in answer to questions. I'm a paranormal investigator with a Doctorate in Physics. You may ask what would a physicist be doing investigating ghosts! How scientific could this investigation be? Why would I be interested in diverging from Physics the most scientific of the sciences?
          To answer your first question I had several experiences as a teenager, and adult that indicates paranormal phenomena. As a teenager I became interested in reading Henry James' "Turn of the Screw." This short story recounts an experience of a lady who was hired to watch children of a wealthy gentleman. She began to sense that these children acted strangely, or spoke about unusual experiences. When she requested further explanation of these strange behaviors from the maid, the lady was reticent to elucidate. She eventually was shocked by following the boy to a location where she actually viewed a man talking to the boy, which she later discovered was dead. The dead man was a boyfriend of a previous matron who had a suspicious personality. The boyfriend and this matron had an illicit relationship, with horror to the new matron, given the children were involved. Furthermore, the apparitions still entrapped the children, specifically the boy in their illicit affair as ghosts. Needless to say the lady became anxious, and began to panic about what danger the children were in! She then proceeded to separate the boy from the ghost before he would be killed!
          As I read this story and other Henry James' Ghost stories I happened to drift off to sleep. I was abruptly woken by a slap in my face. Not only was this a shock, but also a mystery. I got up from the coach I was awoken from, and investigated the rooms of my house in which my parents also lived! To my surprise nobody was there! Was this a dreamlike slap that awoke me, or was this a spirit or ghost that was not happy with the stories I was reading? This was my first, but not the last experience with the paranormal. Perhaps this led me to science to investigate with the scientific method phenomena that were not intuitive!
I opened a door to the room that a ghost of a suicidal woman was to suppose to have woken hotel guests from sleep to menace them at the foot of their bed. Shake their bed, and emit strange sounds that hurt, or burned their ears and body! "Is anyone here," I asked to record an EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena). An EVP is an electronic device that records paranormal voices that are not heard directly! I heard nothing, as I scanned the room with my infrared camera. "Hello, we are not here to cause you pain! Why did you commit suicide," I asked. Just at that moment my partner Harriet Grow entered the room.
          "I was told that we should be partners in any investigation," said Harriet, who looked sheepish given this was her first investigation.
          "What's that near the window?" I asked as a shadow passed by blocking the outside illumination.
          My second experience occurred as I road on a subway train that passed by a cemetery, in the summer. The air-conditioning was on at a minimal level. I looked out at the cemetery as the train passed by. All at once a mist rose up from one of the seats and moved toward the subway doors as the train stopped. The doors opened and the mist appeared to exit. The doors closed, as the train jerked forward. I looked out the window and the mist was not there.
          "The thermal has just jumped 10 degrees to 40," said Harriet as she shuddered. I filmed the shadow with my infrared camera. It was a hot area!
          "Why did you hang yourself, out the window," I asked.
          "I'm scared," said Harriet. Seeing the spirit shook her.
          My third experience occurred on another train. As I sat on the train I looked quickly to my peripheral view to see a woman with a pocked marked face standing near the door. I looked at my book, and glanced up to see that the woman was gone. Sometime after I was on the train when a woman sat down opposite to me, near the doorway. Her face was pock marked.
          After the encounter Harriet and I left the suicide room.
          Our walkies began to speak, "Anything to report," asked the lead investigator.
          "Yes Will, we got an image on the infrared camera," I said. "In the suicide room."
          "I felt nauseous in that room," said Harriett.
          We walked in the narrow hallway to the pool area. The water appeared to be wavy, but no wind was evident.
          "Do you see those waves?" asked Harriett with a whisper so low, that I thought she was an EVP.
          Suddenly the waves go violent and Harriett jumped back only to slip on the water at the side of the pool, the result was that she slid closer to the pool. As she tried to crawl back a hand came out of the pool and pulled her in.
          "Please...help...someone ....nooooo...is pulling me into ...pool...Vic...help me."
          I ran to the edge of the pool and grabbed Harriett's shoulders, and tried to pull her back from the pool, by her armpits. But the shadow apparition was too powerful. Harriett slipped out of my hands. Given I was an excellent swimmer, I decided to dive into the pool to rescue Harriett. "Don't worry I'm coming to help you!"
          As Harriett gulped water, as she flayed with her hands and kicked with her feet, I dived into the pool. I swam toward her with a strong stroke covering the distance in a matter of minutes. Then I noticed that as I swam closer she seemed further away, as if some other dimensional phenomena occurred.
          As Harriett went below the surface, I dived below to try to save her from drowning. Under water the blackness engulphed me as Harriett receded from my vision. Was this distortion of the light in water, or was Harriett taken by some shadow from another dimension, or time?
          As I swam toward where I thought she was I noticed a glare. She was being sucked into a vortex of light and water that had a glow like an entrance to another reality. I swam toward the glowing opening and leaped into another dimension.
          Water dripped from my body, as a bright light shown in my vision. I took a breath of air with relief. My breath was gone. To my left was Harriett. She was stunned, or in some hypnotic trance. Opposite her was a creature that I cannot easily describe. It was nonhuman or so different than human beings that similar characteristics were not evident. It had no mouth, with two eyes on the side of its head. With four arms it was attaching a device to Harriett's skull. I smelled a slimy odor coming from the creature.
          "Who are you," I asked with some hesitation. Would this creature answer me? Would I understand it?
          "We are Noonwon," said the creature. "We...study...your language...no Enlish."
          "Why did you take us?" I asked.
          "We want...no...your...race," said the creature as one of its snake-like legs moved toward me.
          I almost jumped out of my skin, as one of those slimy legs raped around my waist. The odor was so intense that I almost fainted from the stench. As it touched me I felt a slight pain that was almost chronic.
          A sound began to increase, from somewhere. It started as a low prickly sound that became louder, until I realized that Harriet was screaming! Was this the screaming woman that people have heard in the hotel? Could the screaming be from these dimensional creatures that capture people to study them? Was this some encounter of the third kind, where people lose their memory of events for hours?
          "Yayayayahhhhhhh.....YAYAYALYAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH."
          The sound was deafening as Harriett dematerialized from my eyes. I then felt a magnetic, and electric field effect as the otherworldly room with its eerie displays and liquid controls evaporated before my eyes.
          I floated to the surface of the water to see Harriett standing by the side of the pool. "What happened to you," she asked with moderate concern. "Did you just jump in for a swim with your clothes on?"
          Her clothes were dry, and her face was contorted in a strange smile. "I always knew you must be crazy, since you never looked at me directly." She moved side to side as if to show off her figure and long black hair. This was not like her personality of a quiet, inexperienced young woman, but like some transformation occurred.
          "We have a job to do," I said. "We are not supposed to have relationships as investigators!"
          "I was only kidding, silly," she laughed giddily. Then she left. We never saw again!
          I thought after that experience, she might have had a close encounter that she needed hypnotic regression to discover missing time. I remembered what happened, but I could not tell that experience to the other Spirit Hunters. What evidence would I have to validate my experience. Then I thought about my EVP recorder, and turned it on.
          ""We are Noonwon ...we...study...your language...no Enlish."

The End