Ghosts of Flight 401 - The official airline of the paranormal

The most extraordinary and credible research into the ghost phenomenon ever documented is the so-called "Ghosts of Flight 401." On December of 1972, an Eastern Airlines Tri-Star jetliner, Flight 401, crashed into a Florida swamp. The pilot, Bob Loft (on the left), and flight engineer Don Repo (on the right), were two of the 101 people who perished in the air crash. Not long after the crash, the ghosts of Loft and Repo were seen on more than twenty occasions by crew members on other Eastern Tri-Stars, especially those planes which had been fitted with parts salvaged from the Flight 401 wreckage. The apparitions of Loft and Repo were invariably described as being extremely lifelike. They were not only reported by people who had known Loft and Repo, but their ghosts were also subsequently identified from photographs by people who had not known Loft and Repo.

The strange tales of the ghostly airmen of Flight of 401 circulated in the airline community. An account of the paranormal happenings even appeared in a 1974 US Flight Safety Foundation's newsletter. John G. Fuller, the best-selling author of The Ghost of Flight 401, carried out an exhaustive investigation into the hauntings with the aid of several cautious airline personnel. A mass of compelling testimony was produced as a result. The website Flight 401 – The Black Box Story provides an account of the crash as told using material from the Black Box. It highlights how poor cockpit resource management caused a tiny light bulb to distract the pilots and bring down a Tristar jetliner.

The cause of the crash was found to be a couple of minor design faults in the controls, and Lockheed rapidly corrected them. However, it was after some of the undamaged parts of the aircraft were subsequently recycled onto other planes that the mysterious incidents began to be reported. Although Eastern Airlines refuses to discuss the matter, researchers have interviewed numerous individuals claiming to have encountered the ill-fated pair on L-1011s. As the reports would have it, Loft and Repo have devoted their after-lives to watching over the passengers and crew of these Lockheed passenger planes.

Many of the testimonies are extremely persuasive. Many come from people in highly responsible positions: pilots, flight officers, even a vice president of Eastern Airlines, who allegedly spoke with a captain he assumed was in charge of the flight, before recognizing him as the late Loft. 

Ghosts of Flight 401 - The official airline of the paranormal

Supernatural events ‘haunt’ local museum

By JEFF M. HARDISON
jhardison@lakecityreporter.com

At the start of the last week’s Quilt Walk, some curtains appeared to have been moved at the Lake City-Columbia County Museum, 157 SE Hernando Ave.

This is not earth-shattering news, but it harkens back to stories of a ghost in the house. Some past and present museum docents give credit to such incidents to a former resident of the house.

“Cora has been here,” said Museum President Pat McAlhany said as she pointed to the curtains. She then told the story of the museum’s ghost.

Whether moving curtains, plates or an extremely heavy bookcase is supernatural or just physics of an old structure can be debated until the end of time.

For some individuals, however, these occurrences are the work of a particular spirit.

The majority of the house where the museum sits today was built in the late 1870s, McAlhany said. There was a young lady named Cora Vinzant who was from High Springs. She stayed with family members in the house while she attended Lake City Institute.

“The night before she was to graduate,” McAlhany said, “Cora died from yellow fever.”

Vinzant died on May 26, 1892, according to an original hand-carried announcement of the day, which is at the museum in a scrapbook.

Opening curtains in one room on the second floor of the museum at some time between the night of March 26 and the morning of March 27 is among the less spectacular feats attributed to Cora.

The ghost is given credit for moving very heavy furniture too.

Four people left the museum at 9 p.m. on the Thursday before the 2008 Quilt Walk, McAlhany said. They returned at 8 a.m. on Friday.

In those 11 hours, a bookshelf with 300 books on it somehow had moved to another room and was sitting at a 45-degree angle, Karen Cross said. She was among those who discovered it.

“And there were no scratches on the (wooden) floor from it being moved,” Cross said, “until two of us moved it back.”

Jerry Horton said Cora gave him a start a few weeks ago.

“I was showing a visitor this display case,” Horton said. “This Bible here went in slow motion and fell face down. It was May Vinzant’s Bible. She lived here from 1881 until 1981. She died at the age of 102 or 103.”

That Bible was sitting on a carrier similar to those used for placing collectible baseballs, so they will sit on a shelf.

That same glass display case offered another opportunity for Cora to exhibit a prank, McAlhany said.

One day, there were four people sitting in the same room as the dispay case, she said. Its door four times, with a person having closed it each time. There was no person walking on the outside porch or making enough movement in the room or the house to shake the floor.

Read complete story at http://www.lakecityreporter.com/articles/2009/04/05/community/life/doc49d586a76196d085711916.txt

Ghost hunters out for answers

Group explores paranormal and hopes to save Fort Wayne building
By Kevin Leininger
of The News-Sentinel

As a boy growing up in Arkansas, Rob Stone thought the old woman he saw at his grandparents' farmhouse was just an “imaginary friend” - until a photograph of his dead great-grandmother revealed a strikingly similar appearance between the two.

As a teenager in Fort Wayne, Paul Walter had a similarly weird experience: the vision of a woman wearing rimless glasses and a dress, who he at first thought was his grandmother - who was in another room at the time. Both got goose bumps when the dress Walters described turned out to resemble his great-grandmother's burial gown.

Youthful fantasies? Memories twisted by time? Bad dreams? Stone and Walter can't say for sure, which is why they and several other local “ghost hunters” have formed an organization designed to disprove or verify the existence of things that go bump in the night.

In the process, they hope to help save one of Fort Wayne's unique but endangered architectural treasures that may - or may not - have ghost stories of its own to tell.

“All of us are active in our community; one guy is an engineer, some of us are in manufacturing or own (a) business. We want people who want to get to the bottom of these experiences,” said Stone, 41. As spokesman for In Nomine Paranormal Research, he doesn't want his 7-month-old organization's serious, methodical search for answers to be hijacked by thrill-seekers whose knowledge of paranormal research is limited to movies like “Ghostbusters.”

“It's neat to try to document the unexplainable. It's a debunking process,” said Walter, 28, explaining that group members use technology to search for answers that often defy human senses and reason.

The group, which was created when like-minded people discovered each other on the Internet, uses devices to detect abnormal electro-magnetic levels and also uses audio and visual equipment in an attempt to record … well, something.


Stone, who administers the information technologies network at Lincoln Foodservice in Fort Wayne, said the quest has taken the 10-member group to an old house in Sturgis, Mich., an old hotel in Sandusky, Ohio, and, more recently, to Fort Wayne's Masonic Temple, which has been the scene of several unexplained events and will host the group's first paranormal conference in May.

The conference will feature sessions on demonology, exorcism and ghost-hunting; presentations of personal paranormal experiences; a four-hour ghost hunt in the Temple; and other lectures. Proceeds will go to the Temple's preservation fund.

As Masons, Stone and Walter are very familiar with the eight-story temple that has stood at 216 E. Washington Blvd. since 1923 but has fallen on hard times in recent years because of soaring maintenance and utility costs and declining membership.

They have also become familiar with several oddities they cannot yet explain, including shadowy forms moving through doorways and elevated electro-magnetic levels, especially near a fifth-floor conference room and trophy case.

As with the group's other investigations, the existence of paranormal activity has not been conclusively documented at the Temple. But Stone said many “rational” explanations for the odd energy readings have been refuted, such as the presence of electrical wires and circuit boxes - a potentially disappointing but necessary step toward proving the existence of paranormal activity.

Stone said his group's ghost-hunting, counseling and related services are free to anyone who has experienced the inexplicable and is seeking answers.

The group also plans to explore local ghostly legends such as the story of the so-called “Waynedale Witch,” a 27-year-old woman murdered in 1965, doing whatever is possible to separate fact from fancy.

What drives the 10 members of In Nomine (Latin for “In the name of”)?

“For me, it's mostly scientific,” Stone said. “But it's also religious. Most of our members are Christian, but we also have one pagan. They taught us in Sunday school that you die and go to heaven. Why are (spirits) still here?

“We feel like we're meeting a need. Not everybody takes this as seriously as we do.”

As Stone, Walter and I spoke in the Temple's partially darkened, cavernous social room, a series of loud clanks came out of nowhere.

Ghosts?

“The furnace,” Stone said.

Sourced from http://www.news-sentinel.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090205/NEWS/902050316/0/FRONTPAGE

Unsolved Mysteries of Ouija Board - Learn how to use Ouija Board

MENTION THE USE of a Ouija board to a paranormal research group these days and you’ll get a lot of head shaking and statements about “opening portals” and “demonic entities”. Mention it to religious fundamentalists and you’ll practically see them shudder and back away on shaky legs, as if the board was created by Satan himself as a means of enslaving human souls.

How did the Ouija board and similar “talking boards” get this reputation? Is it deserved? How is it different than other methods of spirit communication?

EVIL? SAYS WHO?

The talking board has been around for well over 100 years. Its most popular incarnation today is the Ouija board, marketed by Hasbro. There have been many editions over the years and several imitators, but the concept is always the same: a board on which are printed letters and numbers; a planchette or pointer that spells out answers to questions when the users place their fingertips on it.

Marketed as a toy, the Ouija has been a best-seller for decades. When I was a kid, it was seen as a harmless, if mysterious and somewhat spooky diversion. It was especially used around the Halloween season when thoughts turn to ghosts and the unknown. We never took it very seriously, however. If it did spell out answers, each user suspected the other of making the pointer do it... or maybe – just maybe – it was moved by g-g-g-ghosts! But we never had the notion that it was controlled by demons.

This seems to be a relatively new idea. Where did this literal demonization of the Ouija board come from? I can’t say with 100 percent certainty, but I think this idea came from (or at least was popularized by) The Exorcist, both the book and the movie. In this work of fiction, pre-teen Regan tells her mother she’s been using the Ouija board by herself, conversing with someone named Captain Howdy. Shortly thereafter, she becomes possessed by the Devil.

Subsequent movies such as Witchboard, The Craft, and others further promoted the idea that the Ouija was a conduit to dark forces. Previous to these Hollywood productions, the Ouija was not generally regarded in this way. But the idea was also latched onto by many Christian fundamentalists, who tend to consider just about anything they don’t agree with as the work of Satan.

Then many paranormal researchers also came around to this way of thinking, but I've never come across any convincing evidence that would lead to this position. Yes, we’ve all heard the horror stories from people who claim to have serious negative experiences with the board. (In fact, you can read some of them in this site’s Tales of the Ouija section. Hey, a good story is a good story.) But how many of them can be verified? And how many of the tales are the products of active, highly suggestive, and eager-for-drama teenage imaginations? Yet the majority of paranormal investigators today will advise you not to use a Ouija board, taking the same stance as books such as Stoker Hunt’s Ouija: The Most Dangerous Game.

DEMONS OR THE SUBCONSCIOUS?

For the sake of argument, however, let’s say that at least some of these tales of terror are true. Some of them might be. Should we blame the board? Or should we blame the people using the board? In other words, where is this negativity really coming from? Is it coming from a demon, who I guess we have to assume is sitting around with nothing better to do, waiting for teenagers to sit down at a Ouija board to scare the crap out of them with a selection of supernatural antics? Or is it more likely that any effects – supernatural or not – arise out of the energized subconscious of the users?

If you read related articles of mine on this subject, you’ll know that I do not buy in to the notions of demons and possession. These are ancient superstitions – completely made up – for which there is no reasonable evidence. The idea of the Devil was created by humans to help humans explain to ourselves the evil that humans do. The sad truth is, however, that we create our own evil in the world. We’re responsible for it, not some discarnate demon. We create it, just as we create good in the world.

And what of the supernatural aspects? Just as it is now commonly accepted among most paranormal researchers that poltergeist activity – objects moved telekinetically, bangs on walls, and the rest of it – is created by the subconscious of a person or persons, so too can any extraordinary manifestations in a Ouija session be credited to the subconscious. Why is it often so negative? Because that is often the expectation of the users involved. Intention creates reality.

How To Use a Ouija Board

A Ouija board can be an interesting experience. Some believe it is a doorway to another world and warn against its use, but most people see it as a harmless diversion, especially if it's not taken too seriously. Here are some guidelines.

Difficulty: Easy
Time Required: 15 minutes to 1 hour

Here's How:

1. It takes two to Ouija. Usually one person is not able to work the Ouija. Get a friend to use it with you. A male and female is usually recommended.

2. Timing. Most practitioners suggest using the board at night when, they say, less interference is in the atmosphere.

3. Create some atmosphere. The Ouija is more fun if you darken the room and light some candles. Turn off the TV and any music to minimize distractions....

Read complete article at http://theunexplainedmysteries.com/Ouija-Board.html

Mysteries of Demon Calls

Occasionally, paranormal literature throws up a case so incredible that we either dismiss it as fantasy, or edge towards the idea that demons and possessions are a reality. The facts are just so fantastic, rational inquiry is often forgotten. But are we right to either dismiss or accept? Or is it possible that rational explanations can be placed upon the subject within an overall cultural explanation of phenomena? I opt for this middle ground.

To read more about it http://theunexplainedmysteries.com/demon.html