I have written many articles on a variety of subjects, including the paranormal, history, blues music, and I've even written some poetry. Here you'll find ghosts, haunted places, mystery lights, and much more.
PARANORMAL
1.Ghost Ships
2, Borrego Mystery Lights
3, Huntsville, AL ghosts
4. Why Do Ghosts Wear Clothes?
5. America's Mystery Lights
POETRY (Click for page)
HISTORY
GHOST SHIPS
Rhetta Akamatsu
(This article was expanded and appears in The Journal of Anomalous Sciences)
On April 22,2007, police called off a search for the three-man crew of a
catamaran named "Kaz II," which was discovered drifting about 80 feet off the
coast of the Great Barrier Reef.
When the police boarded the ship, the engine was running. A meal was laid out on
the table. When the police called off the search, they said the men must have
been swept into the sea by a storm nearly a week earlier. But the laptop
computer was turned on and still running, even though, if the men had
disappeared from the ship during the storm, the battery should have been dead.
And the cabin was dry. The food still looked fresh and everything, including the
silverware, was neatly arranged on the table.
One sail of the ship was torn, but there were no signs of violence on the ship.
There were no lifeboats on board, but all of the life jackets and other safety
gear were still in place. Nothing indicated a scramble for safety. It looked as
though the crew had just mysteriously walked away.
This incident naturally led many people to compare the Kaz II to other famous
"ghost ships," most notably the Mary Celeste, which was found floating and
abandoned near Portugal in 1872.
The Mary Celeste
The Mary Celeste was an American ship with a mostly Dutch crew. Its American
captain, Benjamin Briggs, had his wife and two-year-old daughter along on the
fateful voyage that sailed the Mary Celeste into legend.
The ship set sail in November, 1872, on the way to Genoa, Italy with a cargo of
pure alcohol. Almost a month later, a British ship named the Dei Gratia spotted
the Mary Celeste adrift near the Azore Islands. After hailing the ship for two
hours with no reply, part of the crew boarded the Mary Celeste. What they found
filled them with awe. The ship was completely deserted, with no sign of the
crew. There was also no sign of a struggle or any foul play. The cargo was all
there, although a few barrels were empty. A few instruments were missing, but
the captain's log book was found, with the last entry 10 days before, indicating
no problems.
Members of the Dei Gratia crew sailed the Mary Celeste to Gibraltar, where an
inquest was held. Frederick Solly Flood, Advocate General of the British
Admiralty Court, hinted that the crew might have mutinied, possibly drunk on the
missing alcohol. This did not seem likely, as the alcohol was pure and not
suitable for drinking. He also suggest that it might all be a ruse to collect
the insurance, and Briggs and his family were safe somewhere waiting to collect.
Then, he suggested that the Dei Gratia crew may have killed the crew and thrown
them overboard in order to claim the prize for recovering lost ships. But the
complete lack of any signs of struggle seemed to rule that out. In the end, the
Court praised the Dei Gratia crew for its actions and speculated that the crew
must have mistakenly thought the ship was sinking, and jumped overboard.
A few years later, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story, "J. Habakuk
Jephson's Statement," which was based on the Mary Celeste, but embellished the
account with half-eaten breakfasts and warm cups of tea and other indications
that something supernatural took place on the ship he called the "Marie
Celeste."
No explanation has ever been found for what happened to the Mary Celeste, but a
look at her history shows that she had, and maintained, a reputation as a
"Cursed Ship." Before she was the Mary Celeste, she was the Amazon. Her captain
died two days after she was christened with that name, and accidents befell her
with such regularity that sailors began to avoid her, so she was refitted and
rechristened the Mary Celeste.
After the accident, the ship was returned to service, but again, no one wanted
to sail on her. The owners finally did try to pull off an insurance scam,
filling her with worthless cargo and attempting to sink her, but the ship was
merely beached and refused to sink and the owners were convicted and jailed for
the fraud.
On August 9, 2001, best-selling novelist and seeker of lost ships Clive Cussler,
representing the organization he founded, NUMA (The National Underwater and
Marine Agency,) and John Davis, President of the Canadian ECO-NOVA Productions,
announced that they had found the remains of the Mary Celeste on Rochalais Reef,
in Haiti. She was covered in beautiful coral and surrounded by artifacts, which
were videotaped and catalogued for further study.
According to the official press release at that time, these factors were used to
determine that the ship was the Mary Celeste:
* A survey of the wreck revealed its dimensions to be 100 by 25 feet: MARY
CELESTE's recorded dimensions at the keel were 99.3 by 25.3 feet.
* The wreck was fastened together with iron "drifts" and bronze spikes commonly
used in ships built in the mid-19th century: MARY CELESTE was constructed in
1861.
* The wreck was sheathed with "Muntz metal," also known as "naval brass," which
began to replace copper sheathing on ship's hulls after 1850. By the 1860's it
had nearly completely replaced copper sheathing.
* Detailed analysis of twelve samples of wood by Dr. David Etheridge, a wood
scientist from Victoria, British Columbia, showed the ship was built either in
Northern New England or the Maritime Provinces of Canada. MARY CELESTE was built
at Spencer's island, Nova Scotia.
"The enigma of the MARY CELESTE will continue to haunt us all for generations to
come, " Cussler stated. "She is a tale of the sea that will never be forgotten."
Other Ghost Ships
Not every ghost ship vanished on the ocean. In 1872, the SS Iron Mountain, a
stern-wheeler riverboat, vanished on the Mississippi River.
The Iron Mountain was on a run from New Orleans, Louisiana, to Pittsburgh, PA,
with a cargo of cotton,sugar, and molasses that it was towing on barges. Later
in the day, another vessel, the Iroquois Chief, found the barges floating in the
river, apparently cut loose. The crew retrieved the barges and waited for the
Iron Mountain to show up to claim them, but the ship never came. No trace of the
ship or the crew has ever been found. Some believe that she was sabotaged or
stolen and somehow sailed up the river undetected,but others believe that
something supernatural happened to the Iron Mountain.
The era of the ghost ships did not end with the great decades of sailing. The
Kaz II is not the only ghost ship that has been found even in more recent times.
In 2006, a tanker, the Jian Seng, was found drifting in the Gulf of Carpathia by
an Australian Coast Guard plane. It was empty and devoid of anything of value,
but it had a large supply of rice in its hold, and speculation was that it was
used to supply fishing vessels out to see. Because the engines were inoperable,
the authorities believed it had been adrift for some time. No explanation was
found for what happened to the crew, but one suggestion was that it might have
broken loose while being towed to a junkyard. The owner was never located, and
the Jian Seng was towed to deeper water and sunk as an artificial reef.
THE BORREGO MYSTERY LIGHTS
(Appeared in Associated Content and The ParaNexus Journal)
HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA GHOSTS
Alabama, like most of the South, is filled with ghost stories.
Huntsville certainly has its share of those stories.
For instance,a ghost named Sally haunts the Carter Mansion in Huntsville. Sally
is said to have died a violent death at the age of 16, although I could find no
details of her death. She used to be buried on the grounds of the mansion, but
her body was moved to an unmarked grave at Maple Hill Cemetery. While she
was buried there, she was said to topple her gravestone from time to time. Even
though her body has left the premises, Sally still tosses pillows around
and even moves furniture in the house, and some people claim to have seen her
walking around.
The cemetery where Sally is now buried, Maple Hill Cemetery, also has another
well-known ghost.
An eldery lady is buried in a family crypt there. She had an antique rocking
chair of which she was very fond, and the family placed it in the crypt with her
as a gesture of respect. Now, people claim that almost any time you stand
outside the crypt, you can hear the creak.. creak.. creak sound of the rocking
chair swaying back and forth.
Next to the cemetery is a playground where ghost children have been seen
swinging late at night, when all living children should be home asleep. The
swings also sometimes swing by themselve, even when there is no wind.
Another haunted Huntsville site is the old Dallas Mill, which was built in 1891.
It was a working mill until 1949, and then home to the Genesco Shoe Factory
until 1985. It was vacant then until it burned down in 1991. The story
goes that a man was killed while cleaning the smoke stacks not long after the
mill was built, and his spirit still haunts the place. Another ghost who seems
to wander about the ruins of the mill is a homeless man who lived in the ruins
for a while after the mill burned down.
There is a large pair of black gates at Green Mountain in Huntsville, which have
earned the nickname "Hell's Gates" among the locals. The gates guard the
entrance to an imposing mansion located on the mountain. Legend has it
that if you park your car in front of the gates and wait, another car will
appear from nowhere, force you away from the gates, and then disappear. This
author was told by a Huntsville native that he had experienced this phenomena
not once but many times.
One final possibly haunted location in Huntsville is the Space Camp. Camps
always seem to have ghost stories attached to them, and this one is no
exception. Evidently, when the camp was being built, they were using large
explosives to blow giant holes in the ground for the below-grounds quarters. One
day the explosives went off early and a man was buried alive by the blast. He
was dead before he could be rescued, and counselors and camp-goers report still
hearing his screams and cries for help
in the halls and around the grounds of the camp.
Just a word of caution: These sites are not necessarily open for investigation.
No investigation should be undertaken without permission at any time.
Ruins are notoriously dangerous for many reasons that have nothing to do with
the paranormal. Cemeteries are resting places for the dead, and should be
treated with respect. Enjoy the stories, but tread cautiously and courteously.
WHY DO GHOSTS WEAR CLOTHES?
(Some of this material, in modified form, appears in Haunted Marietta)
Recently, I was reading an article that listed questions kids ask about
ghosts, and one question was "Why do ghosts wear clothes?"
It's a logical question. After all, if they are disembodied spirits, they
obviously don't need clothes. But there are at least two answers I can easily
think of.
The first is that most appearances of "ghosts" are not actually disembodied
spirits at all. They are residual hauntings, meaning that they are just
replaying events that happened in the past over and over, like a kind of psychic
movie or hologram. There is no intelligence behind it, and the figures appear
just as they did when the event they are re-enacting took place.
If you watch a lot of paranormal shows on television or if you have participated
in paranormal investigations or experienced ghostly phenomena yourself, you've
probably noticed that when there is actual, apparently intelligent interaction
between people and ghosts, the ghost is almost never visible. The living person
or persons will hear sounds, feel touched, see things move, but not see the
actual apparition, or if they do see something, it's only a shadow.
Most of the time, when ghosts do interact with humans in a visible form, it is
to a loved one, especially soon after death. There are exceptions to this, of
course. People staying in haunted hotels, for instance, sometimes wake to see
apparitions in the room.
So, when this does happen, why are the ghosts dressed the way they are? And,
along those same lines, why are so many alleged "spirit guides" Native Americans
with funny-sounding names?
I think that the most likely theory is that ghosts appear to us in a form that
our minds will be able to accept.
We know from physics that energy is only transformed or transmitted, but never
destroyed. So the energy that inhabits our bodies must go somewhere when we die.
Most likely, that energy has no actual form other than a blob of light, if it
has a form at all. If it is possible for it to manifest as a form (as most
researchers believe,) by pulling light from other sources such as cameras and
other electrical instruments, then it may well choose to manifest in whatever
way it feels the person it is manifesting for will feel least fearful of.
(Unless it wants to scare someone, and I think that would be very rare.)
So, since a naked ghost would be a scarey sight indeed, the entity manifests
with clothes on and looking as much like it did in life as possible.
As for those Native American spirit guides, there is a widely-held belief that
Native Americans were more spiritually attuned than other people. Whether this
is true or not, it' s a popular belief, especially in New Age circles. So, it
would make sense for spirits who have passed over who want to be helpful to
manifest in a form or identify themselves as a form that will be comfortable for
the subject they wish to communicate with and through.
American's Mystery Lights
by Rhetta Akamatsu
While researching a book on paranormal phenomena, I have been amazed at the number of "Ghost lights," "Spook lights," or "Mystery lights" that occur all around the country. Many of these lights occur near railroad tracks. Many have legends attached to them concerning engineers or train passengers who were involved in a terrible wreck in which they were decapitated, and the lights are generally flashlights or lanterns with which the ghosts are seeking to find their heads.
Whatever the explanation, it's amazing how many there are.
In Arkansas, one light occurs near an old railroad track near Crossett. It has been seen by many people since the early 1900's. It is seen as an eerie red, white, amber, or blue light about head high.
The Gurden Lights are more famous Arkansas lights, occurring in this small town about 75 miles from Little Rock. Both the Crossett and Gurden lights have the railroad decapitation legend attached to them.
In Silver City, Colorado, there is a variation on the theme. The mystery lights here are seen in the old Silver City cemetery. They are usually blue-white and about the size of a silver dollar, and appear in groups of two or three.
Georgia is home to the Surrency light. Surrency is a very tiny town near Macon. This bright yellow ball of light has been seen near the railroad tracks since the early 1900's. Science may have found an explanation for it in a strange pool of liquid that has been found far underground under Surrency. But the liquid itself is a puzzle, as liquid is not supposed to be able to form nine miles underground, where seismic equipment seems to indicate this liquid lies!
The Paulding light occurs near Watersmeet, Michigan, outside of Paulding. It has been observed for at least the last forty years, and this is one of the many lights that is connected to the story of a railroad brakeman who lost his life and now wanders the road with his lantern. Since the lights appear to sometimes follow the power lines (although they were seen before the power lines were present,) some people also claim they are the ghost of an Indian dancing on the lines.
The lights appear as circles of red, blue, white, and green, and are evident almost every clear evening. Even though Ripley's Believe It or Not once offered $100,000 to anyone who could offer a solution to the lights, no logical scientific explanation has yet been found, and the lights remain a mystery.
North Carolina has the famous Brown Mountain Lights.
My mother was born and raised in North Carolina and I lived there a while myself. I have seen the Brown Mountain Lights a number of times. They occur in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and they appear to be numerous lights at least twice the size of stars. I have seen them when they were red and another time when they were blue.
These lights have been reported since before white men settled the area. The Cherokee and Catawba tribes have reports of them as far back as the year 1200. In their history, it is believed that the lights are the spirits of Cherokee and Catawba warriors killed in a great battle that year. Civil War soldiers wrote home about the lights.
The lights have been researched many times, including by teams from the Smithsonian and by the U.S. Geological Society. Theories have included swamp gas, reflections from moonshine stills, and in recent years, some unusual atmospheric condition which reflects electricity. The Smithsonian survey dismissed the moonshine still theory, saying there were not enough stills to cause this kind of activity. There are no swampy areas around Brown Mountain. And the lights were around long before electricity.
In 1913, the U.S. Geological Survey concluded that the lights were reflections from locomotive lights behind Brown Mountain. But shortly after that survey was done, floods washed out all the railroad tracks around Brown Mountain. There was no train service in the area for months.
And the lights showed up right on time.
The Brown Mountain Lights are not the only spook lights in North Carolina, though. Wilmington has the Maco Station Lights, which actually could be the paranormal result of the death of a railroad man named Joe Baldwin in 1867. His death is well-documented in newspapers and other public records, and he did die in a dramatic and violent train accident.
Twelve miles outside of Joplin, Missouri, there is a track of road about 4 miles long, which crosses the Oklahoma border. The former town of Hornet is located there, and it is here that the Hornet Spook Light appears. It looks like a ball of fire or a lantern, and varies from basketball size to considerably larger. It travels down the center of the road, weaving from side to side. Some people feel that it behaves in an intelligent fashion, sometimes appearing inside cars, letting people approach to a certain distance but never get too close and retreating when it is pursued.
The legends attached to this light are centered around Native Americans. One theory is that the lights are the spirits of two Quapaw Indians and another is that it is the spirit of an Osage Chief who, predictably, was beheaded and is looking for his head. Another legend says that the light is the lantern carried by a miner still looking for his children, who were kidnapped by Indians.
Explanations that have been put forward for this light include marsh gas and reflections from minerals. Neither of these explanations hold up. There is reason to believe some sightings may be caused by car lights from the highway five miles away, but this does not explain all the documented sightings from before the highway was built, and even before cars were commonplace. Troy Taylor, in Unexplained America, says that the Army Corp of Engineers concluded that the Hornet Light was a "mysterious light of unknown origin," and so it remains.
Bragg, Texas has another occurrence of a mysterious light, and another decapitated brakeman legend. This light starts small and grows to about the size of a flashlight beam, and is orange.
Texas also has the very well-known Marfa Lights. The lights were observed by settlers and cowboys driving cattle through Marfa in the 1880's. The first recorded account of these lights was by a rancher named Robert Ellison in 1883. The Apache have legends that the lights are stars that fell from the sky. Today, they can be seen from US 90. They vary in color and intensity, although usually they appear as reddish orange balls from 1 to 10 feet in diameter, and they appear to move about. As always, some skeptics claim they are reflections of car lights, but, of course, they were being seen in exactly the same way long before there were cars. Many scientists have tried to come up with an explanation for the lights, but so far, they remain unexplained.
Whatever the spook lights are, they are not just an American phenomenon, of course. There are spook lights in Canada, in the UK, in Norway, and in many other places around the world.
Someday, we may be able to explain them, but in the meantime, it's good to be aware that we do not have an explanation for everything. The world can always use a little mystery.