"Ego Dico Cum Mortuus Populus"...

Since an encounter with my deceased paternal grandmother at a very young age, I have "spoken with dead people"...

As with most people with psychic gifts, however, I have little control over when, where and with whom this communication happens. It just "happens" when it "happens", it seems...

I have written elsewhere here on Gather about some of my experiences in this regard and here are links to a few of those articles in case you wish to peruse them:

Hank's Horses

The Ghost of Mr. Franchetti

Nanny's Winged Messenger

As far as physical evidence of hauntings goes, I also have an article here on Gather about that, too, at the following link: Are Cemeteries Haunted? In that article I show several photographs which I believe to be "paranormally-related".

I discovered one thing about recovering physical (photographic) evidence of a paranormal nature quite by accident, though, and I thought I would pass this advice on to you in case you are interested in this type of phenomena: WHEN IN DOUBT, TAKE PHOTOS!

If you "see" or simply "perceive" anything -- ANYWHERE -- have your camera with you and TAKE A PHOTO or two because you never know when something unusual might show up in one!

By way of illustration of my point, I offer the following:

During the summer of 2003, I was asked to perform a selection from my repertory of "ghost story vignettes" that I perform each year at the "Barbara Bull Memorial Cemetery Walk" (a yearly fundraiser for the historical society of which I am a past co-president) for another venue, "Heritage Days", in a neighboring town.

Here is a photo of me in my "Native American Storyteller" costume taken early in the afternoon on that day:

I performed three times on that day dressed as the storyteller but, after my last performance, I had to walk back to my car (parked several blocks away) to change into ANOTHER costume (turn of the last century lady) to report to the historical society's tent at the function to help hand out literature and such.

The venue was in the downtown area of the town of Santa Rosa CA near the old rail yards. I had briefly noticed that -- near the place where I parked my car that morning -- there were a couple of old railcars that were cordened off by hurricane fencing -- as though they were awaiting restoration or something. I didn't pay too much attention to them at that time but, as I was walking back to my car that afternoon, I thought I saw a man standing at the rear of one of the cars out of the corner of my eye.

Quickly realizing that the cars were fenced off and nobody should really have been near them, I turned back to look at the area where I thought I had seen the figure of the man to find no one was there...

It just happened that my little "Digi-Pen" camera that I had at the time was right on top of the box that I was carrying and, so, on a whim, I snapped a quick photo of the area and, later on that evening, I downloaded the poorly resolutioned photo into my computer to take a closer look...

After blowing up the image a bit, I noticed a "foggy area" in the photo in the "window cutout" just to the right of the doorway that didn't look like it belonged there... After sharpening the image and playing with the color tone a bit, an image emerged from the photo that literally made me gasp!

Here is the image that I found:

In that "window area", I found what clearly appears to me to be the face and part of the upper body of an African American male as we can plainly discern from his full lips and rather flat, widened nose... He appears to be looking downward and to the left of the photo... What amazed me even more, though, was the shape of what appears to be a "billed cap" on his head -- almost identical to ones that were commonly worn by railroad "porters" for many years! One can even make out some type of metallic ornamentation just above the bill of the cap and -- if you look further down -- what appear to be metallic "buttons" down the front of his "jacket"!

Intriquing to me is the light-colored "hole" further down the "jacket" with an interesting light-colored "star pattern" around it... As you can see from the original photograph, the entire rear of the train was all the same, dark, color so I cannot readily explain this difference in color and the "hole" present in the blown-up version of it.

I submitted both the original photo and the blow-up to some fellow online paranormal researchers and one of them called to my attention that there seemed to be OTHER entities in the "doorway" of the rail car... Here is a cropped image that was sent to me by that researcher:

I have (very roughtly) outlined the two "faces" my fellow researcher saw in the image to clarify them below:

Interestingly, the face on the "bottom" of the two seems to be wearing a railroad engineer-type hat!!

So, as you can see, had I not, on a whim, taken the photograph when I first perceived an entity of some sort near the rear of the rail car as I passed, I would not now have this photographic evidence of anything paranormally-related!

As I have stated, the lesson here is to TAKE PHOTOS whenever you get a feeling like this or even THINK that you are seeing something that you cannot confirm visually!

Happy ghost hunting!

jean