Happy Friday the 13th!

If you're looking for something fun to do to celebrate Friday the 13th, Haunt Jaunts to the rescue! Check out their website for a list of haunted attractions that will be open today...if you live in Passaic, NJ, Rosharon, TX, Plano, TX, Canton, OH, Bedford, TX, or Wright City, MO, you're in luck!

http://www.hauntjaunts.net/haunted-attractions-open-friday-13th-2016/

When Ghosts Attack: Beasts From the Beyond

I haven't watched When Ghosts Attack in awhile, so I decided it was time to scare the crap out of myself again.  This time I watched an episode called " Beasts From the Beyond," which aired on Destination America.  Katharine Driver moved to Flat Rock, Indiana to help her parents renovate their house.  When she was a teenager, strange things happened in the house, such as a Quija board spelling out "BEAST" and "DEATH"  when Katharine's friends decided to try to contact the ghost that haunted the house.  When Katharine arrived to help her parents, she noticed a bad smell and several dead mice in the house, so she called cleaning specialists Cassi Bowman and Vicki White on August 3, 2011.  Cassi said she felt like she was being watched when she was cleaning, and Vicki saw a figure pass by a doorway; she thought it was Cassi (the only other person in the house), but it wasn't.  The next time they went to the house, Cassi saw footprints on the floor, even though she knew no one had been there since the last time they cleaned, and she heard a voice whisper "Get out." Vicki and Cassi did not return after that. (Smart move.)  On October 8th,  Katharine slept in the house and had dreams about a man in a gray suit running through the woods; he looked like he was from the 1800s and kept saying "What have I done?" and "How do I fix it?"  She began having the dream regularly, and one night she awoke to a freezing room and saw the man from the dream standing next to the bed.  Katharine later saw this man in the woods; she followed him, and he disappeared.  She decided to research the area and found out that two people had died in an explosion at the sulfur springs not far from the woods, and she wondered if the man she saw might be one of the men who died in the explosion.  On September 17th, 2012, Katharine woke up feeling like something bad was going to happen, and she was correct; her cat didn't appear when Katharine called her to eat, and she found her dead in the yard.  That night she kept hearing someone repeating the word "cat" over and over again, and then she felt something grip her throat; she said her neck felt cold and like it was being shocked.  She repeated a mantra that her grandmother had taught her ("White light, bright light, please protect me both day and night."), and then she could breathe again.  Katharine has not experienced any paranormal activity in the house since that night.

On June 9, 2007 in Manahawkin, New Jersey, Cam Sammartano and Lindsey Monaco decided to stop sitting around the house and visit a pet cemetery that was said to be haunted. (Sounds like a great idea...what could possibly go wrong?) Soon after arriving at the foggy cemetery, they began hearing barking and growling dogs, so they decided to get back in the car.  Once in the car, Cam tried to drive to the main road, but just kept driving past the cemetery; he tried to do a three-point turn, but the car wouldn't move.  Cam thought he saw something in the woods, and then the car was attacked by something that looked like a dog; Cam and Lindsey were terrified, but the attack stopped when the creature disappeared.  They eventually found the main road and made their way back to Cam's house; he worried about the damage to his mother's car, but when he got out of the car, there wasn't even a scratch on it.  They knew that it would be impossible for the car to not show any signs of damage after an attack from a real dog, so Cam and Lindsey concluded that the animal they saw must  have been a ghost.  They learned their lesson and never returned to the pet cemetery.

Katie Gammage thought it would be fun to work at Eastern State Penitentiary's "Terror Behind the Walls" Halloween attraction, but she was soon proven wrong.  On October 13, 2012,  Katie was locking up and felt like she wasn't alone.  She then saw a male figure wearing prison gear from the 1920s and felt cold air rush past her, and the figure vanished.  She then heard chains rattling and was shoved to the floor by "an unseen force."  An EMT heard Katie screaming and came to help her; she told Katie that the night before, she had seen an orb in the area where Katie was attacked.  Katie continued to work at the penitentiary, and though paranormal activity is still reported in the building, she has not had any more experiences like the one from October 13th.

This episode of When Ghosts Attack wasn't quite as scary as some of the other episodes I've seen, but I still enjoyed it. : )

My rating: 8/10

2014 MUFON Symposium

MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) is holding this year's symposium July 17th-20th at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey.  If you'd like to hear lectures by UFO experts or want to learn how to be a Field Investigator for MUFON, you'd probably enjoy going to this.  I would love to go, but I won't be able to, so if any of you guys go and would like to write a guest post about it, let me know.  : )

http://www.2014mufonsymposium.com/

When Ghosts Attack: There's No Place Like Hell

There's a new show on Destination America called When Ghosts Attack, and I'm not going to watch too many episodes because it's one of the scariest paranormal shows I've seen.  I purposely watched it in the afternoon because I knew it would creep me out too much if I watched it at night, yet that still didn't stop me from looking over my shoulder every few minutes!  I watched the first episode, "There's No Place Like Hell," and the first part of the show focuses on the Settle family (Lori, Donny, and Kaitlyn, who is Lori's daughter and Donny's stepdaughter) and what happened to them when they moved into a new house in Fayetteville, West Virginia in September 2002.  Not long after the family moved in, Lori says that she felt like she was always being watched; Kaitlyn also experienced this and felt like something that wasn’t human was watching her.  Lori felt like she was not welcome in the basement, like she was “invading someone else’s space.”  She discovered flies in the corner of the basement, and nothing she tried ever made them go away.  A few weeks after they moved in, Lori finished cleaning the kitchen and walked out of the room for no longer than a minute; when she came back, all of the drawers and cabinets were open.  On December 7th, Lori and Donny went to sleep and woke up to the sound of heavy footsteps (like boots) on the stairs.  Kaitlyn came in and said that there was a man in her room, standing at the foot of her bed.  Lori told Kaitlyn she was imagining it and took her back to her room and plugged a night light in; after she shut the door, the night light exploded. 

On January 14, 2003, Lori was home alone when she saw a child standing in the hallway, “fists clenched, head down, no facial expression.”  When the child looked at Lori, she had no eyes, and Lori ran out of the room. (I wouldn't have just left the room...I would've left the house and never returned!)  Less than a month later, Lori and Kaitlyn were asleep in Lori’s bed when Lori was awoken by a hand pushing her down into the mattress; a few minutes later, it pushed her so hard she fell out of bed.  Lori and Kaitlyn ran out of the room, and when Donny was comforting Lori, they heard a loud cackle.  Lori’s mother, Beverly Settle, suggested she do some research about the house, and Lori found out that a man named William Bennett lived there in the 1940s.   He had a wife and child, and the wife left him because he was too overbearing, and the daughter died at a young age; William was so depressed that he shot himself in the basement (in the corner where the flies gather).

Beverly says that Donny began to change, that he “became distant from Lori, he didn’t talk much, and then it seemed like he started to go into a depression.” Lori says he often seemed angry and agitated.  On April 29th, Lori and Kaitlyn went out, and Lori dropped Kaitlyn off at Beverly’s house before she came home; when she walked in the house, she couldn’t find Donny and he wasn’t answering when she called his name.  Lori soon discovered blood in the hallway and followed the trail to find Donny sitting dead on the bathroom floor, which was completely covered in blood.  The autopsy said that Donny died of an aortic rupture, but since he was only 42 and in good health, Lori thinks the house had something to do with it.

June 27, 2003 was the final straw.  Lori was going to the basement when something pushed her down the stairs, and she decided it was time to get out of the house.  Beverly came over to help Lori and Kaitlyn get their things together, and she felt cold air in the house, even though it wasn’t cold that day. Something unseen hit Lori in the face and left claw marks, and they all ran out of the house, leaving their belongings.  Beverly believes that Lori and Kaitlyn would’ve been killed if they’d kept living there.  Lori did not believe in the paranormal before living in that house, but her experiences there led to her becoming a paranormal investigator.

The second part of the show is about single mother Marsha Eden and her daughters Katrina and McKenzie.  In September 2010, they moved into a house in central New Jersey that Marsha's boyfriend, Raymond Griffis, found for them.  The house was old, but everything inside was new.  The house was across from an old mill, which Katrina says was as “bad as having a graveyard in front of your house.”  McKenzie says that the house was okay during the day, but creepy at night.  The girls started hearing hissing noises and feeling like they were being watched not long after they moved in.  Marsha says she would see shadows that would disappear into another room or into the wall.

On September 21, 2010, Marsha came home from work early because she had a migraine; she went to sleep and woke up to a loud noise from the bathroom.  When she went in there, the shower door was shattered and glass was all over the floor.  Two weeks later, Marsha was fixing dinner and felt a cold spot around her; she suddenly dropped the silverware she was holding, and something she could not see attacked her.  She asked Raymond to spend the night, and they later “woke up from a dead sleep,” heard a creak, then the door opened, and it got really cold in the room.  Marsha felt the cold on her feet, then it traveled up her legs and got heavier until it overpowered her, and she saw a man’s face right in front of her.  After that disturbing incident, they decided to do some internet research and discovered that the house used to be a boarding house for the employees of the mill and that many people died there as a result of accidents that had happened at the mill.

On October 19th, McKenzie says that she felt cold all around her and Katrina felt a sudden burning sensation on her back as she walked into the room; Marsha and McKenzie examined Katrina's back and found a red welt. Marsha and the girls ran and locked themselves in a bedroom, and Marsha called Raymond.  The walls started shaking, and they heard moans coming from outside the bedroom.  McKenzie found scratches on her thighs after feeling a burning sensation. Raymond came to help them, and everything calmed down once he showed up; he took a picture of Marsha, Katrina, and McKenzie in the bedroom, and there was a glow behind them in the picture.  Marsha decided that they weren’t going to live there anymore. The apartment is currently being rented by someone else, and there have been no reports of paranormal activity.

If you like scary paranormal shows, you should check out When Ghosts Attack...this might be the scariest one I've watched so far!

My rating: 9/10

http://america.discovery.com/tv-shows/when-ghosts-attack