Copyright
(c) 2002 San Jose Mercury News
San Jose
Mercury News (CA)
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October 31, 2002 GHOST-HUNTERS
HEAR THINGS THAT GO BUMP During
the day, the 120-year-old ranch house at Joseph D. Grant
County Park on Mount Hamilton is open for tours, its broad wood-plank
floors thumped by the feet of many visitors who can gape with awe at the
lifestyle enjoyed by a rich merchant who counted President Herbert Hoover
among his close friends. But
park historian Ron Bricmont doesn't tell visitors everything he knows
about the house. Not the story about the guests who heard furniture
crashing around in Grant's bedroom, only to go up and find no one there.
Or the one about the footsteps park employees heard -- even though they
were alone in the house. And he hasn't told many about the seance held in
Grant's room during which the medium became so agitated, she tried to
throw herself out a second-story window. |
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No
one, Bricmont said, really knows what's behind the strange occurrences. On
Tuesday night, with Halloween looming, Bricmont unlocked the front door of
the house to lead a four-hour-long tour for special visitors who wanted to
confront what might be lurking in the house. Santa Clara ghost-tracker
Gloria Young, her son, daughter and another ghost-tracker, among others,
could hardly wait to get inside. For
more than 10 years, Young has been listening, measuring and photographing
what she thinks are ghosts. She believes in them. ''Men fear what they
don't understand,'' Young said. ''They don't understand there are ghosts.
They are trying to get our attention.'' Skeptics
may scoff, but Young's South Bay organization, called Ghosttrackers,
merely reflects what ghost researchers everywhere say is an actively
growing interest in the afterlife. In the last decade, a 2001 Gallup poll
reported, belief in ghosts has increased from 28 to 38 percent in the
United States. ''It's
the survival instinct,'' said Loyd Auerbach, the Orinda-based founder of
the Office of Paranormal Investigations. ''It's one of the longest-lived
beliefs in human beings -- that we want to have some proof we exist after
our body dies.'' On
Tuesday night, Young began the tour, eventually making her way to a
bathroom on the ranch house's first floor. She stopped. ''That room is
very thick. There's more than just us in here,'' she said. ''It's like
walking through a force field.'' Bricmont
said: ''People tend to avoid this room.'' By
the end of the tour, the Ghosttrackers' paraphernalia registered
temperature differences in certain parts of rooms, mysterious orbs of
light and knocking sounds in others. And there was one frightening moment
when one of the researchers said she felt a hand on her shoulder and a
sudden, sharp, strong push from behind. But the only other person in the
room was in front of her. ''The
average person is fascinated by these things,'' said Jeffrey Mishlove, a
licensed clinical psychologist who earned a doctorate at the University of
California-Berkeley in parapsychology, the only such degree ever awarded
by an accredited American university. Mishlove
doesn't like to use the word ghost. To him and to other researchers in
this field, these are apparitions and they are considered a psychological
phenomenon. ''There are situations were apparitions are seen by one person
and others won't see it . . . there's obviously a large possibility that
these are subconscious projections combined with extrasensory
perception.'' Young
has taken courses offered by the American Ghost Society and has
certificates from that group as a ghost-hunter and paranormal
investigator. |
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Copyright
(c) 2002 San Jose Mercury News |
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