By Hank Hayseed, Esq.
BayToday.ca
Wednesday, March 26, 2008

The first house I bought was a cute little old farmhouse in the Caledon Hills, north of Toronto. The missus and I moved there a mere week after our daughter was born.

Everything was roses: I had an exciting career, we increasingly enjoyed our new place and our daughter was an absolute joy to be with.

Until…things started to … subtly change.

The neighbours had advised us to lock up when we left the house due to some recent hooliganisms in the area. Upon our return from shopping, as one of us would reach for the front door with our keys, the door would slowly open!

“Um, okay, I guess we didn’t lock it properly, eh honey?” After the second occurrence, we gave that door a thorough inspection. Yes, we could definitely hear the locking mechanism engage. Next time we came home, same thing…the door was unlocked and partially open.

Okay, we tried coming home via the back door. Same thing.
Oh boy!

I was raised in a family with several women. Guess how many times I left the toilet seat up? Right, once! In this new home, every time I went to do a stand-up procedure, the lid was up when I walked into the bathroom!

For the first few times, I just assumed that I had left it up after my previous visit. But, NO! I never leave a seat up! And there was no way that the missus would’ve.

But wait…there’s more!

I had bought a rocking chair for the nursery, for the missus and I to feed and rock our daughter. One day, the missus went upstairs to see the chair rocking! Exactly as if someone was in it! The window wasn’t open for any wind to be moving it.

We finally asked our neighbours if they knew the history of the house. Previous to the young couple we bought if from, there were two spinster sisters that had lived there for several decades. Their family had once owned several hundred acres in the area. As their parents and siblings had passed away or moved on, they sold off the property to be left with the wee house on an acre and half.

One of the sisters had died in her sleep. In my daughter’s room! After her passing the other sister moved away.

The missus and I discussed it. Outside, in case the Ghost was listening. We agreed that at least it appeared benevolent and certainly not worthy of any concerns of poltergeist-like activities.

The five of us, daughter, missus, dog, our Ghost and myself, spent a most enjoyable time living there.

Especially, as a man, to find the toilet seat already raised for me.
 

My main objective is to get out of this hell house… it’s filled with such a bad vibe and I just want to get out.  Dark, cold, damp and musky smells consumed my senses… my heart is pounding.  I can feel something coming.  Something bad.  Then out of nowhere a fellow coworker crashes my dream in her usual staggered limp of a walk.  She’s removing her coat ever so slowly as I watch her, all confused, she turns to me and saids her usual good morning.  I shook that off and I decide to pick up the pace so I could get the hell out of there.  I managed to get outside and weave in and out of the neighborhood until I crashed into consciousness.  Then that Monday morning I read an email that the same person that I dreamt about had to take a rather long leave of absence.  I have never thought of this woman outside of work, let alone dream about her and then she ends up getting so sick she can’t work for a while… so strange! I told one of my close friends at work about it, as well as the fact that I am a Libra and very sensitive, she looked at me and said “oh boy that’s strange!”.  Isn’t it?!     

Perhaps you haven’t heard about Dr. Ron Paul as much as you have heard about Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton… that’s exactly what the super elite want.  The big news broadcasting companies don’t even give him much air time either.   The majority of his information is coming from the internet, especially his website and his YouTube Channel:

http://www.ronpaul2008.com/

http://youtube.com/user/RonPaul2008dotcom

 That’s not enough though and I am very concerned about this… I keep having dreams about the worlds end.  Recently I wrote Mr. Paul and stategized on how he could spread his word.   His message like the US is so much in debt because they have been printing money without backing it with gold and silver since the 70s, how about telling the people about how the US sold so many treasury bonds to China if they sell them the US market will crash, and so on.  If the US goes down, what about us Canadians… well it’s not good to say the least.  We export about 80% of our goods to the US so if they can’t afford to buy from us then guess what!  There is still hope… we have to spread the word.  Maybe the US will instate a law that only people that hold diplomas, even high school, are able to vote.  Speaking of which, Alex Jones has a terrific website that we should frequent… www.infowars.com  With knowledge comes power!  I for one don’t want to go down without a fight.  I know that there is enough time to turn this around.  I wish Canadians could have a say in this thing too. 

If you read the following article you may believe that the fellow featured may have had some sort of sleep disorder.  It is possible.  I, however, know for a fact that my experiences are 100% because when I experienced a similar paralysis it was post my blankets being pulled down 3x!  I will never forget that for as long as I live, and beyond! 

For the Gray brothers, terror has turned out to be a good thing.

Two years ago in the middle of the night, Adam Gray saw a figure in a white shroud at the foot of his bed.

“I was quite terrified and I was trying to scream or move,” said the Belleville resident, now 35. “I was completely paralyzed, except for my eyes.”

The figure raised a hand, and Gray said he felt as though his soul was being pulled out of his body.

Gray’s wife, Jacqui, was alerted by muffled noise coming from her husband. She saw nothing unusual in the room, and shook him.

“As she shook me, it vanished,” said Gray, who added the experience was so frightening he was content to believe it had been a nightmare, as Jacqui had suggested.

But it became a recurring scare, and Gray was so shaken that he began researching its symptoms.

He learned about sleep paralysis, a condition experienced by an estimated 20 per cent of the world’s population.

One scientific theory says the mind and eyes wake up before the sleeping body, leaving the limbs still immobilized from sleep. In some cases, scientists say, the victim’s mind may produce some sort of ghost or creature as a way of explaining the paralysis.

Some people feel as though they’re being suffocated; others have many more symptoms.

Gray wanted to learn more, and since he was already in partnership with his brother Andrew in Graymatters Video Productions, a documentary seemed the best route.

When Andrew Gray first heard his brother’s story, he had a typical brotherly reaction: “that he was nuts.

“It took some convincing,” Andrew, 32, said this week.

But in time, the pair developed a solid proposal for The Nightmare, a film exploring the subject.

They recruited Canadian producer Paul Stephens, whose work includes Beowulf & Grendel, Ordinary Magic, and TV’s Torso: The Evelyn Dick Story. They’d met earlier when Stephens, a frequent visitor to the Quinte region, wandered into their former Pinnacle Street office out of curiosity.

The Grays made their pitch to VisionTV at Toronto’s Hot Docs film festival.

“From the first few words of their pitch, it was exactly what we were looking for,” said Joan Jenkinson, VisionTV’s director of independent productions and The Nightmare’s executive producer.

“It was a fresh perspective,” she said. “Their vision was also big. “I took a chance with them because I didn’t really know anything about them,” she told The Intelligencer.

Jenkinson said once work was underway, however, “They blew me away.” Together, VisionTV and Space: The Imagination Station gave The Nightmare the green light.

“In order to pull off such an ambitious project on the budget we had, we really had to get our hands dirty,” Adam said.

For the next two years, the Grays travelled from Japan to the African island of Zanzibar, filming interviews with people who’d had sleep paralysis and scientists who have studied it.

“I’d never left the continent before, so it was all new and strange,” said Andrew.

Every culture they visited had a different name for the nightmarish experience.

But in each, a strange creature visited victims in the night, terrorizing the person and sometimes creating the sensations of being choked or, in Zanzibar, physical signs of rape.

Newfoundlanders spoke of “the hag,” a witch who attacked sleepers. In Japan, one woman said the face of her father on the figure choking her. And in Zanzibar, a witch doctor told Gray he had been possessed by evil spirits, then performed an exorcism on him.

In California, a Hmong shaman from southeast Asia performed another ceremony on him, ending his recurring experiences.

Scientists, meanwhile, offered theories on whether or not the experience was a hallucination or something else entirely.

Some of the evidence seen in The Nightmare seems to indicate it may be much more than a bad dream, at least in some instances.

So far, Adam said, “They can’t really explain something as bizarre as this.”

And after two years of work on the project, Andrew still isn’t convinced one way or the other.

“It can’t be explained by science, but supernatural theories don’t make a lot of sense either. I think there’s a lot to the mind and body that we don’t understand.”

Adam said he was reassured by their investigation, if only because he learned just how common his experience was.

“When you talk to so many people who are obviously completely normal, healthy people who’ve had the same experience, it’s comforting.”

The brothers’ roughly 43-minute film aired on VisionTV’s Enigma March 5. It’s expected to repeat and air on Space as well, though no dates have been set.

The brothers are hoping it could lead to much more, and that may be happening.

The Nightmare was the first broadcast project written and directed by the Grays. VisionTV’s Jenkinson liked what she saw.

“They are my best find of the year,” Jenkinson said without hesitation.

“Throughout the whole process they were very, very professional and very creative, and the product we got at the end was fantastic.

“The writing was also very dramatic; they told a very good story.”

Jenkinson has already agreed to use a new half-hour cut of The Nightmare in her new series, “Do You Believe In…?” It’s a rebranding of Enigma, and aims to explain paranormal and supernatural phenomena.

The brothers from Belleville have a place in the new brand, she said.

“We have full intention on moving forward with them on at least a couple of projects.”

The Grays have pitched her ideas for four new documentaries covering everything from clairvoyance to black magic.

If they’re accepted, Andrew said dryly, “We’re going to be quite busy this year talking to a lot of strange people in foreign countries,” Andrew said dryly.

“It feels great,” he said of the prospect of more work. “It feels like everything I’ve been working for is starting to take off and I’ll be able to explore the kinds of topics I want to in film.”

They said they’re mindful of the possibility of being labelled as makers of only spooky projects, but aren’t yet concerned by it.

“I don’t think that’s our lifelong goal - to make supernatural films - but it’s a fun place to start,” Adam said.

He added regardless of whether the strange phenomena are real or imagined doesn’t matter: people are experiencing them, and whatever the cause, it’s worth investigating.

“We’d like to make films that open people’s minds to the possibility that it’s a genuine experience - this is something that’s real and happening, and people should think about it.”

lhendry@intelligencer.ca

Article ID# 944280

“I’m not actively participating in any group meets. I’m very private when it comes to my paranormal world. It’s very personal to me and I’m not ready to join a meet up group right now, if ever.”

I mean I do want to go, don’t get me wrong, but I just feel that I have to reach a certain level before I can benefit a group and/or the persons that have invited us into their home, or where ever. I take the paranormal very very seriously, not saying that no one else does, but I strongly feel that I have to know more before I can experience any meets. Too many energies maybe? Maybe we wouldn’t attract as much or maybe too much. I found out recently that I was not attacked by a human spirit in the past. What if there are demons in the mix?! I have always been prone to receiving energy, so for me that negative energy is the absolute worst feeling that I have ever encountered. Long story short, I just can’t participate in a group meet. I would, however, like very much to apprentice someday soon. I think an experienced mentor would be ideal.

Graham Readfearn

March 10, 2008 11:00pm

ONE claimed she could make people urinate with the power of her mind while another confidently predicted an asteroid would destroy Bowen, in far north Queensland.

The long list of failed challengers for James Randi’s $US1 million prize is as entertaining as it is bizarre.

TORONTO, March 7 /CNW/ - ESP PSYCHIC EXPO returns to the International
Centre in Mississauga, March 7-9. This ‘Exposition of the Paranormal’ features
demonstrations and lectures on psychic powers, ESP, clairvoyance, astrology,
palmistry, and auras. Live psychic readings and astrology charts are also
offered.    Mentalism Show - Saturday 7pm
    Complimentary sample psychic reading offered with admission    ESP PSYCHIC EXPO
    INTERNATIONAL CENTRE, 6900 AIRPORT RD. MISSISSAUGA
    March 7, 8, 9
    Friday 4pm-10pm, Saturday 11am-10pm, Sunday 11am-7pm

For further information: or interviews - (Media contact) Valentine
Safranko, (416) 425-4827

After reading the article below I realized that I have had my share of casting out unwanted energy so I was even considering going on an investigation. I still would rather take a paranormal course prior though because it is best to know as much as you can. It’s a very serious thing because most investigations are required to help people that have an unwanted and a possibly harmful entity, or entities, in their home.

March 4, 2008  - Foxnews.com 

NEW YORK —  Something strange going on in your neighborhood? You may want to give Brooklyn Ghost Investigations a call. For $20 an hour, the group of self-proclaimed paranormal investigators offers to go to your house to help chase away whatever goes bump in the night.

“When I was 10 years old, I started to see things _ spirits and ghosts,” said Sal Cicconi, 27, who formed the group with two other Brooklynites.

The group, which claims to have honed its spooky craft by watching such TV shows as “Ghost Hunters” and “Paranormal State,” has one client: a man who said he saw two apparitions in his apartment.

Cicconi and another member of the group, Sergio Ocasio, 20, went to the man’s house and waited until 3 a.m. to catch a glimpse of the ghosts.

“I caught something on tape,” Cicconi said. “It looked like two lights moving around, like the spirits were playing with each other.”

He said they used a homemade Ouija board _ often used in seances to supposedly talk to the dead (or undead) _ to coax the bogeymen to leave. But it didn’t work.

“Sometimes, spirits are afraid to talk or to show themselves to us,” Cicconi explained.

I read an article that featured a dead, yes dead, Toronto photographer that is an active member of  the Blog TO Flickr Pool.  Photos are being uploaded to this day, even though he’s been dead since the 80s?!  I for one believe that energy never dies, so did our ghostly friend find a wormhole that enabled him to travel and communicate, with the living, on the internet???  For further details please see the link below…

 http://blogto.com/arts/2008/02/ghost_of_dead_photographer_haunts_flickr/

  

After reading the article below, what comes to mind is how ignorant and closed minded some people can be. There is more to the world than war, sports and beer. I am not sure why so many are fixated on things that are so meaningless! I am also unsure why people do such evil things. I can’t stand stupidity and negative energy. Anyways, please take a boo at the following, if you wish…

To some Helen Duncan was merely a medium but the police in wartime Britain took a more sinister view of her work. Now a campaign has begun for her to be pardoned. By Andy McSmith

 Friday, 29 February 2008

 Of all the suffering endured during the Second World War, the brief imprisonment of Helen Duncan, a Scottish grandmother who claimed to have paranormal powers, was a minor injustice at worst. But, six decades later, it is still causing hubble, bubble, toil and trouble.

Mrs Duncan was one of the last people in Britain to be convicted under the 1735 Witchcraft Act. Yesterday, the Scottish Parliament received a petition with more than 200 signatures, demanding that she be given a full posthumous pardon. It was organised by Full Moon Investigations, a team of Scottish ghost-busters who claim to have paranormal gifts.

During the war, Mrs Duncan made several visits to Portsmouth where the desperate relatives of men killed or missing in action would flock to her seances, paying an admission price of 25 shillings a head – a huge sum in those days – hoping to hear the voices of their loved ones.

At one seance, she claimed to have made contact with a sailor from HMS Barham, a ship which had not been officially declared sunk. When it was announced, several weeks later, that the ship had indeed gone down, some took it as proof that Mrs Duncan was psychic. Others believed she had been tipped off and was giving away naval secrets to improve trade.

When she held another seance in Portsmouth, in January 1944, a plain-clothes policeman was waiting in the audience to arrest her the minute the first spirit from beyond turned up. She was sentenced to nine months in prison. After her release, she was more cautious about summoning the dead. She went off to join them in 1956, aged 59.

She was not, as is sometimes asserted, the last person convicted under the Witchcraft Act because six months later the same Act was use to jail a 72-year-old called Jane Yorke.

Her defenders at Full Moon Investigations are in no doubt that Mrs Duncan was a gifted medium persecuted by the authorities for fear of what else she might cause the dead to reveal. They see it as a late example of centuries of persecution of real or imagined witches, many of whom may have been faith healers, herbalists, or people who were either benevolent or just a bit cranky.

James VI of Scotland, who reigned in England as James I, was notoriously obsessed with witches, which was why writing Macbeth was a smart career move by William Shakespeare. Poor Agnes Simpson, the “grace wife of Keith”, was interrogated by the king in person, then deprived of sleep and subjected to days of barbaric torture until she confessed to being the leader of 200 witches who rode out to sea in sieves at Halloween and enjoyed a rendezvous with Satan in North Berwick.

Members of the Full Moon team feel very strongly about injustices such as this, because they are themselves the sort of people who might have been burnt at the stake if they had had the misfortune to live in Tudor or Stuart times. Their website describes them as having “a wealth of knowledge in all aspects of the paranormal”. Ewan Irvine, whose name heads the list of signatories of yesterday’s petition, discovered his vocation as medium at the age of 19 after “many strange experiences that could not be explained logically”.

There are still places in the world where being accused of witchcraft is life-threatening. Human Rights Watch has appealed this week to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia to rescind a death sentence passed on anilliterate woman, Fawza Falih, who is accused of bewitching a man and making him impotent.

The main newspaper in Papua New Guinea, The National, reported the case this week of a woman seven months pregnant who was accused of sorcery when her neighbour suddenly died. Villagers hanged her from a tree. She gave birth while she was struggling to free herself. Mother and baby are in hospital.

The British authorities stopped taking witchcraft seriously nearly 300 years ago. The whole point of the 1735 Witchcraft Act was not to end witchcraft, but to end silly stories and phoney seances. The Act is like a forerunner to the Trade Descriptions Act; it made it illegal to con people into thinking you were performing magic.

Mrs Duncan already had a pre-war conviction for fraud, when during one her seances a guest grabbed at the shape of a ghost emerging from the other side under her skirt, and found it was a knitted elastic undervest.

At her trial at the Old Bailey, in 1944, Mrs Duncan’s defence team called witnesses, including a founder of Psychic News, to convince the jury she really could summon the dead. They were more convinced by the evidence of Portsmouth’s chief of police, who called her an “unmitigated humbug and pest”.

William Colvin, an investigative journalist who launched the campaign to rehabilitate Mrs Duncan, is in no doubt that she was the innocent victim of a judicial frame-up, who had a “precious gift that brought comfort to thousands”. Mr Colvin also concluded that Winston Churchill was a druid, who visited Mrs Duncan in prison. This is unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that she was a fraud who was rightly banged up for making money from the grief and gullibility of the bereaved. If I am wrong, no doubt I shall be turned into a toad.