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Paranormal
Articles

The following are actual articles as posted dealing
with various paranormal happenings.

Chile: Ghostly Image Captured on Cellphone

SOURCE: IIEE and Crónica Newspaper
DATE: 02.24.07

CHILE: CELLPHONE PICKS UP GHOSTLY IMAGE
by Tania Merino

Technicians believe the phenomenon is "bizarre"

The time was 11:02 pm on February 4, 2007 when after a family
get-together in a house at Villa Cap, a 25 year-old man tried to take
a photo of his mother with his cellphone camera. All of the guests
were gone and only the young man and his parents were in the
house. It was for this reason that uncertainty gripped them all when
they saw the images that the cellphone had captured.

Only in one of the snapshots, taken in a quick sequence of four
photographs, did the woman appear. The rest of them picked up
sections of the face of a man who looks straight into the lens and
who was never in the room.

"My mom got nervous, I put the cellphone away, we checked the
house, but there was no one there but us," said the young man,
who preferred anonymity rather than face public questioning of his
sanity. He said that "a heavy atmosphere" weighed over the house
at the time, that it was "saturated", and that strange things had
already occurred them, such as objects moving without any reason
whatsoever.

Upon seeing what had happened, he fired another volley of three
photos and the same thing occured. The man's face reappeared.

He nervously showed us the time and date of the images captured
by the cellphone. All of them correspond to the hour and minute he
indicated and each sequence falls within the same minute: 23.02,
23.03, 23.05 and 23.06 minutes. the photos remain inside the
cellphone until their origin can be ascertained.

The next day, he informed his brother of the event and they
uploaded the images to a computer through a USB cable. They
assembled the parts of the jigsaw puzzle and were surprised to
clearly see the features of a man aged between thirty and forty,
wearing a white suit and shirt. "This is a person that doesn't exist in
the household; no one knows him. No one in my family wears three
piece suits, to begin with."

"I even asked the old owner of my mother's house and she had
never seen him either," he added.
Furthermore, he added that "the other day a neighbor who drives a
taxi cab was getting home at 3 a.m. when he saw an image appear
in the backyard of our house, a man wearing a three-piece suit and
smoking. The driver turned oun the headlights, but by the time he
did so, there was no one there." Our interviewee showed the
cellphone images to the neighbor and the driver recognized him -
not by the face, but by the shape and the suit.

"Now I want to know who this person is, what he wants and what he
needs," he concluded fearfully.
We consulted with an expert from a cellular telephony company and
explained the situation. "Nowadays, cameras have a VGA system
with pixels, and capture the image that is before them. These can
only be manipulated and rearranged by editing, but there is no way
that they can invent an image or create that of a person that isn't
standing in front of the camera," explained Roman Montero. He
admitted that it is "bizarre, because I can't find a logical explanation
for it. It is impossible that it should occur. A camera cannot
photograph something that it can't see," he added. He suggested
taking the photos to a lab and to have them analyzed. He
understood the urge to associate the images with a ghost. In earlier
times, the exposure of a negative could justify such a thing, but it is
not possible with a digital photograph.

Above Article : About.com

Fortean Historical Archive

Thursday, March 1, 2007
Ghosts of Long Island

While Long Island may not be known as a ufological or
cryptozoological hot spot to most, if there's one thing that the island
does have plenty of, it's ghosts. The most famous case from Long
Island would without a doubt have to be the "Amityville haunting",
spawning a series of movies and national interest in the events that
took place in "High Hopes" despite the case eventually being
exposed as a hoax. Regardless of this fact, reports of haunting and
ghostly experiences have being noted in local newspapers for over
a century, serving as a documentation of the island's paranormal
history. While there are many cases that could be discussed and
analyzed, for now a small catalog of reports taken from that most
Fortean of newspapers, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, shall serve as a
quick illustration of the nature of ghost reports near the end of the
19th century:

1) Visits The Earth Again - The Screams of a
Murderer's Ghost Heard in Port Jefferson (Aug. 11,
1889)

The residents of Port Jefferson were terrified in this year by
mysterious, ear-piercing screams issuing from a barn on the Emmet
Darling property. It was known to the local residents as a place
where a double murder had taken place many years prior, ending
with the murderer, a Mr. Waters, hanging himself in said barn. The
eerie screams are said to have begun soon afterwards, lasting for
several decades and always ringing out from the barn roughly
around midnight. Conventional explanations, such as a creaky
weather vane or the call of a nocturnal bird, were put forth in order
to explain the phenomenon, but all were ruled out as not being able
to adequately explain the phenomenon. The screams eventually
died out, but returned with a vengeance shortly before the article
was written, despite that Emmet Darling's aunt, who lived at the
property at the time, denied ever hearing the screams (one
suspects that she might have been in denial). This article is
interesting, not only because it took place in the town next to mine,
but because strange, high pitched screams have long been a
staple of Fortean phenomena. Indeed, as Loren Coleman writes in
his book Mysterious America, "This peculiar sound - also described
like that of a baby crying- often spills out of haunted houses to
bathe the locale in eerie vibration. Strangely, the awesome Bigfoot
seem to emit this sound, as well as those elusive phantom panthers
that prowl the landscape. And, of course, the legendary banshee is
famous for its terrible scream. Often, a myriad of "unrelated"
unexplained phenomena have the same element in common."

Now, of course, no honest or sensible researcher would try to link
haunted houses to phantom panthers, or Bigfoot to the banshee,
but it has been increasingly noted by researchers that many other
types of phenomena do share many similar aspects. Whether this
has any significance towards their meaning, however, still remains
a subject of debate. (Note: In a later post, I plan on returning to the
characteristic of high pitched screams in anomalous phenomena
reports, and how it has been consistently included in reports
throughout the decades).

2) A Lively Ghost - Which Is Causing Consternation
Near Far Rockaway (Dec. 7th, 1885)

As the heading of the article noted, the specter that was seen
regularly by "scores of persons" in the belfry of the Methodist
Episcopal Church was indeed a playful character, jumping and
dancing throughout the belfry. It also exhibited other curious
behaviors, such as "enlarging and decreasing in size according to
the angle of observation", or following certain witnesses and
hanging around their homes for hours. Some people even claimed
to hear the bell of the church ring at odd hours of the night. In fact,
one night, as the article notes, "Half the village declares that at
precisely ten o'clock the bell was tolled, and the other half is
laughing at the superstition, as they call it. Immediately after the
tolling, three hearty amens were heard, and then the specter
flattened itself out on the roof. This was interpreted to be an
attitude of prayer."

It is noted that, appropriately enough, the ghost supposedly makes
its appearance from a graveyard, though there are no reports in
the article of any witnesses actually seeing the ghost appear in the
adjacent cemetery. Jerome Clark, in his book Unnatural
Phenomena, reported a news story from Arkansas in 1894 dealing
with the appearance of a ghost in a belfry that was also alleged to
have rung a bell, showing that at least some apparitions seem to
have a fondness for church belfry's. Interestingly enough, although
not related to ghosts and haunting, Rockaway Beach was
experiencing a "wild man scare" during this same period, with many
people claiming to have witnessed a strange wild man on the
nearby beach, and who was theorized to be an insane shipwrecked
sailor (these reports and others from the island will be the subject
of an upcoming post).

3) A Fiery Tongue - The Latest Long Island Ghost
Story (Dec. 18, 1885)

The "fiery tongue" noted in the title of this piece belongs to a
specter that was seen regularly on the Centerville race course just
south of Woodhaven, and just like the stories from Port Jefferson
and Far Rockaway noted above, it not only reappeared after a
span of five years but was witnesses regularly by scores of people
every night. The ghost was seen to first appear in the vicinity of the
stables at the old Centerville Hotel and then moving at a quick
speed across the race course, stopping at certain intervals and
even reportedly saying "Whoa!". Disagreements (perhaps
inevitably) arose between the witnesses on certain details such as
whether the apparition was wearing a robe of white or a garment
more the color of sheep's wool, and whether the specter was the
ghost of one of two jockeys murdered on the track, or perhaps the
troubled spirit of the murderer responsible for one of the bloody
deeds. However, as the article notes, "But on one other point there
is no disagreement - the ghost spits fire like a foundry chimney and
leaves a sulfurous odor behind it."
The characteristic of fire spitting is something that does not come
up in ghost reports very often, making this an unusual case if we
stick mainly to looking at reports of ghosts and haunting. If we
broaden our range and look at other Fortean phenomena,
however, we will notice that fire spitting is a detail that appeared in
some Spring-Heeled Jack reports, to continue the train of thought
noted earlier about similarities between anomalous phenomena
occurrences. While I would not advance the theory that
Spring-Heeled Jack was a ghost, and the reports of his spitting fire
may have very well been exaggerated, it remains an interesting
coincidence none the less.

While these three accounts are but a small sample of the available
reports from Long Island, and indeed I have some in my files that I
have not touched upon yet, they represent the kind of ghostly
experiences that Long Islanders have reported over the years and
that form part of our paranormal history. In my next post, I plan on
discussing the periodic "ghost scares" that have overtaken parts of
the island from time to time, and which even led to the creation of
ghost hunting expeditions. Stay tuned.

Posted by Brian Gaugler

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