This week’s story involves a total passion of mine. Ghost hunting.
Not that I’ve ever gone ghost hunting myself. I would, if given an opportunity. It’s not like I’d be afraid to sit in an empty house, with a few fellow investigators, completely wired for audio, video, spectrum analysis, thermal imaging, EMF, EVP, and whatever else someone’s concocted to sell high tech equipment to true believers like me. In fact, I’d love to get into the field as an investigator. Maybe even get on one of those ghost hunter shows.
Maybe I could be a ghost hunting journalist. Wouldn’t that be great? Reports from the field. Given a nice “you are there” twist, for those who actually read, as opposed to watching it on TV, Google, or YouTube, like I do.
Every day.
By the way, here’s the best video clip I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s not that awesome, as video drama goes, but it is the only one I’ve ever seen that couldn’t have been faked. I always offer this one up when confronted with a hardcore “you guys are idiots” skeptic.
It’s been authenticated and analyzed to death. Yeah, it’s pretty mundane, but then, true paranormal actually is pretty mundane when you bump into it in real life.
That, however, is not the case with our feature presentation this weekend.
The story I’ve chosen this week is fictional. The location featured is not fictional, and is located exactly where I located it for this tale. The disturbing history of the location is also accurate, as are the names of the players in the horrific drama, referred to in the story, that occurred at that location nearly 40 years ago.
I know this, because I knew, in the way that a 13 year old could ever know someone much older and wilder than he could’ve been at age 13, the main character in that drama and watched a lot of the fallout occur in my small town in UpState New York. It’s all public record, so go ahead and do your Googling to make sure, but I know what I know about what it is that I know.
The rest of it, this particular account of a liar and his lies, well, that’s just good clean fun.
The Liar
My name is Ben Waltman, and I’m a born liar. I lie for a living, and I believe in nothing and nobody. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I do believe in ghosts. It’s the only thing I really do believe in, but I believe in them in a way that makes up for everything else that I don’t believe in. I believe in ghosts more than I do or am anything else in my life.
That wasn’t always true about me. It certainly wasn’t always the case that my belief in ghosts was the first thing I’d think of when putting together a list of personality traits that would describe me. Not that belief in anything is a personality trait. At least I’m pretty sure that a specific belief isn’t considered a personality trait, although I think that to be a person who believes might be. To be capable of believing, that is.
I wasn’t always capable of believing. That much I’ll admit right off the bat here. In fact, I don’t know that I had any real strong beliefs whatsoever once I got past the whole Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, Monster-Under-The-Bed phase of my life. I tried to believe in God. I went to church and I even got baptized. The real baptized. As in “born again” baptized.
It was in the late 70s. I’d been dating this girl that I’d met in Virginia, while I was on a temporary duty assignment in the military. Long time ago. We sorta got all worked up
