Most Haunted is most excellent...

There's a show on the Travel Channel called, Most Haunted that my wife loves to watch. Lately, she's been interested in shows about hauntings, which is a welcome change from the 24 hours of cops and detective reality shows that she usually watches. If it isn't City Confidential, it's something like Cops that she's watching.

Most Haunted is a show show in England and the crew there visit some of England's most haunted places, hence the name. The crew consists of the female host, a historian, a paranormal research and various other crew members. The only one that I really remember the name of is Derek Acorah, a medium who speaks to his contact 'Sam' for information about places they're visiting. He gets a sense of what's happening in places and gets the names of people that haunt the place from Sam. Usually, he freaks out the staff by freaking out at things they cannot see. In one episode, Derek continually yells at a bad spirit, who he claimed was responsible for most of the mischief in the place

They usually hole up in a haunted place for 24 hours. When it gets dark, they turn off all the lights and use night vision cameras. They get in groups to see if they can contact the ghosts or sometimes they split up even more to single camera encounters in dark rooms to try to get in contact with the ghosts that reside in these haunted places.

The Most Haunted crew has visited a brewery, several hotels, a huge opera house-type mansion and a prison. Some have shown more activity than others, but all had something strange happen at one time or another.

One particular hotel in England had activity in room 214 and 217 in which guest have been woken up in the middle of the night to see a woman in white. Other times, people hear someone whispering in their ears or pushing on their chests. The hotel staff said that people come down white as sheets with tears in their eyes requesting another room.

In this hotel, nothng extraordinary happened other than the women crew members that were lying on a bed in one of the haunted rooms felt that the bed was moving. It was only when they reviewed a stationary camera that they noticed the chair and bed moving. Over a six-minute period, the chair turned to one side and then back to it's original position and the bed shifted in place a few times. This was from sped up footage. Pretty creepy if you ask me.

At another location, some of the guys on the crew attempt to contact a ghost that supposedly threw a boy across the room in a haunted hotel. After a long time of nothing happening, one of the men yells that the ghost must be afraid because there's a room full of grown men. It's at this time that a door across the room bangs hard and the TV turns on. The guys turn it off. It comes back on. They keep trying and it comes back on. They unplug the TV and it still turns on. Needless to say, they hightail it out of there and spend the night in one of their crew trucks rather than go back.

Personally, I think that ghosts exist. If I ever saw one, I'd be screaming and running out of the place I saw the ghost like a little girl. I'm that much of a pussy when it comes to ghosts. If I see a movie about ghosts, I usually have to turn on all of the lights when I move from room to room. Sleep that night will usually be restless as I'll relieve the parts of the movie that were creepy.

In most haunted, I have to admire the restraint and courage of the cast members of the show. When they turn out the lights, it's bad enough that every light in the place is off, but some of the members go off by themselves to try to contact the ghosts. I just have to say something to that if that was suggested to me "No f&*king way!"

Oh sure, I might go in there and sit down, but as soon as a gust of wind goes by me, a floorboard creaks or any other strange noise occurs, you'd probably see the camera flying to the ground and me running away like the sissy boy that I am. I mean, what's the point? Why by myself? Send me with someone braver than me that I can cling to? Sure. Send me in the deepest, farthest part of a haunted house by myself? F&*k. That.

I'm sure my days of not seeing ghosts are going to expire sometime. There are too many strange places to visit. Too many hotels to frequent. New homes to buy that may have had a murder committed in them.

The closest I've ever came to seeing or feeling the presence of a ghost was when I went on a business trip to Davenport, Iowa. The guy I went with was a devout Catholic and booked up in a place that used to be an old Abbey. Consequently, it was called the Abbey. Basically, it was a place that used to have a chapel and nuns would live there until they died.

Before we got to the place, the Catholic guy talked about how he had stayed there the year before and he just had such a feeling of peace when he was at the Abbey. He talked about it at length. I'm not religious, so I knew I wouldn't find peace there, but I figured that maybe it was relaxing so I'd be open minded.

We check into the hotel and we each go to our separate rooms. My room was the room closest to everything. The Catholic guy informed me that the rooms on the second and third floors were rooms that used to be part of the rooms the nuns used to stay in, but walls were knocked down and three nun rooms were made into one big room.

I walk in the room and set my bags down. Everything is white. The building was white. The walls were white. The bedspread was white. Interesting...

I sit down on the bed and turn on the TV. It was then that I noticed the pamplet on the table. I start to read. It's the history of the Abbey, which explains that the nuns stayed here until they died and never left. During Sunday mass, they were behind a veiled screen so that people wouldn't see them clearly. After the died, they were buried in the basement, which were ... (say what?) I read that back. Yep, it says the nuns were buried in the basement after they died. The next sentence assured me that all of them were removed and buried in a cemetary during the renovation of the Abbey. Very reassuring. Isn't this how Poltergeist ended? They found out that there were ghosts because the suburb was built on top of a cemetary?

Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, but I always felt that I was being watched when I was there. I hated going to sleep because of the whole alone in the dark thing that I mentioned. I would eventually fall into a restless sleep. It was then that every single night I was jolted away to find myself staring at the alarm clock at 4 am. I never saw anything or felt anything move in the room, but I was still creeped out.

Curious, I go upstairs one day to the third floor where I was told that one of the old nun rooms was set up to show people what kind of room they lived in. I walk onto the floor and feel creeped out already. It's not a very wide hallway so I immediately hope I don't see at the end two dead nuns like Danny sees those two twin girls in the Shining that ask him to play with him. I quickly walk down to the middle room and peer through the glass door set up. There is a room the size of a walk in closet with a small bed and some clothes hung up near it. I turn and quickly race to the end of the hallway, all the way not looking back while the hair stands up on the back of my head.

Yes, I'm a wimp and it was probably my mind playing tricks on me, but I genuinely felt creeped out. Not the Catholic guy! He would come to breakfast every morning and ask how I slept. I'd say that I slept okay and he'd go one his usual, "Oh, I slept so good! I feel so at peace here!" spiel.

Okay, so that story wasn't that creepy save for the realization that bodies were at one time buried in the basement, but I have a better one of what happened to a friend of mine on another company trip.

I think it was in Michigan where this occurred. My friend Cody was set up to stay with a few other guys on a company buying trip in a historic hotel. This historic hotel also had the reputation for being haunted.

He had checked into his room and not noticed anything unusual, but it wasn't until they had returned from their first day of work and were sitting at the hotel bar when they started to hear the stories. The barmaid there was telling them that some think the hotel was haunted because strange things happened. She said a few of the rooms had activity in them. Cody asked if his room number was one of them. She smiled and said, "Oh, you're going to have fun tonight!"

Cody thought it was weird, but didn't place much stock in the story. He went to his room and watched TV until it was time for his usual bedtime. At one point, Cody reached for the remote and noticed that he couldn't find it. He had just used it, but now it was gone. He looked under the covers, under the bed and in the desk drawers, but found no sign of the remote control.

He thought he'd look for the remote in the morning and turned out the light. Shortly after turning out the light, Cody was startled by the knobs on the locked double doors suddendly clank hard as if someone had tried to open them. He sat up with a 'Huh!' reaction when he felt something whiz by his head. Bang! Something crashed into the headboard behind him. He quickly turned on the light. It was the remote control. Quickly, he turned on the TV and just sat there... for two hours. It was about 2 in the morning when he finally said aloud, "Okay... I can live with you if you just deal with me for a few days." He shut the light and TV off and went to sleep without incident.

Not wanting to be seen as a total wimp, he didn't mention it to the hotel staff, but he did mention it to his co-workers. They'd say stuff like, "Hey Cody, good luck with your ghosts!" when they'd leave him for the night. Cody didn't go right to his room after dinner, however. He went to the bar and stayed there drinking until the bar closed. Then he'd quickly run into the room, take a shower and go to bed. Cody would then get up in the morning an leave as soon as he was dressed.

The remote control flying by his head wasn't the only incident, however. Cody said that even though the hallway behind the wall that his bed sat against was usually deserted, it seemed well traveled during the night as he heard contant sets of footsteps all night long.

With the week finally over, Cody wearily checked into another hotel for a layover before flying back to Nebraska. When he checked in, the desk clerk told him that all the regular rooms were booked, but they had put him in a suite for the night. He opens the door and there's a room with a hottub in the middle of it. He thought to himself, "Well, this makes up for it."

When a I worked in San Francisco, another friend of mine was telling me about a friend of his in the San Francisco area who lived in a haunted house. He said that this guy didn't really like to talk about it, but would say that there were mainly things that would move, lights that were switched on that shouldn't have been and doors closing or opening by themselves.

One incident occurred when this guy was sitting in his living room by himself watching television. He hears the garage door open up and a car drive in. Pretty soon he sees his wife walk through the living room. He said hello to her, but she just walked on by and up the stairs. He just figured that she had a hard day at work and wanted to rest. He was just starting to wonder when she was going to come back downstairs when he heard the garage door open, a car pull in and his wife walked into the room. He turned white as a sheet when she walked in and said hello.

He had sort of noticed that this woman that walked through looked indifferent to him being there and was dressed in clothes that he had never seen. They looked upstairs, but the mystery woman was no where to be seen.

All of this talk of ghosts tends to creep me out, especially when it's dark and I'm alone, like right now. Granted I have my cat with me, but it still creeps me out. However, part of me seems compelled to read up on ghosts and to someday try to seek one out. I just love to torture myself I guess.