(above - my childhood home in the mid 1860s after the war and the basement today)
In 2009, I embarked on a study of 50 haunted sites around America and their features and histories to discover if there is a formula for haunted places, or as I like to call them "spirit vessels."
I grew up in an over 200-year-old home that was used during the Civil War as a hospital. The floors were still stained with their blood and the land filled with relics that we dug up and displayed in a cabinet. It had me wondering from a young age why, as a psychic, I noted certain buildings were more haunted. I had come to learn the "features" that make an ideal spirit vessel. Some buildings simply had the "right stuff" to show promise and I intuitively knew those features.
My childhood home sat atop a never ending stream and was originally called the Springfield for that. We drank the well water and enjoyed robust health. But, the building itself was an ideal spirit vessel of construction from the basement to the tin roof. Combined with traumatic history, the running water, the geology, and building construction and layout, it was a dream spirit vessel and I wrote about the incidents we had growing up there in my book, "Growing Up With Ghosts."
Here are the results looking at features -
The haunted scale measured 1-6; 1 as least haunted features and 6 as most haunted features.
Geology (in order of most potent geology and then descending in importance)
1. Limestone: 13 of 14 sites with limestone ranked a 5 or 6 on the haunted scale
2. Shale: 12 of 13 sites with shale ranked a 5 or 6 on the haunted scale
3. Sandstone: 20 of 22 sites with sandstone ranked a 5 or 6 on the haunted scale
4. Granite: 1 of 2 sites with granite ranked a 5 or 6 on the haunted scale.
Sedimentary is a rather vague title for a type of geology and just about all the 50 sites had this kind in one way or another, but then a great majority of the land in the US is sedimentary, so that's not necessarily significant, except that volcanic areas seemed to be very devoid of activity, except mining towns with copper.
WATERWAYS: (I considered if the site was within a mile of running water, stream, river, ocean)
41 of 50 sites had this feature--that is very significant. It's also hard to discover whether or not the other 9 sites had underground springs, so it's a very hard one to judge. Also, people tended to build homes near waterways long ago before we had wonderful plumbing and such. I did not, however, find one super haunted site that did not have running water nearby.
TRAINS: This one intrigued me because of the strange correlation, but now I am leaning more toward it being an incidental finding and considering removing it from the formula all together which might alter a few things, but statistically it wasn't horribly impressive and, as I said, people tended to build older homes near trains and trains tended to be built near towns.
32 sites had train tracks nearby, 18 did not.
DEATH/TRAUMA:
42 of 50 sites.
OLDER THAN 50 YEARS:
All 50 sites
CONSTRUCTION:
Masonry/block/brick were 43 of the 47 that could be judged (one place was a sign, one place was a ship, and one place was a cemetery, so construction could not be included)
Frame were 4 of 47.
All of this has unfolded to make me search for more answers about construction and haunting features. National Geographic had a wonderful program about seeking out the source of ghosts. A study was performed at Eastern State Penn, a very actively haunted location.
It was discovered that, with the spoke-like stone construction, when it rained, it created corridors of moving infrasound (sound below the audible range of human hearing), but exceedingly uncomfortable to people who would feel watched, see shapes and figures, and generally experience typical haunting features.
What happens when a massive building with the right shape is constructed to take advantage of wind and rain? Does nature then amplify this harmonic and create certain feelings in the humans within? Is this perhaps the principal around why lighthouse seem to be particularly haunted with their stone cylindrical shape and water crashing outside?
I next began to take my research on the unusual ancient stone structures that were circular and the new study of acoustic archaeology and wondered what the ancients knew about shape, stone, resonance and acoustics that might have created either visions or perhaps even real connections with other realms. Why did they drag particular stones huge distances in order to construct these "vessels"?
Stonehenge (above)
Eastern State Penn (above)
Chaco Canyon (above)
Arkaim, Russia (above)
Lighthouse (above)
Let's have a look at how sound affects the human vessel:
The use of biaural beats and HemiSync rhythms can induce astral projection. Does this possible cause the mind to leave the body or simply stimulate visual hallucinations? This may be the key to hauntings and to ancients' purposeful constructions.
The use of biaural beats and HemiSync rhythms can induce astral projection. Does this possible cause the mind to leave the body or simply stimulate visual hallucinations? This may be the key to hauntings and to ancients' purposeful constructions.
What are the effects of infrasound on a human body? We know that there is a man who can make infrasound and physicians say it is because he has longer than usual vocal chords.
Might an ancient giant have extraordinarily long vocal chords and the ability to create infrasound? What if he created this sound within a stone structure that could create a resonant frequency to make something happen? Might his symbol from their ancient culture and borrowed by natives around the world be the symbol of their sound attraction?
What can infrasound do? Let's look at this experiment as to what it can do to water -
Does earth resonance, sound, frequency, acoustics have something to do with the nature of, or perception of, other realms?
(Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum - largest stone structure in America and likely an ideal spirit vessel)
CONCLUSION
Perhaps the ideal "spirit vessel" is one that combines geology, stone construction, building shape, placement on the land, nearby cemeteries and waterways and the cumulative history of bursts of human emotion over centuries.
