ghost hunting, excursion #1
Earlier this week my best friend and I drove over to Colma. We didn't leave Walnut Creek until 6pm and my first thoughts was that it was going to be too dark by the time we got there to take any photographs. So I drove us to Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, first. It was still quite light, and she was wanting to shoot photos on the edge of darkness, if not entirely in darkness. That type of darkness was 45 minutes away. So we decided, "what the hell"-like to just go for it and drive all the way to Colma. By the time we got there, it was dark. Fully, black night, dark. This was very exciting to me.
Partly because the whole point of going to Colma with her was to go into the no-trespassing, what I've been calling, "secret crypt". A part of Cypress Lawn cemetery that is virtually impenetrable to normal visitors. I learned how to gain entrance to it a couple of weeks ago, and have been trying to get a model to go there w/me for a photo shoot. My best friend is my favorite model, but she doesn't consider herself a model and only let's me photograph her on special occasions. This turned out to be a spectacularly wonderful turn of special circumstances.
So I parked the car across the street at the visitor center of the cemetery, so that the car was off the street and somewhat out of site. It's really not allowed for people to visit the cemetery after dark, so we had to sneak in. There are only a couple of cemeteries I go into, or have gone into in the/after dark. And I had never been to this cemetery after dark before. I shared with her a story of when I had been inside Mountain View Cemetery just a few moments after total darkness had swallowed up the cemetery, and admitted that I felt rather terrified. And let on that I was feeling fearful about walking into this cemetery, in the total dark. I knew my way around, so that was not where the fear came from. It's being inside the territory of the dead when you cannot see with your normal eyes. In the dark, shadows play tricks on you. Also, there is that mystery of the darkness. It gets thick. And here in Cypress Lawn cemetery, the darkness was extremely thick. I did not feel fearful though because she was with me, and she exhibited no signs of fear.
We got to the secret crypt and she was up and over the wall with no effort. Extremely impressive considering that she was wearing a dress and flats. Even once inside what I consider to be the creepiest section of any cemetery I've ever been in, she showed no signs of fear. We did a mini-shoot in this area with my good camera. I always want more photos of her than she's comfortable allowing me to take so we only stayed inside there for about 20 minutes. She wanted to get down to what she considered to be the more serious business of the evening. Using the apps on my Android phone I had recently installed to "hunt ghosts". Namely, Echovox.
We went back out into the main area of the cemetery and found the steps of a large granite crypt to sit on. We had seen demos of people using the app but had never used it yet. This was our very first time to turn it on. We listened very attentively to the utterings that were stirring. I'm not going to go in depth to explain what Echovox is or how it works other than to say it is a cell phone version of what more sophisticated "ghost boxes" are/do. Cutting to the chase, here's what we felt that we heard.
We moved to three different locations in the cemetery, but primarily heard one distinctive female voice, and another male voice. A lot of single words came out like, "you", "two", "people"... those words were repeated a lot. But as we got more used to deciphering the chatter (and by chatter I do mean that there seemed to be layers of voices trying to get heard), more distinctive and meaningful words and phrases came out. We both heard "first timer" - which we assumed that they thought we were "first timers" using a ghost box. The other distinctive word that she really picked up on was "antlers", which had huge significance because she has a tattoo of a deer with antlers on her neck. This meant that we really were being perceived by spirits on the other plane. We've heard in the demo videos that people are able to get the spirits to state the names of the humans doing the ghost-boxing, but we were not able to hear either of our names spoken. We are awkward with knowing how to speak to "them" yet. We made some attempts to speak to them, to try to direct the conversation but it didn't seem like it was working.
On this excursion I forgot to bring any candles or incense which I thought would be appropriate to use to create a ritualistic opening prayer for protection with. We tried to sit near statues of angels to ask them to protect us from letting any unfavorable or unkind spirits from invading our sessions. Oh, then the other things we heard in each of the three places we sat with the Echovox was what seemed to be the spirits getting impatient with us and they said, "stop", and "leave". We didn't argue with them, and after the third and last attempt to hear from them we gave up for the night. I have some photos that I'll add to the blog later with notes.
Partly because the whole point of going to Colma with her was to go into the no-trespassing, what I've been calling, "secret crypt". A part of Cypress Lawn cemetery that is virtually impenetrable to normal visitors. I learned how to gain entrance to it a couple of weeks ago, and have been trying to get a model to go there w/me for a photo shoot. My best friend is my favorite model, but she doesn't consider herself a model and only let's me photograph her on special occasions. This turned out to be a spectacularly wonderful turn of special circumstances.
So I parked the car across the street at the visitor center of the cemetery, so that the car was off the street and somewhat out of site. It's really not allowed for people to visit the cemetery after dark, so we had to sneak in. There are only a couple of cemeteries I go into, or have gone into in the/after dark. And I had never been to this cemetery after dark before. I shared with her a story of when I had been inside Mountain View Cemetery just a few moments after total darkness had swallowed up the cemetery, and admitted that I felt rather terrified. And let on that I was feeling fearful about walking into this cemetery, in the total dark. I knew my way around, so that was not where the fear came from. It's being inside the territory of the dead when you cannot see with your normal eyes. In the dark, shadows play tricks on you. Also, there is that mystery of the darkness. It gets thick. And here in Cypress Lawn cemetery, the darkness was extremely thick. I did not feel fearful though because she was with me, and she exhibited no signs of fear.
We got to the secret crypt and she was up and over the wall with no effort. Extremely impressive considering that she was wearing a dress and flats. Even once inside what I consider to be the creepiest section of any cemetery I've ever been in, she showed no signs of fear. We did a mini-shoot in this area with my good camera. I always want more photos of her than she's comfortable allowing me to take so we only stayed inside there for about 20 minutes. She wanted to get down to what she considered to be the more serious business of the evening. Using the apps on my Android phone I had recently installed to "hunt ghosts". Namely, Echovox.
We went back out into the main area of the cemetery and found the steps of a large granite crypt to sit on. We had seen demos of people using the app but had never used it yet. This was our very first time to turn it on. We listened very attentively to the utterings that were stirring. I'm not going to go in depth to explain what Echovox is or how it works other than to say it is a cell phone version of what more sophisticated "ghost boxes" are/do. Cutting to the chase, here's what we felt that we heard.
We moved to three different locations in the cemetery, but primarily heard one distinctive female voice, and another male voice. A lot of single words came out like, "you", "two", "people"... those words were repeated a lot. But as we got more used to deciphering the chatter (and by chatter I do mean that there seemed to be layers of voices trying to get heard), more distinctive and meaningful words and phrases came out. We both heard "first timer" - which we assumed that they thought we were "first timers" using a ghost box. The other distinctive word that she really picked up on was "antlers", which had huge significance because she has a tattoo of a deer with antlers on her neck. This meant that we really were being perceived by spirits on the other plane. We've heard in the demo videos that people are able to get the spirits to state the names of the humans doing the ghost-boxing, but we were not able to hear either of our names spoken. We are awkward with knowing how to speak to "them" yet. We made some attempts to speak to them, to try to direct the conversation but it didn't seem like it was working.
On this excursion I forgot to bring any candles or incense which I thought would be appropriate to use to create a ritualistic opening prayer for protection with. We tried to sit near statues of angels to ask them to protect us from letting any unfavorable or unkind spirits from invading our sessions. Oh, then the other things we heard in each of the three places we sat with the Echovox was what seemed to be the spirits getting impatient with us and they said, "stop", and "leave". We didn't argue with them, and after the third and last attempt to hear from them we gave up for the night. I have some photos that I'll add to the blog later with notes.
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| on the steps of a crypt using Echovox |
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| inside the "secret crypt" |
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