Another story from the Arkansas Gazette this week, which apparently is your home for all ghost stories from this great state, along with this blog at least. So if you click on that little label link after this article that says "ghosts", you'll get spooky tales from the Booneville Sanitarium, the Arkansas State Capital building, the haunted Hardy Hotel and many of the ghost hunting groups. Do it!
LITTLE ROCK — Not all hunters wear bright orange and sit in tree stands.
Karen Shillings’ prey is the paranormal. She is the director of the Central Arkansas Society for Paranormal Research.
“The group used to be huge,” Shillings said. “It was more like a social event than anything else. Now we have a group of a few ladies, and I can do what I love to do: investigate haunted locations.”
With ghost hunting, she said, the smaller the group, the better the results.
“We usually get more evidence when fewer people are involved,” Shillings said. “Maybe the spirits get confused and back off when there are too many people around. For some reason, spirits seem to like me. Sometimes they even do things I ask them to do.”
As a child growing up in Cabot, Shillings said she knew she was sensitive to the supernatural world.
“There was one interesting thing that happened to me at my grandmother’s house while playing in the backyard one day at about the age of 4,” Shillings wrote on the CASPR Web site. “My mother and grandmother saw me playing at the fence and talking. At first they thought I was just playing, but upon further viewing, they decided that it looked as if I was having a conversation with someone.
“When I came inside, they asked who I had been talking to. I answered that a very sweet old lady had been there, and yes, we had been talking for quite awhile. This disturbed my family, since they never observed anyone else around the fence, but they wrote it off as a playful imagination.
“A few days later, I was looking through our family Bible and from out of the pages dropped a photo of an elderly woman. I got excited and told them that this was definitely the woman who had been speaking with me in the backyard that day. My mother and grandmother were shocked because the photo was one of my great-grandmother. She had been dead for over 10 years. Although I can’t remember the encounter, I believe that it is possible that she was visiting me,” Shillings wrote.
Children, she said, are often less fearful of the unknown.
“I think that children are allowed much more contact with the spirit world than adults,” Shillings said.
When going on a ghost hunt, Shillings said it is vital to stay strong when confronted with an unknown entity. She recalled a particularly scary encounter with an unfriendly visitor that her years of experience didn’t prepare her for.
“One night I arrived to investigate a home where three teenage girls had been terrorized repeatedly by an aggressive and violent unseen entity,” Shillings said. “This is the type of haunting considered to be classic poltergeist activity by most researchers. I chose to stay alone in the bedroom where the most ghostly activity had occurred, in the bed where one of the teenagers had been attacked repeatedly.
“No one had slept in this room for months. In fact, the whole family refused to enter by day or night. Fearlessly, I made my way to the bed. A few minutes passed and, still wide awake, I turned from my right side onto my left and immediately became aware that someone or something was lying in the bed facing me. In the semidarkness, the shape and outline of a shoulder came into focus.
“My shock turned to horror as I realized that I was nose to nose with the entity. Instead of a face, though, I was staring into a faceless black hole. It exuded an oppressive, tentacle-like aura that enveloped me with an icy mist.
“For the first time in my experience as a ghost hunter, I was frozen in fear. I pulled the coversover my head, curled up in a ball and waited for its next move. As I lay there, my heart pounding in my ears, I sensed it had gone and quickly made my way across the room to the light switch.
“It was at that moment that I finally understood the reason some people are afraid of the dark,” Shillings said.
Although the terms spirits and ghosts are often used interchangeably, Shillings said she believes there are distinct differences between the two.
Spirits, she said, have crossed over, gone to heaven and then chosen to make their presence known to some. They most commonly visit family or loved ones and never do anything to cause alarm.
“Most of us never know that we’ve been visited by a spirit being, but sometimes we get lucky enough to remember the visit through a vivid dream, the kind that we could swear was real,” she said.
Ghosts, on the other hand, Shillings said have died but refuse to go to the light and end up wandering the earth in either a dazeor some other type of existence.
Haunting, Shillings said, can be either complex or simple in nature. The simple ones are called residual. This occurs when an event plays itself out over and over again without interaction with its surroundings.
“Ten-mile House in Little Rock sets a good example of residual haunting,” she said. “The owners report that, almost like clockwork, they can expect to hear the marching footsteps of the soldiers who once occupied their land during the Civil War.”
CASPR has investigated everything from historical locations like the USS Razorback in North Little Rock and Sylvania Cemetery in Cabot, to private residences and hospitals. The group gets countless requests for investigations from those who are convinced they have a haunting and, sometimes, from practical jokers.
“After awhile we’ve learned to weed out people who aren’t serious,” she said. “Some people are straight to the point and just say, ‘I think my house is haunted.’ Others have kept records of occurrences and write us a novel.”
If CASPR does investigate a private residence, Shillings is quick to say that all information is kept private.
“People trust me and I never post private investigations on our Web site,” she said.
While some people find paranormal activity in their home exciting, others just want it to go away. Shillings said she offers some options.
“I tell people to call their clergy and to try and pray and ask God to remove it,” Shillings said. “They can also try and talk to it like they would to a person and say out loud, ‘I am speaking to you, and I want you to leave.’ Sometimes that works.”
This article was published Sunday, October 26, 2008.
written by Tammy Garrett
Pages 119 on 10/26/2008
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