Balancing on a Wire: Blood Forest

Those of you who know me know that I don't watch television. It's very rare that I find a show that actually holds my attention. However, my husband and children recently got me totally hooked on a show. Don't laugh. I mean it. GHOSTHUNTERS!

I've always been somewhat fascinated by the possibility of the paranormal. And I've had two really freaky experiences in two different houses at two different times in my life.

So after we finished watching every single episode of GhostHunters that was ever made and I read both of their books, we decided it was time to do some ghost hunting ourselves. I kid you not.

My husband bought us a little ghost hunting kit for Christmas - with an EVP thingy (that's the technical term), a little voice recorder, a yellow boxy like thing that has red lines, and case with a handle that has already broken off. Yeah, we're professionals.

The day after Christmas, we packed up all our gear, grabbed our two digital cameras and our video camera, and headed off to hunt ghosts. We had searched all the freaky paranormal sites online and picked a destination - BLOOD FOREST. We read all sorts of online accounts about this crazy man named Arthur Blood who murdered people with an axe and hung their dead bodies from trees. And haunted the forest. Other people said a woman roamed the forest and told people to leave. There were some accounts of slain animals, sounds of laughter with no one around, blood-curdling screams, mysterious black fog shapes, and aliens. Always aliens.

So really - when you get past the paranormal sites and really learn about the place, Blood Forest was named after a wealthy man named Arthur Blood. He was a philanthropist and donated the land to the town. There are no accounts of him murdering anyone. In fact, there are no accounts of anyone being murdered there.

We all donned our warm clothing and off we went to hunt ghosts. I learned some very important things that day:

My husband SUCKS at taking pictures. I'm pretty sure it's because I have a right-handed camera and he is left-handed.

Lucky for me, I have about 500 more pictures that look a lot like this. Of course he did defend himself by saying that every time he tried to take a picture, a ghost pushed him and knocked him off balance, causing the picture to be blurry. But I think he might have made that up.

THE FLYING MONKEY takes awesome pictures. My almost-10 year old only took about 12 shots, but every one of them was clear and interesting. Check out these funky trees.

And these tree branches that are almost suspended in mid-air:

THE CRAZY CLOWN takes great videos. In fact, they're so great that you can clearly see me hunkered over, peeing in the woods. Sorry, no visuals for that. The camera is locked in my closet. The child has a You Tube account.

THE RINGMASTER plays funny jokes. THE CRAZY CLOWN had picked up a gigantic piece of rock. To carry with him while hiking through the woods. Because he enjoys doing things like that. He finally got tired of carrying the rock and set it in a location that we would pass by on the way back. He called out to the ghosts in the woods and asked them to protect his rock. I'm sure you can guess. When we got back, it was gone! We searched everywhere. And were honestly a little freaked out. There was no one else in the woods with us. It turns out the joke was on us. As we initially walked away from the rock, THE RINGMASTER somehow snuck back and hid it. In the end, it was actually quite funny.

If you stare at a picture long enough, your mind will do funny things. When we got back home, it was time to go through the evidence. Any ghost hunter knows that this is a tedious task. You have hours and hours of voice recordings to listen to (ours all sounded like people walking on leaves and sticks) and lots of pictures to enlarge and analyze.

My husband was in charge of listening to the audio. Since I design graphics but don't have enough confidence to call myself a graphic designer, my job was to analyze the photographic evidence. This is what I found: