Oct 10
In October 2009 a local geocacher, WitzAbout, wrote an article “Ghost Hunting with Geocachers” that you might enjoy (given the encroaching season of goblins and jack-o-lanterns).
This past Saturday, we were invited to go ghost hunting as part of a group of Geocachers. A Geocaching friend, ‘QZ’, from outside Denver was making the less than 2 hour drive down to Colorado Springs for the weekend, and decided she wanted to check out the haunted tunnels she read about on Gold Camp Road in our area…
Jan 9
While on a business trip to CA, I introduced several people to Geocaching. At one point I headed out to Geocache with some free time we had. I had only prepared for finding microcaches. Microcaches are generally small containers that hide in the landscape and contain only a small slip of paper to sign. In this case, however, I happened across an actual cache box. Cache boxes give geocachers the added bonus of trading an item. The item you put in the box should be of equal or greater value of the trinket you take out. As a bonus, it should represent something about your character and/or augment the theme of the geocache. I pulled out a trinket then looked over the possessions in my arsenal to trade. Other than my ID, credit card and pen I had a Scooby-Doo band-aid. “Cool enough” I thought (trying to convince myself that this was an even trade… which is wasn’t).
Coworkers teased, and I kept saying “but it was a cool bandaid” (again trying to rationalize the bad trade).
A week later, while I was home working, my wife and kids went geocaching in Angelfire, NM and came across what promised to be a big cache. When they opened the box it was filled with business cards and bandages! They were all so disappointed. I then told my kids about what I did in CA to which my eldest said (without any prompting) “at least you left a cool bandaid. These weren’t like that. They were boring.”
Nevertheless, I vowed never to leave something like a bandaid in a Geocache again. And certainly wouldn’t leave a business card. (What type of jerk does that?! If I find your business card in a cache, I’ll call you to find out!!!)
Aug 7
I recently read a good article that questions the assumptions most paranormal investigators make about “stone tape theory.” Other than that, I recently came across a Bible verse in psalms that dispels the core logic of stone tape theory.
Stone tape theory, also known as residual hauntings, is the idea that a ghost repeats itself. Usually at a specific timed event, such as the anniversary of that spirit’s embodied death, or at the stroke of midnight. Stone tape theory is the idea behind what causes it while a residual haunting is the phenomenon itself. What stone tape theory proposes is that the earth can record certain events if the conditions are right and play them back under some set of special conditions (similar or otherwise).
I’ve been a pretty strong proponent of STT until recently because of a misunderstanding of Genesis 4:10 where Abel’s blood cries out from the ground. But what brought me back to looking at that verse was a recent wandering to Psalm 103:15-16. In both Psalm 103:16 and in Job 7:10, a specific reference is made that the place does not remember the deceased.
As a place, a bed of limestone – even a magnetically charged one – should not remember anything. That means one of three things.
1. People who “see” ghosts are mad, hence the surge of reports reflects the overall human race traveling down the road of insanity.
2. Supernatural occurrences are happening more frequently but being misinterpreted as ghosts.
3. The media is a lying and the supernatural/ghost craze is perceptual, or worse, is another instance of life following after “art” (if you can call anything on TV “art”).
I have to admit, though, a riveting thriller from Ambrose Bierce, Washington Irving or Ray Bradbury gives me pause to think about mortality and the mysteries of a world bound to it.
Call me cynical but everyone is born inherently evil; selfishness, greed, envy, spite, anger, bitterness, arrogance and pride exhume themselves like Hollywood zombies from our rotting hearts starting the day we’re born. It takes extraordinary care, work and divine intervention to draw us away from our own natural disaster.
Perhaps it’s these ghosts in our mind that keep chasing us. We each have our own tell-tale heart. After all, that’s what Stone Tape Theory is, isn’t it? Rocks that tell a tragic tale over and over again until those who hear it go mad.
