BOO! Casting Ghost Story Podcasting

A real ghost or not?
You decide.

Here is a video taken in Barton Mansion in California in the USA on an investigation conducted in 2001.

Someone just dressed up?
Who cares the investigators reaction is funny.

Please visit my forums
http://www.paranormaltavern.com/

Ghost Stories from the Proprietery House in Perth Amboy, NJ. The most haunted house in New Jersey according to Jane Doherty, noted psychic and ghost hunter who leads ghost tours at the Proprietery House. Look closely and you can actually see some form of other world entity.

Does a group of teenagers capture a real ghost?
Is the death the cause of accident?
You decide.

Rispin Mansion, once a fabulous landmark of the Monterey Bay, now sits in ruin overlooking the community of Capitola. Built by Henry Allen Rispin and his oil heiress wife, Annette Winfeld Blake,in 1921. The eventually estate went from the Rispin family to the Catholic church where it was used as a monastery from 1940 until it was abandoned by the nuns in 1957.

It’s said that the old mansion has several resident ghosts, with sightings of a woman dressed in black like the nuns were. There’s also been sighting of a well dressed woman, but her identiry is anyone’s guess.

Learn more about the ghosts and history of Rispin Mansion.

WE ADVERTISED IN A LOCAL PAPER FOR PEOPLE WITH GENUINE GHOST STORIES TO TELL. AMAZINGLY WE GOT A LOT OF REPLIES, AND FILMED MANY OF THE STORIES. THIS FILM IS ONE OF THE BEST WE DID, BECAUSE OF THE STRANGE ORBS WE CAPTURED ON FILM. THESE ORBS ONLY APPEAR WHEN THE CHILDREN ARE AROUND.

By Bobbie Grennier

I met psychic Jane Doherty by pure chance, which is to say that nothing is ever left to chance when it comes to the psychic world. Her book, Awakening the Mystic Gift: The Surprising Truth About What It Means to Be Psychic, chronicles Jane’s own psychic awakening and what it truly means to be psychic. For those seeking more information on what it means to be psychic, this book is a very compelling read.

Jane Doherty is a gifted psychic and medium of international acclaim. Many refer to her as the “real deal” because of her accuracy and sincere caring nature. In fact, Hans Holzer, known best for his many books on ghosts and paranormal activities, has named Jane Doherty as “One of the top twenty psychics in the world.” A born teacher, Jane feels part of her own purpose in life is to teach others to open to their own psychic abilities, and for this reason Jane has brought her psychic teachings to an online format through the Herbal-College.com website. Here Jane has established a book club for her readers to explore more about their own psychic abilities with her personally, and Jane will also teach her multi-leveled Psychic Development courses at the Herbal-College.com website.

Widely recognized and respected for her extraordinary psychic skills and sensitivities, Jane Doherty has been featured on Fox Network News, CNN, The Today Show, Sightings, MSNBC Investigates, WB11 and numerous publications, including The New York Times, The New York Post and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She has been named one of the top twenty psychics in Woman’s Own magazine. Reuters News Media has featured her in Australia, Austria, Germany, England, Russia, and the major Spanish network, Telemundo. She has also co-hosted a psychic call-in radio show for eight years and has been featured in three books, as well as in Woman’s World Weekly magazine.

Currently Jane is featured on The Learn Channel’s Dead Tenants show. The Dead Tenants TV show follows the journeys of the Preternatural Research Society (PRS) — a team of paranormal investigators — through the attics, basements, living rooms and back yards of some of the most haunted houses in the country. Coming to the aid of families experiencing very unwanted ghosts and unexplainable activity in their homes, Jane Doherty and the PRS team do their best to assist the families. The Dead Tenants show weaves the historical, scientific and psychic into a rich tapestry to help the viewer better understand the hauntings.

A renowned psychic for more than 15 years, Jane Doherty works with PRS as a psychic and channeler, helping to discover ghosts at haunted locations and to communicate with them directly. She also provides individual guidance through private consultations, while also offering classes and workshops to those who are interested in discovering and developing their own psychic abilities.

Meeting Jane Doherty has changed my life for the better. Her devout belief in the power of God is very infectious. Jane uses her God-given talent to bring comfort to hearts that are hurting; hope to those who have lost all hope, and encouragement to the beleaguered and down-trodden. She has also assisted law authorities in cases of missing persons and homicides.

“There was never a question of how I would use my gift,” Jane says firmly. “I have taken every possible opportunity to help others.” Jane Doherty is the real deal. Her words are like the words of her book - so compelling, you won’t be able to put it down.

If you’d like to learn more about Jane Doherty’s book club and book (Awakening the Mystic Gift), or about her Psychic Development courses, please visit the Herbal-College.com website for more information and registration details.

About the Author: Bobbie Grennier is a freelance writer and master herbalist. She teaches herbalism at herbal-college.com. She publishes several herbal health blogs. Visit her web sites http://www.boocasting.com and http://www.master-herbalist.com for more herbalist healer information.

By Patti Nickell

NEW ORLEANS - Tennessee Williams. William Faulkner. Truman Capote. Kate Chopin. John Kennedy Toole. Walker Percy. Anne Rice. Richard Ford. Andre Codrescu.

Ask any bibliophile what these writers have in common and the likely answer would be: They all lived and wrote in New Orleans.

Washington Irving. Sinclair Lewis. Walt Whitman. Carl Sandburg. Katherine Anne Porter. Erle Stanley Gardner.

Ask the same question and the answer is not as obvious, but it’s the same. And like their counterparts, they wove threads in the rich tapestry of its literature.

New Orleans, like her Bohemian cousin, Paris, always has been and continues to be a Mecca for writers. Like Faulkner, who wrote his first novel, A Soldier’s Pay, here in 1925, and James Lee Burke, who follows fictional detective Dave Robicheaux on a tour of the city’s seamier side, writers have found a muse in the sultry decadence of New Orleans that has proven elusive in more sanitized cities.

For some, the inspiration was the flamboyant mix of cultures that thrives here. Williams, Faulkner and Percy mercilessly probed the dysfunction inherent in tangled Southern family roots. Rice has made a career of exploring the uneasy alliance between Catholicism and darker religions.

Whatever it is about New Orleans that has attracted writers for 250 years is as strong today as it was in the late 18th century, when Creoles of color wrote romantic poetry in their native French.

The literary wild side

Like most visitors to New Orleans, writers were, and are, drawn to the French Quarter.

Faulkner wrote A Soldier’s Pay while living in a house in Pirate’s Alley, overlooking the garden of St. Louis Cathedral. (Today, the house is a bookstore specializing in his works, as well as those of his Southern literary brethren.)

Capote claimed that he was born in the the Monteleone Hotel’s lobby (in truth, Capote’s mother made it to Touro Infirmary in the nick of time, but the Monteleone, one of three hotels in the country designated literary landmarks, encourages Capote’s version of his birth).

When Williams was “spent with the rigors of creation,” he liked to retreat to Victor’s Restaurant, which once stood at Toulouse and Chartres Streets, to have a brandy Alexander and listen to the Ink Spots on the jukebox.

That these writers’ ghosts are especially restless can be attributed to one man. W. Kenneth Holditch, a retired professor of English at the University of New Orleans, has conducted literary walking tours of the French Quarter for 30 years. Dressed in a seersucker suit and Panama hat and spouting wry and sometimes barbed comments, Holditch leads his charges through an imaginary world where Lucky Dog vendors mingle with quadroon beauties, where Blanche DuBois and the vampire Lestat walk hand in hand.

A 21st-century troubadour who quotes his favorite authors with aplomb, Holditch covers 286 years of the city’s literary heritage on his strolls. He shows off the Chartres Street location where O. Henry lived for a while after being released from prison in Texas, and the small yellow Creole cottage on Dumaine where William March Campbell first envisioned Rhoda, the evil child protagonist of The Bad Seed.

He gathers his charges on the steps of the imposing Royal Street building which once was the courthouse where Katherine Anne Porter got married, with Kentuckian Robert Penn Warren as best man. He pauses before Le Petit ThŽ‰tre du Vieux CarrŽ, the oldest continuously operating community theater in the country, where Sinclair Lewis appeared in a 1940 production of his play Shadow and Substance. Finally, he proudly introduces his personal favorite — the courtyard of what is now La Marquise Bakery on Chartres Street, where, as he says, “Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and ‘Aunt’ Rose Arnold, one of Storyville’s most notorious madams, would get together for an afternoon of cool libations and hot gossip.”

A lasting legacy

For those who long to make more than a spiritual connection with the New Orleans of fiction, I offer the following suggestions: Hop on a stool at the Monteleone Hotel’s Carousel Bar, order a Sazerac cocktail, and enjoy the revolving turn just as Capote did, or request Room No. 9 at the Maison de Ville Hotel on Toulouse. It was in this tiny room off the lush, tropical courtyard that Tennessee Williams stayed while working on A Streetcar Named Desire.

The mercurial Williams also frequented a number of French Quarter restaurants, including Brennan’s and Broussard’s, but his favorite was Galatoire’s on Bourbon Street, where several times a week he could be found holding court at a corner window table.

Faulkner loved the bar at Broussard’s, on Conti Street, where, during his years as a struggling writer, he was treated to drinks by a sympathetic bartender. Broussard’s is a bit upscale for Burke’s detective, Dave Robichaux, who prefers his oysters not Bienville or Rockefeller, but right on the half shell at Acme’s or Felix’s Oyster Bar. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Ford (Independence Day) and playwright Robert Harling (Steel Magnolias) love the salon-like atmosphere of The Upperline Restaurant, an art-filled Creole cottage in the city’s Uptown area.

But the most famous literary-restaurant connection has to be that of Antoine’s, the oldest restaurant in the city (1840). Its Creole elegance was immortalized in the pages of Francis Parkinson Keyes’ novel Dinner at Antoine’s.

Visitors to the city are interested not just in where writers ate and drank, but in where they lived as well. In New Orleans, homes of famous scribes command the kind of attention reserved for those of film stars in Hollywood. Keyes’ white-columned mansion on Chartres Street originally belonged to no less a personage than Confederate general P.G.T. Beauregard. Today, however, it is known as the Beauregard-Keyes House, and both it and its beautiful garden are open as a museum.

George Washington Cable’s home stands in the Lower Garden District, not far from the First Street mansion that once belonged to Anne Rice and which was used as the eerie setting for her novel The Witching Hour. It is nearly engulfed by tropical vines, making it easy to imagine the clan of Mayfair witches living out their tortured existence there.

But it is Williams who remains the literary figure most closely associated with New Orleans, and several of his former homes are on Holditch’s tour. There’s the building on Toulouse where the playwright paid $10 for a room in 1939; the pink house at 1014 Dumaine, where he wrote his memoirs; the Orleans Coffee Exchange where, in 1946, Williams had an upstairs chamber that he concluded was haunted “by the ghost of a handsome young man”; and the apartment on St. Peter about which he wrote, “From here, I could hear that rattletrap streetcar named Desire running one way and the one named Cemeteries running the other, and it seemed a perfect metaphor for the human condition.”

Of all Holditch’s beloved bards, Williams holds pride of place.

“You can’t go anywhere in the Quarter and not think of Tennessee if you know his work,” he says. “His ghost is everywhere.”

It’s a haunting both Holditch and New Orleans clearly savor.

Virginia’s Governor’s Mansion is the oldest governor’s residence still being used for its original purpose.

For 194 years, it’s been a bright spot in Capitol Square. It has housed dozens of governors and their families. But some believe Virginia’s Executive Mansion also houses the supernatural.

First Lady Anne Holton first lived in the mansion in the early 1970’s. That is when her father Linwood was governor. More than 30 years later, the Kaine family is experiencing unexplained mischief. Holton’s two-year-old nephew knows he saw someone on a stairwell while visiting for Thanksgiving.

In a home nearly 200-years-old, creaks and moans are expected. But Holton chooses to believe the more mysterious explanations.

Brrrr: Who knew Edinburgh could be so frighteningly entertaining?

Are you alone at … Edinburgh Castle?
Silke Schmidt

Old Mr. Boots has scared hundreds down in the Vaults under Edinburgh’s South Bridge — preferably blonde women in their mid-20s. “Men are fairly safe,” says Gary, a sturdy Scotsman with a bushy red beard who’s been leading groups for Mercat Tours down into the Vaults under the Scottish capital for several years.

Nobody knows who Mr. Boots was in his living days. But the hateful spirit certainly does not approve of visitors wandering around in the Vaults, where he got stuck after his death some time in the 1800s. To scare the living away, he breathes heavily, invisibly walks around with pounding steps, pulls hair, punches, pinches, and sometimes even shows up.

“People who have seen him say he wears a blue coat and heavy black military boots,” says Gary, who admits he has been converted when it comes to believing in ghosts. “I was open-minded, but didn’t think there was much to it. Since I started guiding tours, I have seen horrifying things happen to groups down here.”
The Scotsman Hotel

He even got attacked himself: “Once an arm came ’round my neck and squeezed tight. The group later asked who it was who tried to strangle me.”

Most entities down in the Vaults are more peaceful: The “Watcher” in a former pub room just watches, a shoemaker in the “Safe Room” dislikes only wearers of nonleather sports shoes. The spirit of Jack, a well-dressed boy of about 6, is known to be playful; he tugs on jackets or takes people’s hands.

The times when Jack or the shoemaker were still alive were stricken with violence and disease. By the 1830s, Edinburgh’s population had grown too much, so people moved underground: In the Vaults built into Edinburgh’s bridges, people worked and lived — ordinary people of Edinburgh at first, soon the poorest, and then those who feared daylight and the police.
Mary King’s Close encounters

The Vaults became a lawless zone, dark, dirty and dangerous. Death was ever present, and so were body snatchers — people who took dead bodies, even stole them from graveyards, and sold them to anatomists. Eventually, the Vaults were cleared of all human occupancy by the Town Council, sealed — and forgotten, for a long time.

Not far from the Vaults, only about a 10-minute walk away, is Greyfriar’s Kirkyard. Famous for the heart-throbbing story of a little dog that kept vigil at his master’s grave for 14 years, the cemetery also has a reputation of being the most haunted place in Scotland’s most haunted city.

As if it weren’t enough that the graveyard hill once used to be a small valley, and over the centuries was built up of hundreds of thousands of corpses — most often victims of war, bubonic plague and other diseases — the Lord Advocate “Bloody” George MacKenzie added thousands of souls to Greyfriar’s grisly history.

In 1637, Scottish Presbyterians signed the “National Covenant with God.” They opposed the attempt of King Charles I, an Episcopalian, to impose a new liturgy and prayerbook upon the Church of Scotland.

A civil war was the result. Successful at first, the Covenanters luck turned in 1660: Their movement was pronounced illegal by the Crown, and the Covenanters were persecuted. In Edinburgh, George MacKenzie was responsible for that. He imprisoned 1,200 survivors of the war’s last battle, the Battle of Bothwell Brig, in the Covenanters Prison at Greyfriar’s Cemetery without proper shelter or food.

A total of 18,000 Covenanters died for their beliefs. Most of them were put to death by MacKenzie; the Lord Advocate himself died a natural death in 1691.

That same year, by the way, a man named David Brown settled down in Edinburgh. Brown was Jewish, and his application is the earliest proof for Jews living in Edinburgh.

By 1780, an organized Jewish community existed. The first Jew to buy a burial plot in Edinburgh was the dentist Herman Lyon, who had come to Scotland from Germany in 1788; he purchased a plot of land on Calton Hill. Today, no headstones indicate the location of the burial site, and only a few people know where it is.

The Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation (www.ehcong.com) offers regular services: Friday evening at 8 in summer (April 14 to Aug. 25), or just around sunset at other dates, with Saturday-morning services at 10 (starting at Nishmat), followed by kiddush (at around midday).

While Herman Lyon’s tomb has been searched for a long time, MacKenzie’s grave down in Greyfriar’s is avoided by everyone with a sane mind. MacKenzie was buried right next to the Covenanters Prison, just steps from a number of Covenanters graves. Though many stories tell about his soul wandering around, frightful hauntings began only quite recently — in 1999, after a homeless man desecrated MacKenzie’s tomb on a cold December night.

“Something was obviously raised then,” says Jerry, a young man guiding Blackhart’s “City of the Dead” tours to the usually locked Covenanters prison and the Black Mausoleum inside.

“In the past five years, we’ve had more than 400 people walk out of here with scratches, bites or burns,” he warns. “More than 170 have passed out, and two reportedly went insane after going inside the Mausoleum.”

All Blackhart tour guides have had incidents like these on their tours; some have made their very own experiences. Jerry claims to see a boy, about 12, standing in a corner of the prison or inside the mausoleum regularly.

“There are lucky ones among us who will never experience anything paranormal,” says Jerry. “But most people are inductors — they will see, hear or feel such things eventually. In this part of Greyfriar’s, that usually happens after about 20 minutes.”

But don’t worry: “Eighty percent of it is suggestion,” says tour guide Gary down in the Vaults. “It’s just those last 20 percent you need to be concerned about.”

Info to Go
There are probably hundreds of ghosts haunting the Scottish capital. Most of them call the city’s Old Town their home. Here is where some can be found:

· Edinburgh Castle has got numerous ghosts: John Graham of Claverhouse, George MacKenzie’s accomplice in persecuting the Covenanters, appears periodically in the castle.

A steward of the Duke of Gordon, once governor of the castle, wanders the walls since he was stabbed by the duke. The dungeons are said to be haunted by the ghosts of prisoners held there during the Napoleonic War.

· Mary King’s Close is the most haunted of all haunted closes in Edinburgh’s Old Town. Some 300 years ago the plague swept through the city. In Mary King’s Close, now situated underneath the City Chambers, hundreds of people were walled in and not permitted to come out. Nobody — neither man nor mouse — survived.

· The Scotsman Hotel, North Bridge: In 1990, a security guard at the hotel ran into an employee whom he was sure was dead. Also, a blonde woman is said to haunt the house.

· St. Mary’s Street apparently is haunted by a young woman, a victim of a motiveless murder in 1916.

· The West Bow (Victoria Street) gets visits by a phantom coach and the ghost of a sailor named Angus Roy.

· George IV Bridge: Vaults under the bridge are said to be haunted by a Highland chief. In 1973, he was spotted by librarian Elizabeth Clarke.

Several tour operators offer ghost tours to Edinburgh’s haunted sites. Some are:

· Mercat Tours, 28 Blair St., Edinburgh EH1 1QR (www.mercattours.com)

· Mary King’s Close, 2 Warrinston’s Close, High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1PG (www.realmarykingsclose.com)

· City of the Dead Tour, Blackhart Entertainment, Tron Church, 122 High St., Edinburgh EH1 1RU (www.blackhart.uk. com)

· Auld Reekie Tours (auldreekietours@blueyonder.co.uk)

· Witchery Tours, 84 West Bow (Victoria Street), Edinburgh EH1 2HH (www.witcherytours. com)

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