Word for the day “Psychomancy”

psychomancy

[sahy-koh-man-see]

noun
1.	occult communication between souls or with spirits.

Great book. “Ghostland: An American History of Haunted Places” Ghosts, a memory out of control?

Colin Dickey is great!  In this book he brings up a lot of points that only come from somebody who has hunted, seen things he can’t explain, but… a natural skeptic.

He thinks things through and, in my opinion, runs a natural logic tree.  Is the conclusion that ghosts are a function of a memory out of control a valid one?  He is an experienced ghost hunter, pretty funny live, and has interesting observations.  One observation, there is a lot of money in ghost hunting (again his sense of humor.)

He likes to research, really research, his sites and thinks about the paranormal on a deep level.  One example is the Winchester House.  He looked deeply into the legacy of Sarah Winchester.  He says its amazing for how rich she was how little documentation exists.  His conclusion was that she was not crazy, differently go around moaning or acting weird.  No employees ever complained about her behavior.  We know that she was a self- taught architect.  It was her craft, she loved it, a lot of things she designed and builtwere experiments, not sexy supernatural, haunted widow pathological stuff.  It was not, in his opinion, a manifestation of paranormal influence.

Halloween coming up

If you go a hunt on private property this Halloween ask permission.

Make a checklist/agenda for the hunt.

Start time, who’s who in the zoo?  What equipment?  Back up batteries?  More than one EVP recorder (verification, validation) What’s the layout, what are we going to cover, what’s off limits?   have a first aid kit. What time to we end.  AND who is going to help process the information.

If you have any local groups I suggest join them, they have the experience and tribal knowledge on what to do and what not to do.  I have been lucky with the few I have hunted with.  Good people, skeptics and believers, keeping it curious.

Have Fun and a Happy Halloween!

 

How to Create the Ghost Effect!

Short Interview with Razor

If you read the Bayou Savage, Ghost Hunter books you remember the father, the bad-ass who inspires Bayou to be a ghost fighter, They both use the 1953 Fender Esquire in their ghost fighting.  Today I shot a quick video of him (real cat is 87 year-old Bob Russell, my father) talking about guitar.  Shooting it my iPhone ran out memory.  So its not finished but for a short vid of him, you get a feeling about him from watching this.

 

New Bayou Savage website!

The Bayousavage.com is up and reborn.  We tried to keep up as much as we could from the old website with a few new twists (check out the music tab)  Thanks to all of you for your support.  Music, wine, and good story telling is a great combination.

 

Here is the link to the new website:  https://bayousavage.com/

Cool science behind the movie Spectral

https://arstechnica.com/the-multiverse/2017/07/spectral-movie-science-review/?comments=1

Last night, the muse kicked in again

Chase Walker is a kick-ass friend.  He has always understood my writing style and made it coherent with color and details I never imagined.  He is my co-author on the Bayou series.  We have a good writing and personal relationship.  After being in Minneapolis for years and moving back to Waynesville NC has been a pleasure.  Details in the books, the mountains are real, Waynesville and Asheville are real towns.  The beauty is real.  The characters are real to us.

We both have been doing other projects the last two years and been busy with life, not getting to the Bayou series.

We got together Thursday night and had a Bayou Savage discussion that had been long overdue.  We discussed the 2002 beginning and the 2004 publication of “The Resurrection of Bayou Savage, Guitar Ghost Fighter.”  We discussed book II “The Ghost Wars.”  and we both knew exactly what happened on book III, “Attack on the Institute” and why it never was finished.

I kept adding elements and it grew too complex.  I had read that adding romance was the way to go for big time ratings and profits.  The problem is that it (in our small focus groups) we found that the romance took away from the other two books as paranormal action themes.  As we discussed the not finished book III, I remembered my two favorite scenes in the book.  Chase said he didn’t remember those scenes as he had been doing his mojo on the first half of the book.  My scenes were at the end of the book.  Curious if I had imagined writing those scenes I came home, pulled up the original manuscript, reread what I written years ago.  It was there, yeahhh, I hadn’t imagined it, I copied and sent it to him.

But as I reread the ending it made me cry.  It was the finale that I had written the book for.  For me that’s not unusual.  In my mind books I and II were one big book.  Book III, I had the ending in mind when I started.

Last night, I had a glass of wine and thinking about that ending I wanted to finish up a few stray thoughts I had.  Going into the zone, I started writing.  Book IV started forming.  Tentatively called “Bloodstone Moonshine or the Bloodstone Chronicles or something else…  This time I took the ending from the not published book III and wrote 7 straight pages, picking up where book III left off.  Probably didn’t help that I was watching John Wick 2 in the background with the wine.  Somewhere between the two I found my muse and it kicked in.  I have a rough outline in my mind how the book should go. Mist now has the Bloodstone and grown more powerful, Bayou is a now older, wiser guitar ghost fighter, Quirk has gone through a big change and organizing some big adjustments.  Steve Johnson is a freshly minted guitar ghost fighter, and his wife Jade is there also.

So for any friends/fans of the Bayou series,  if book III every gets finished, understand I am now working on book IV, lol.  Its all good.   Don’t know about other authors but for me if felt good getting back in touch with the characters we created.  The characters have been friends for years.

 

ps: If any of you had not done the series, the best way to do it is to listen to the audio book.  Chase does the reading with his gravely voice and the music is cool.  Here is the link we posted on YouTube to give you a taste:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNkjUsI6L1I

Ghost are voices of history in the present

 

great blog

 

As light faded, a century dissolved, and I heard ghosts. No ectoplasm or voices, just a powerful presence of the past, heightened by the potential consequences of my own folly in being there.

So, think about ghosts. If we visit the original place, or we hold the artifact in our hand, and, if we find the right frame of mind, then something happens. Combine knowledge of the past with the physical object, and we can get much more than the sum of two parts. If the circumstances are right, we share something with those who once touched — or who saw — what we now touch or see.

We find history transcending dates and facts. We join the past by sensing its unique texture. We hear what it’s telling us. The same thing happened to me when a Polish friend took me to see Auschwitz on a rainy weekday — a day when we, and the ghosts, were the only beings in that desolate place.

But, put aside slaughter and genocide. Happier ghosts dwell in, say, old books. Look at marginalia in books from other centuries — in books that’ve changed lives. As we read what readers have left in the margins, their ghosts reveal the transforming power of the written word in other ages. Or walk through old houses, for all houses are haunted in the sense that I offer the word.

And I leave you with this claim. It is, simply, that we never fully know any history until we quiet our minds, and listen to the people who once lived it.

 

From a John Lienhard blog post at the University of Houston

 

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2030.htm

Two for one deal, just saw this in the news

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/offbeat/residents-of-dulce-claim-ufos-bigfoot-spotted-in-area/ar-BBsQHG3?form=PRHPTP