Haunted River Ghost Tours

By John Linn

Your usual run-ins with apparitions along Riverfront have to do with Ghosts of Drunken Nights Past - which are not really ghosts so much as pangs of guilt. For a much needed injection of honest-to-goodness ectoplasm in your life, check out the River House Ghost Tours, going down every Sunday night at 7:30 at the Historic Stranahan House Museum. The spiritual journey will give you an historic perspective on old-time Fort Lauderdale, specifically the domestic life of one of our earliest captains of industry, Frank Stranahan. The tour starts in Stranahan's abode, where, using dousing rods and listening to EVPs on tape (electronic voice phenomena), you might just channel the spirit of ol' Frank, who offed himself in the historic building during the height of the Great Depression (there were apparently no sky scrapers to hurl oneself from back in those days). After communing with the deceased Stranahans, you'll get shuffled aboard a river boat and ferried to the other side, where you'll hear tale of more of Fort Lauderdale's greatest ghosts, including one who haunts the Downtowner Saloon to this very day.

Bring an extra pair of undies (and $20) to 335 SE 6th Ave. in Fort Lauderdale. You must reserve your spot in advance by phoning 954-524-4736.

I myself grew up in FT.Lauderdale,and had tons of paranormal activity there as a kid,thats why I just write about ghosts,and not hunt them.To learn more about my encounter go to this blogs achive to some of the first stories I wrote.Only this last paragraph was writen by me,the rest by John Lin at www.browardpalmbeach.com

Paranormal enthusiasts investigate ghost reports

Their mission: build a ghost database akin to what police do with criminals and their fingerprints.

“This is paranormal research. This is not thrill seekers. This is not like a ghost hunting tour, like you go and people take you out to cemeteries. We don’t do anything like that,” said Brandy Runyan, 30, founder and team leader. “We are legitimate. We are legal. We don’t trespass. We’re registered with the state of Texas. We’re an unincorporated non-profit.”

Founded in January by Ms. Runyan, a mom and freelance writer, Central Texas Ghost Hunters now has about 15 members.

The group notifies local police before they set up shop at a suspected haunted building. They work in pairs to ensure the integrity of their research. And their staff includes trained medical and security members.

The Central Texas group has bitten off a question that has bedeviled man throughout history: Do ghosts exist? And if so, what are they?

At least one scientist remains convinced there is no proof of ghosts.

Benjamin Radford, a scientific paranormal investigator and managing editor for Skeptical Inquirer magazine, wrote in 2008 that ghost hunting is “about having fun with friends, telling ghost stories, and the enjoyment of pretending you are searching the edge of the unknown.”

Radford wrote, “Virtually all ghost hunter groups claim to be scientific, and most give that appearance because they use high-tech scientific equipment such as Geiger counters, electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, and infrared cameras. Yet the equipment is only as scientific as the person using it; you may own the world’s most sophisticated thermometer, but if you are using it as a barometer, your measurements are worthless. Just as using a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician, using a scientific instrument doesn’t make you a scientist.”

Here in Temple, the Rev. Tom Chamberlain, pastor at Our Lady of Guadalupe parish, said Catholic belief that souls either go to heaven, hell or purgatory hasn’t changed. However, he said there are some unexplained “things” out there and he has no problem with scientific research. But Chamberlain does not condone such things as seances and trying to interact with the dead.

The Central Texas Ghost Hunters say they are building their body of evidence on audio and video recordings. When they investigate a house or other building they sometimes ask questions to see what’s out there. Playing back the audio through special software that takes out background noises, Ms. Runyan and project manager Veronica Perez say they’ve heard some funny and spooky stuff that can’t be heard with the naked human ear. Stuff such as voices that have insulted team members, asked them for help and giggled.

What’s the scariest? Probably the organ music recorded at a chapel inside Yorktown Memorial Hospital.

“I got goose bumps when I heard it,” said Ms. Perez, a 34-year-old stay-at-home mom.

The hospital, which is about 70 miles southeast of San Antonio, has attracted lots of attention. Closed for about 20 years, at one time it was a drug rehab center. The property owner courts, and charges for, overnight guests looking for ghosts.

Caretaker Mike Hanson said the Central Texas Ghost Hunters stood out.

“They were a pretty private group. They were real professional,” Hanson said. “They had a team clear the building. They were probably more prepared than any group I’ve ever seen.”

Hanson said that absolutely the 50-year-old hospital is haunted.

“I know for a fact there is a lot of ghosts here,” Hanson said. “I’ve seen just black objects, like the size of a German shepherd. I’ve seen a guy standing in front of the chapel. I’ve seen red eyes twice. There’s a door at the front that goes up to a stairwell that we hear rapping on the glass nightly. You can turn off the lights, stand by the nurse’s station … and you’ll see people walking around.”

After Central Texas Ghost Hunters finishes reviewing its overnight stay in Yorktown, it plans to post the results on the Web.

Looking ahead, Central Texas Ghost Hunters has teamed with Horny Toad Harley Davidson in Temple for a motorcycle ride on Sept. 12. The group wants to erase the stigma haunting ghost hunters by chalking up some positive exposure.

Team members also plan to build a Habitat for Humanity home.

Ms. Runyan said the group hopes to maintain a “high degree of professionalism upholding best practices and the release of evidence only after exhaustive review to eliminate logical and natural causes.”

On the Web at: www.ctgh.org Thanks to www.tdtnews.com for the story by Fred Afflerbach

Ghost Hunters Recap Essex County Penitentiary

Ghost Town on the Gulf

Once there was a town on the Texas Gulf Coast, which during its hey-day— which lasted barely a half-century from start to finish—rivaled Galveston, a hundred and fifty miles east. It started as a stretch of beach along Matagorda Bay, called Indian Point, some miles to the north, selected for no other reason than it was not Galveston by a German nobleman with plans to settle a large colony of German immigrants. Prince Karl Solms-Braunfels was a leading light of what was called the Mainzer Adelsverein; a company of well-meaning nobles whose ambitions exceeded their business sense by a factor of at least three to one. They had secured— or thought they had secured — a large tract of land between the Llano and Colorado rivers approximately a hundred miles west of Austin, but the truth of it was, all they had secured was the right to induce people to come and settle on it. If they recruited so many settlers to come and settle, and farm so many acres, the backers of the Adelsverein would profit through being entitled to so many acres per settler for themselves.

That this tract of land was unfit for traditional farming, was the traditional hunting grounds of the Comanche and Apache tribes (peoples not generally noted in the 19^thcentury for devotion to multi-cultural tolerance and desire to live in peace with their neighbors) seems to have struck Prince Karl as a mere bagatelle, an afterthought, a petty little detail that other people would take care of. The Adelsverein would earn a tidy profit by inducing people to settle on such lands as they held a license for… so no fair for other entrepreneurs to poach their immigrants, as they passed through the fleshpots of Galveston. With a fair bit of the old Teutonic spirit of organization, Prince Karl decided that the Adelsverein settlers, who had signed contracts, and sailed on Adelsverein chartered-ships would not be contaminated by crass mercantile interests or distractions. He felt it best for those recruited settlers to come straight off trans-Atlantic transport, through a port of his choosing, comfortably close to the most direct route north, and the way-station he had himself established to feed settlers into the Adelsverein land grant. So it was, that his choice fell on Indian Point, soon to be christened “Karlshaven”.

Three years later, it was called Indianola, the major deep-water port and entry-point for thousands of European immigrants to Texas, as well as a couple of shipments of camels – which is another story entirely. Indianola had become the major port for supplying, among other concerns, the US Army in the West. A great road, called the Cart Road supplied the interior mercantile needs of two nations, running northerly towards San Antonio, and southerly crossing through the contentious border area, to Chihuahua, Mexico. By the mid 1850s, the town relocated to a location slightly lower in elevation, but one which would let it take advantage of deeper water… and a navigation route which would favor major maritime traffic. The Morgan Lines established regular service to Indianola, which boasted two long wharves, with the Morgan ticket-office at the very end of one of them. It was called the “Queen City of the West”, shipping— among other things— rice to Europe, and in the post-Civil War cattle glut, and experimented with shipping refrigerated beef and canned oysters. For a few decades, Indianola gave Galveston and New Orleans a run for the money. It changed hands a couple of times during the Civil War, when life turned out to be a lot more interesting than most inhabitants of Texas had bargained for. Upon the end of that unpleasantness, Indianola looked fair to taking a rightful place in the list of great ports of the world.

But in September of 1875 – September being a fateful month in those parts – a great hurricane slammed Indianola. Its’ low-laying situation left it vulnerable to storm surge, both from the Gulf and from the deep bayou in back of town. Still, there were enough left. It was a fine deep-water port and a good strategic location; not something to be casually abandoned; so the city stalwarts rebuilt in the spirit of optimism. To no avail – eleven years later, Indianola was slammed again. To add to the horror of it all, an upset oil lamp set fire to the structure it was in. At the height of the hurricane several of the survivors taking shelter in that building were burned to death, and several nearby structures also burned. The rebuilt town was obliterated; the remnants of those long docks built for the Morgan Lines are still lying at the bottom of the bay. The city fathers sadly accepted the inevitable, moving their various commercial establishments inland to Port Lavaca, to Cuero and Victoria and farther inland. There is hardly anything of the site left above water today; mostly holiday homes built on tall stilts along the shore where it was, but otherwise it is mostly monuments and relics, bottles and doll heads, doorknobs and Minie balls, sad tattered reminders of what was once the Queen City of the West. Galveston inherited that place, with queenly grace; but only for a couple of decades, until that city itself took the full force of a devastating hurricane in 1900.

(Indianola figures in Adelsverein – The Gathering as a desolate and disease-ridden camp on the deserted shore where the Becker and Richter families camp for weeks, awaiting transportation to the lands they have been promised. In the final volumeAdelsverein – The Harvesting it is where they come after the end of the Civil War, to purchase stock for a general store – and from where – having become prosperous in cattle-ranching – they depart on a visit back to Germany, just beffore the fatal first

Thank you to historical-fiction.thedeepening.com for the story

Ghostly encounters