It’s that time of the year again when the days get shorter,
the nights chillier and Halloween is fast approaching. Just remember when you are listening to
ghost stories and watching scary movies that send a chill down your spine and
keep you awake a little longer at night that Green Bay has its share of spine
tingling tales and haunted locations.
Few people have heard about Baird Creek, where children are heard
laughing and playing as well as a man’s spirit who walks the trail. Also the
Cotton House located at Heritage Hill, where Pricilla Cotton died and her
spirit has never left or the haunted train at the National Railroad Museum.
People have a few ideas as to why a spirit might linger around. One
assumption is that they died suddenly and don’t realize that they are dead,
another one is they have unfinished business to attend to. The last assumption
is that they are attached to a certain item or place that they loved when they
were alive.
There are different types of hauntings; these are the most
familiar, one is the residual haunting.
This haunting is where an event is repeated over
and over. The spirits are unaware of their surroundings.
They don’t know that we are
around and we can’t communicate with them.
The second type of haunting is an intellectual
haunting.
In this one spirits are
aware of their surroundings and can communicate with us.
The last type of haunting is
poltergeist activity. This type of haunting
involves furniture moving around, items being thrown around
the room, loud noises
( like
footsteps, knocks, crashes, voices). Ghosts and poltergeists can both cause
this type of activity to happen but poltergeists are non-human entities, not
spirits of the dead.
Poltergeists
are more cruel and destructive than spirits.
Recent polls have shown that forty five – forty eight percent of people
believe in ghosts. Throughout history well know figures have been believers.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, was a spiritualist and
paranormal investigator. He was also a member of Ghost Club. Ghost Club was
founded in England in 1862. They are a society for paranormal research and
investigations. Other famous members of Ghost Club included Author Charles
Dickens, Poet William Butler Yeats and Actor Peter Cushing.
People have been trying to
communicate with the dead for thousands of years. Thomas Edison was working on
an electronic device to detect and communicate with ghosts but he died before
completing it. Today there are many devices that paranormal investigators use
to see if a place is haunted like digital recorders, emf detectors, video
recorders, ghost boxes, digital cameras and thermometers etc. A good
investigator always has to be a little bit of a skeptic. Seventy to eight five percent of ghostly
activity has been debunked, but tonight when you hear that bump in the night
remember the fifteen to thirty percent of hauntings that remains unexplained.
This is what makes peoples believe that something is out there.
If you
would like to find out about the hauntings and history of other buildings in
Green Bay, join Green Bay Ghost Tours on a walking or bus tour. For more information go to www.greenbayghosttours.com. We are the original and local Green Bay
Ghost Tour. We don’t sell tickets on Groupon.
