I didn’t make the Lincoln Day Dinner for the Butler County GOP this year because my family and I have been traveling all over the place, particularly in Eastern Ohio and West Virginia going to paranormal sites in a research project for my new book, The Politics of Heaven, and it’s all coming along very well.  I wanted to go to the dinner and do appreciate the offers to attend with people I know.  But almost to the moment, I was on a ghost hunt with my kids and grandkids that turned out to be pretty interesting, so I’m sharing it here for more than a bit of fun.  Both of my daughters are tuned in to ghostly encounters, and one is so interested in it that she makes a living painting about it, for which she travels all over the country, appearing at conventions, selling her art.  And my wife has had contact with all kinds of paranormal activity all her life; they chase her around like hungry cats looking to be fed after a hard night outside in the rain.  She’s kind, and disembodied spirits in whatever form they exist look for her, and she never fails to attract their attention.  So for my birthday this year, as research for the new book, I thought it might be fun to go to one of the most haunted places on planet Earth, the Moonville Tunnel in Vinton County, and do a ghost hunt.  The kids would get a kick out of it, and I was curious about several things that worked exactly as I thought they would.  So we went there during the day to warm the kids up to it.  Then we went back at night.  And while we were filming, we didn’t get much.  But after I turned off all the equipment, a green orb appeared, which was more than a little strange.  Made even more that way by the very remote location that Moonville is.

I tend to approach these subjects from the point of view of disproving paranormal activity.  We had gone to several locations during the past week, but I knew that the Moonville Tunnel was a prime location since something always happened every time we went over the years.  And that was the case when we walked back to the car after a reasonably detailed investigation.  When we turned off our ghost hunting equipment, my wife felt something next to her and told my grandson about it.  He took several flash photos with an iPhone, and sure enough, he was pretty freaked out by the green orb that appeared and was headed away from us back down a hill to Raccoon Creek.  I saw the image from the screen as I looked at those spots in real time, and there was nothing we could see there physically.  And I was ensuring there was no lens flair with our flashlights causing problems on the camera lens, or that light was bouncing off some bug.  It was as black as black night with no other light sources but our flashlights for many miles.  There were no homes nearby and indeed no porch lights.  The Moonville Tunnel is as far from other people as possible in Zeleski National Forest.  These kinds of woods are so remote that they have frequent bigfoot sightings, and other things, just because of the area’s nature.  The spirit world always spooked the Indians from the region.  The place feels haunted because of its lack of other human beings.  It stays that way because there is a single-lane gravel road that provides the only access to the area for miles and miles that runs deep into the hills. 

Green orbs are supposed to indicate a healing nature of the ghostly encounter, so who knows what kind of lifeform it was trying to emerge and interact with us?  I have seen this kind of thing before, so I wasn’t surprised as much as I was a little shocked at the repeatability of it.  Almost the same thing has happened to us several times over the years we have been to Moonville.  We do a ghost hunt, thinking that nothing happened.  We might have felt uncomfortable feeling that other people were around us, but we could see nothing we could physically see.  Sometimes, shadow people appear in the corners of our eyes, but disappear when we focus hard on them.  But later, especially when using cameras with a flash, because digital cameras mess up the color palette of the visual spectrum, things appear just outside the visual range of human eyes, and the cameras pick it up.  Because of this, I avoid flying bugs and light tricks while we are filming.  Or even moisture from breathing, so they don’t taint our experiments.  I would have been happy to do that ghost hunt with my kids and grandkids for my birthday and family time.  But what showed up in our photos was pretty good, especially since I was trying not to have anything like that happen.  But sure enough, my wife could feel something next to her.  We took a picture.  And something was there and leaving, which, given that area, was more than a little spooky and made for a long walk back to the car, knowing that these things were all around us but we couldn’t see them with our physical eyes.

Needless to say, I did get good material for my book.  I explained to everyone that the spirit, whatever it was, should be looked at as a stray cat that once you pet it, it won’t go away.  If you think about the nature of spirits living in such a place, lost in time and space, having us there was an extraordinary occurrence.  We were talking to it and giving it attention, which was probably the highlight of its existence, and you can start to feel sorry for these things when viewed that way.  I don’t think ghosts like that can do any harm; likely, they are stuck and probably aren’t very smart.  What makes them interesting is that they exist, but not in a way we understand, and the need to communicate with elements outside our perceived reality cuts through the limitations.  And I was happy that something like that happened while introducing my grandchildren to ghosts and the spirit world.  They see and hear so much on television and the internet, it was good for them to have their own experience and to approach the subject logically.  It was a long way to go to come back with nothing, and like I said, I gave up a chance to go to the Lincoln Day Dinner for the Republican Party of Butler County because of it.  And I was glad that something happened that deserved a lot of talk after.  I thought overcoming the fear of such a scary place would be good for my family, and I would have been happy if nothing happened.  But it did, leaving me scratching my head even more, but in a good way.  The spirit world is real; some creatures live in it, want to interact with us, and do much more than we’d like to admit.  But that doesn’t mean they have more power because they exist in a way that hides them from our knowing eyes.  They only have the power of concealment.  They don’t have the power of superior intelligence. 

Rich Hoffman

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