GHOSTLY PHOTOS

All of these pictures were taken in February 2009 during a tour of the Queen Mary in Long Beach, California. It was my daughter's birthday and she wanted to go to the Queen Mary on a 'ghost hunt'. Now, you have to know my daughter... she was born 'old'. She was always very level-headed, wise, not given to the usual teenage drama, etc., but about a year ago, she told me that she believes she is a 'sensitive'. She says that she sees the dead, like that movie the Sixth Sense. I guess you have to know Mollie to know how out of character it is for her to be a drama queen or make outlandish claims. She has always been very down to earth, so when she told me this, I took her seriously. She is not sure if she wants to develop this talent but she really wanted to go to the Queen Mary, since the ship is reported to be haunted, to see what she could 'see'. She took all of these pictures. It would seem that the ghosts do come out for Miss Mollie. Believe it... or not....!

This photo was taken in the engine room of the Queen Mary at door 13. Door 13 is infamous because a worker was crushed in this door during an emergency drill back in the 40's and his ghost is said to linger in this area. The kid you see in the picture is my daughter's boyfriend. We took several shots of this door just for the heck of it.	When you zoom in to one of the pillars beyond the door, this is what we found.... can you see it? To me, it looks like a skeletal man with a big gaping mouth and goo/blood running out of his mouth. Yikes!!! Scared the bejeezus out of us!!!

This is an interesting photo because we see at least four or five different images in it. This photo was taken on the Queen Mary's Ghost Tour. Mollie took the photo and , at the time, only she and Jimmy were in the room that she was aware of. It's possible that there were people that she didn't see, but she is taking a picture of a knick knack cabinet with a mirror behind it. There is absolutely nothing behind this display but a mirror. You can see the reflection of the flash in the mirror. So then we started looking closely and....	... this is what we found. There is no possible way this could be somebody in the room or a reflection of someone, mostly because if you look at the other picture, you do not see legs or feet below the bowl of flowers in the reflection. Moreover, notice closely - this image is in black and white. There is no color whatsoever. Who takes a black and white photo in a color camera??? Moreover, the proportion is all wrong. It seems small and out of place. I think this photo amazed me the most of all. Mollie kept telling us that she was seeing someone in a Fedora follow her around as she took the tour. We didn't pay much attention until we saw this on film. Again, draw your own conclusions, but this is a truly spectacular photo.

Another engine room shot. It was active down there, apparently. Mollie said after we left that she kept seeing a shadow figure following us around. She kept catching glimpses of him. When we looked at this photo after we had left the ship, this is what we saw.....	See the shadow figure in the red circle? Interesting.....

Mollie found another one!! Early in November 2009, my daughter was looking through our Queen Mary pictures again and she came across another spirit photo. I tell you, this girl has a knack for finding ghosts in photos. She thinks it looks like it has a nautical or naval hat on, which upon review, looks like it to me also. I think this one is the scary and absolutely crazy. See if you don't think so, too! Notice how it seems to block out the wall behind it, so it's not transparent - whatever was materializing was somewhat opaque. Scary!!!!!

And just so you know, I spent two weeks in England and France taking a myriad of pictures and never once came up with anything spooky or questionable. In hindsight, I should have brought my daughter. The spirits would have come out for her!

Update May 2010 - Last month, my daughter, her boyfriend, me and a friend of mine went to a local cemetery that is a burial place for many of the pioneers in our area. Since we live in Southern California, people think that there isn't much 'history' here like there is, for example, in Europe or even the east coast of the U.S. (revolutionary war stuff). However - there is a indeed a huge amount of history in our area with early Spanish settlers, land grants, missions and such. You just have to know where to look. Therefore, Spadra Cemetery in Pomona is the heart of a hugely rich pioneer history for the east San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. Not a lot of people know about it exept for the elderly in the area or those people interested in local history. So I have to tell you about my experience with Spadra Cemetery....

Night Number One: This was the night that my girlfriend, Cindy, and I decided to go to Spadra. It was a Thursday night and raining off and on (perfect time to go to a derelict cemetery, right??!!). So we drove down to where I had found the cemetery on mapquest and, I have to tell you, my first impression of it was just sad. It's tucked up against a hill with a major freeway pretty much running right next to it. It is also in an industrial area of Pomona, not very safe, and has been known to attract vandals and other unsavory characters. The cops patrol it regularly so on top of not wanting to run in to criminals, you don't want to get arrested for trespassing. Hey, this is fun already!! Just kidding. Anyway, Cindy and I drive down there in the rain and find this big, creepy wrought iron gate that says "Spadra" on it. I'll tell you; this gate is about as eerie and creepy as they come. Now, I should explain that my friend, Cindy, is also a 'sensative' like my daughter, only Cindy hears things more than she sees them, although she can see things on occasion.

So Cindy and I find this creepy black gate in the rain and I pull into the drive way with my lights on the gate. A construction yard is to the left and the freeway to the right, so beyond the gate is a long driveway that probably goes for about 150 feet before you actually get to the graveyard tucked back against the hill. I gotta tell you, we could not have picked a creepier night to do this. It's pitch black but for the lights from the construction yard, a few street lights, and my headlights. Beyond the gate out of the range of my head lights, it's pitch black. So I pull the car forward over the giant wash that runs beneath this driveway. They wash is like a raging river. We get within 10 feet of the gate and I put the car in park and pull out my camera. Cindy stays in the car as I get out. Now, I thought she was getting out with me but she didn't; she stayed in the car. I walked up to the gate, peered through it into the darkness, and took a couple of shot with my camera. I took a few steps over to the right side of the gate and noticed that someone had cut the fence so you could actually pass around the gate (slipping in between the cut fence). As I turned around to Cindy to tell her we could get in if we were brave enough (not sure I was), I see her pounding on the dashboard. I had no idea what she was doing but she was clearly in a panic. Before I could ask her what was wrong, she threw open the passenger door and says in this really panicked voice, "they're coming, they're coming; get in the car! They're coming!!". Terrified that she meant the cops (nothing like calling your parents as 46 year old woman to ask them to come bail you out of jail because you were trespassing in an old cemetery....), I scrambled back into the car, slammed the door, threw it into reverse (and forgot about the raging wash), peeled out of the driveway, jammed the car into drive and took off.

We're about half way down the rainy street when I realized there were no cops. We were alone on this rainy, creepy street. I turned to ask Cindy what the hell was wrong when I saw she had tears in her eyes. Then I was really concerned and asked her what she meant. As I mentioned, Cindy sometimes sees ghosts. Well, she had apparently seen many. After she calmed down, she said that she had been afraid to get out of the car because of a 'feeling' she had. As I'm walking around at the gate, oblivious, she was seeing apparitions down the driveway lingering just out of the range of the lights from the construction yard. According to Cindy, she felt like they were watching us, milling around, not sure why we were there. Mistrustful. Considering how much that place has been vandalized, I don't blame them. Anyway, about the time I saw the cut in the fence, Cindy said that these apparitions suddenly started running towards the gate. They 'bolted' was her word. And leading the pack was something she could only describe as half-human, sometimes running on two legs and sometimes on all fours. That's when she started beating on the dashboard and that's when I bolted back into the car. Cindy refuses to go back to Spadra ever again and I can't say I blame her. I'm not a sensitive but that places gives me the creeps also. So, the next night, I brought in the big guns... I took Mollie down to Spadra to see her take on it. And what a take it was.

The next night with my daughter, Mollie... well, Mollie and I have been talking about going to Spadra for awhile. When she heard that Cindy and I went and our subsequent tale, she was very anxious to go. So I took her and her boyfriend, Jimmy, the next night.

It was raining again. This time, I stayed in the car with the headlights illuminating the creepy old gate while Mollie and Jimmy got out of the car with my camera (the same one that took the Queen Mary pictures) and walked up to that cemetery gate. Mollie kept peering through the slats, looking down that long driveway towards the cemetery itself, and snapping pictures here and there. She seemed very intent staring down the left side of the driveway where the wall that separates the driveway from the construction yard is. About fifty feet down the driveway is a streetlight, but it's so dark down there that the street light really doesn't do much good. So after several minutes of looking through the gate in the rain, Mollie and Jimmy got back in the car and we drove off into the darkness.

I didn't press her right away. She was busy going through the pictures she had taken on the camera. I finally asked her if she saw anything and she said 'absolutely'. I asked 'what did you see?', which opened up the flood gates. She said that she began seeing shapes down in the wash that runs underneath the driveway. She said there were lots of souls in the wash for some reason and not happy souls, either. She said they were trying to hide and not friendly. The gate was a whole nother ballgame; she said that she saw many people lingering just outside of the streetlight that hangs over the driveway about 50 feet down. She said that she felt they were very mistrustful and she felt as if she should have asked permission before taking the pictures. Although she didn't see the half-human creature that Cindy saw, she said there was something not-too-good lingering back in the crowd. She could feel it and see hints of it. But she said it was very busy back there and she just got an overwhelming sense of mistrust.

Now, here's the kicker - all of those pictures she shot? I didn't see them until we got home and I got into good light, but there are faces EVERYWHERE. Faces, faces, faces in those shots. All of the shots have the gate have them and the faces appear behind the gate, looking back from between the slats. And, omg, there is almost the perfect outline of a skeletal woman's face complete with an up-hairdoo and the top part of her torso wearing a kind of prairie-type blouse from the 1890's. There is also something like looks like a skull with glowing eyes. We can see old men complete with beards as well. Remember I told you that the spirits come out for Mollie, and they really do. These pictures floored me. I remember thinking "look at all of the faces!" - like in the movie Poltergeist when they film all of those spirits descending the stairs in the house; well, it'd kind of like that. Faces are everywhere.

We plan to go back to Spadra and we also plan to go to Agua Mansa Pioneer cemetery in Colton, CA, which is just a stone's throw from my new job. I can see it from where I work. I'll get back to you with our trip to Agua Mansa as soon as we go.

Here's the second shot in the eleven that Mollie took, but it's the first shot for our purposes. You're going to want to click on these so you can view them in large form. The circle is where the shape is; see the skeletal lady's face? Notice above her head it looks like an upswept do. Many of these pictures have faces I didn't even see until later, so it's very possible that there are many other face in this picture that I haven't circled. Have fun searching them out because they are everywhere!

Here's the one that looks like the screaming skull. It's the single circled figure atop the two. And those spots aren't orbs; they're raindrops. It was raining!

This is going to give you a laugh. My good friend, Terry, and I have talked about 'heading' up a ghost hunting team for years. Terry and I have spent a lot of time together chaperoning our kids around and we became good friends, realizing we liked a lot of the same stuff. Anyway, to make a very long story short, we would joke about calling our team "S.H.I.T" - Spirit Hunter-Investigation Team. Of course, now you came come up with all sorts of funny tag lines for this, and believe me, we did - like "I'm the president of S.H.*.T" or "You don't know S.H.*.T." and so forth. Terry is one of the funniest people I have ever met and we've had a blast talking about this. But finally, in July, I put together an itinerary and we actually did our first S.H.*.T hunt. Hysterical.

So we visited several places on our inaugural hunt - Pinnacle Peak Restaurant in San Dimas (used to be an old stage stop, rumored to be haunted by the ghost of a little girl), San Dimas Canyon Park (they used to hang the horse theives here), Spadra Cemetery (no explanation needed, but didn't get any ghosts in the shots), The Phillips Mansion in Pomona (SUPER creepy), and the La Verne Cemetery in La Verne, CA. We took our good friend Cindy with us, who is a 'sensitive', and she got all sorts of feelings at these places. We even got a fantastic shot of what looks like a shadow creature (complete with a cowboy hat) leaning over Terry's daughter, Toni. I'll post that photo when I get a copy. All in all, it was a fantastic trip and we had a blast. We didn't hear or see much (we have a team member with an infrared camera but it didn't pick up anything), but we won't give up. Stay tuned for our next ghostly gathering! Oh, by the way... we will probably start a website dedicated to our hunts - we're going to call it ishitmyself.com. If you think that didn't have us rolling with laughter, think again......

Here's a picture Terry took at San Dimas Canyon Park. She sees something in the "V" of the tree that is directly above the swing. Look closely - do you see anything in the "V" of the tree trunk??

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