 |
| This is what 9 years of wedded bliss looks like ... |
Wait for it …
I took him on a trip to Gettysburg, PA, the most haunted town in the United States of America. The mission: a ghost hunting adventure with a real live paranormal team. Wait what?! I know … not exactly the norm when it comes to anniversary woo'ing, but this is right up our alley. We have been married for 9 years, the normal "dinner and a movie" thing seemed somewhat predictable. I wanted something different. Something that we had never done. Ghost hunting was the perfect combination of adrenaline rushes and fear-driven embraces.
We set out on our adventure on Friday evening. It takes about an hour and a half to reach Gettysburg from our home. Per the norm, we left our house later than we had planned. Meaning that we would be arriving in the haunted little community after dark. This worked out perfectly. We were unable to see what we were driving into. Had it been daylight, we would have seen battlefields on either side of us, decorated with memorials for the 51,000 soldiers that died in the 3 day Battle of Gettysburg. Did you hear me? 51 THOUSAND soldiers took their final breath in this quaint little town. (God bless their brave souls.) That means that thousands of spirits are still lingering here. Eeep!
We pulled into our hotel and joked about it being haunted, too. Truth be told, I didn't really want a haunted hotel. I wanted to be able to escape the terror that was going to take place later in the night. We stayed at a sweet little hotel, the Quality Inn at General Robert E Lee's Headquarters. It was pretty AND affordable, a winning combination in this gal's book. My husband and I had to meet our Ghost Hunting teammates at 11pm. We had a couple hours before our hunt began so, we sat in our hotel room and started reading up on the battle and our hotel. What did we find out?
OUR hotel IS haunted.
Well, crap.
OH ALISON!! … What were you thinking? Why didn't you do your homework on your hotel accommodations? Clearly, I should have paid more attention in high school history class because, as it turns out, General Robert E Lee was a pretty huge part of The Battle of Gettysburg. The "Quality Inn" portion of the hotel name was just a ploy to get us non-history knowing folks into the lobby. The "General Robert E Lee" portion of the name was definitely a dead giveaway (pun totally intended) that the place is crawling with ghosts of the General and his friends.
After reading that our hotel was (gulp) haunted ... we decided to get a jump start on our hunting adventure. We whipped our smart phones out of their imaginary holsters (in a "put your hands up, or I'll shoot" manner) and began snapping dozens of photos of the room. If we could photograph a ghost before our hunt, we'd surely feel a little less like amateurs when we reached the Gettysburg Paranormal Association.
As I clumsily point and shoot my camera phone in several directions, I looked down and noticed that there was a cloudy looking smudge above Tom's head in one of my photos. I stared at the photo for a minute or so, it was just a smudgy looking oval floating above his head. It could've been anything, right? I decided to show him the image. At that point, I didn't believe that the General was in our room, I was just trying to get his paranormal interests flowing. I called him over to check out my "find". Before he could get a look at my picture, it was GONE!! Actually, all of the images on my phone were gone.
C o m p l e t e l y g o n e.
The phone had locked up and erased every photo in my phone. Including the pictures of my children. And to that I say "bad ghost". Those memories were important to me. Just because they're on a cellular device, and not in a frame on my mantel, doesn't mean that I cherished them any less.
After about 10 minutes and 2 phone restarts … the images were back. However, they were not on my phone, instead they were saved on my memory card. They are still gone from my phone at this very moment. Actually, the only images on my phone are several pictures of Nutella (that's a whole 'nother story … you see, Nutella makes me gag and one of my dearest friends uses this as a form of amusement).
The clock hit 10:30pm. Time to make our trek into the great unknown. We gathered our cameras and our best "I ain't scared" attitudes and hit the road. We checked in and met with the GPA (Gettysburg Paranormal Association) and the other hunters. There were about 20 of us. We were taught how to use the ghost hunting equipment. Then they handed out the fancy devices and sent us to our cars.
We followed GPA to the haunted destination. It was called the Hoffman Mansion. Man o' man did this place look creepy!!! I did NOT want to enter that mansion. Ghost hunting equipment doesn't keep you safe. It just gives you a slight heads up that there might be a spirit invading your personal space. They gave us a brief rundown of the house, its history and past paranormal experiences that had happened there. At this point, I'm thinking that dinner and a movie, though predictable, would have been a more appropriate anniversary evening. What was I thinking? Ghost Hunting? Seriously? I'm a wuss. This is ridiculous.
Anyhoo … GPA wrapped up their speeches and sent us in. I said a little prayer as 19 slightly frightened individuals and one absolutely, completely, hook line and sinker, to the nth degree, petrified 31 year old girl (you guessed it ... me) filed into the spooky abandoned house.
Dear Lord,
Keep us safe from harm (and by "us" I just mean me and Tom. I don't care about the others … they signed up for this, too. They can say their own prayer. I WILL, without hesitation, trample a little old lady to get to the nearest exit if I sense danger (Hey, it's my prayer … I'll pray it how I wanna. It's all about self preservation, y'all).
Amen.
 |
| Click on the picture to enlarge. |
To be continued ...
Dun dun duuuun ...
Dun dun duuuun ...
No comments:
Post a Comment