Crisis of Faith

I am not sure that I believe in ghosts anymore.

Now, if you knew me, you would find that to be a shocking statement.  My belief in and my investigations of the paranormal have been a huge part of my life for a very long time.  Ghosts, and all of those things experienced but unseen, have been a steadfast and constant part of my being since I was a child growing up in a regular, working-class family of psychic superstars, many who took my ability to “know things” and feel spirits as just an expected and accepted part of my DNA.  Not everyone thought it was cool, of course, and there was a long period of time where I hid my talents and interests from others, but it is a fact that it has always been a part of my nature to be drawn to those invisible and mysterious things that intrigue some people and frighten others. I have had experiences with the paranormal that have been exhilarating and some that were truly terrifying, but they have all fueled my curiosity about the unseen and my determination to document whether or not there is actual evidence that those things are real and if so, what, or who, those beings are.

I am the type of paranormal investigator who lives life as an almost constant paranormal investigation. No matter where I am or what I am doing ghosts are on my mind and the topic of conversation will almost inevitably be about my paranormal experiences, the most recent evidence that I have gathered and the latest gadgets available to help those of us who live to look for ghosts do it more professionally. I am blaming my current lack of a social life on the work and busy schedules, but it is, in fact, a distinct possibility that those in my circle are happy for the break from my endless stories, speculation and theories.

If you can’t tell already, investigating the paranormal is one of the greatest joys of my life and I take it very seriously.  I live it. I breathe it. I may never find anything that truly changes the field or moves the science forward in any way, but I am passionate about the journey to try to find the answers. It is an undeniable fact that some of the happiest times for me are when I am investigating haunted locations and trying to figure out if anyone or anything is there and if so, who and what they are. My life is all about trying to document these amazing experiences with the hope that the evidence I gather might provide some sort of clue as to who or what these entities are that people have felt and told stories about since the beginning of time, but who still live in the realm of the unproven and often, the ridiculed. I also admit to having my own agenda.  I would like to truly know if these “ghosts” are proof that humans live on after death or if they are, in fact, proof of something else.      

***

For those of you who have read my essay “Contact,” you know that I had an incredible experience recently that led me to believe that orbs might be just that proof for me.  Orbs are spherical balls of light that appear in places where they are not normally expected to be like in pictures and videos of ordinary people in ordinary situations.  They are often present at investigation sites and are sometimes caught in pictures and videos at the same time as an investigator is remarking that they feel something with them or when unexplained activity is occurring.  Orbs come in various shapes, sizes and colors (most commonly they are spherical and white) and they have a long history with humankind, often appearing in ancient works of art and narrative.  They have sometimes been assigned spiritual significance as some believe that they are the souls of those who have passed or angels that are at work on earth. 

Orbs are also controversial among paranormal investigators. There is a never-ending debate on whether orbs are real paranormal manifestations or whether they are dust, insects or even ball lightning.  Many paranormal investigators won’t even consider them as any sort of evidence due to the possible confounds they present that could taint a serious investigation. Orbs hadn’t been the most prominent thing on my radar during most of my investigations, but I had caught a few pictures and videos that had piqued my interest and made me wonder (vaguely) where they fit into the paranormal puzzle.

For those of you who haven’t read “Contact,” here is the Cliff Notes version of my incredible experience.  My brother, who said that he would contact our family after his death, passed away and in my grief, I was unable to try to make the same kind of contact with him that I do almost every day with spirits I don’t have any personal connection with.  I went back and forth for weeks, trying intermittently to contact him but having an irrational fear that he might answer that alternated with panic and fear that if I didn’t get my act together, I might miss it if he did reach out.  After weeks of this kind of back and forth, on again-off again behavior on my part, one night I made some peace with my chaos and stopped trying.  The very next evening I had one of the most extraordinary paranormal experiences of my life. 

And it was all about orbs.

Again, the Cliff Notes version:  I was working at my desk in my office.  There were no windows open or fans on and I unexpectedly felt a strong cold breeze move over the top of my hand.  I have been doing this long enough to recognize when someone is trying to get my attention (the extremely cold temperature is a pretty standard clue), so I grabbed a meter designed to help facilitate yes and no communication with spirits and the nearest camera, which was on my phone, and started to ask questions to see if I could get a response.  During the next 27 minutes I had an extraordinary, almost magical experience videotaping multiple orbs in my home moving back and forth in front of me at warp speed, and with some that seemed to intelligently interact with me.      

Every time I watch the video, I am impressed with how cool I was.  Inside, I was jumping up and down like an excited little kid, but on the outside, I was trying my best to collect good evidence. The data was inconclusive, there were no voices captured on audio and what I thought might have been a response on another type of meter wasn’t repeatable, but the nature of the experience was so amazing that after it was all over I really believed that something valid had happened.  And then it struck me a few days later that maybe the breeze on my hand, the magic of the experience and the unexpected nature of the contact was a gift from my brother.  Maybe, he was letting me know that he was okay and giving his paranormal investigator sister the experience of a lifetime to prove it.

I didn’t completely lose all perspective, though.  Several times over the next two weeks, I would randomly grab my phone (using the same camera that had captured the experience in the first place) and walk around my house looking to see if there were any orbs that decided to make a return appearance.  There were none, which only solidified my belief that this was a one-time special event that was real. And more than that, it left me with an uncharacteristically profound belief that this orb storm was likely a gift from my brother to let me know he was okay.   

I was also beginning to wonder if this gift from my brother was to show me that orbs really are what is left of the souls of those who have departed, like many people believe.  My determination to be more aware of them and to try to figure out what they were increased.

Not long after the orb event, I was sitting at the dining room table alone, writing, when I felt someone ruffle my hair. It isn’t very often that paranormal investigators get touched, but if you have ever had that experience, you can definitively say that it isn’t something you generally mistake for anything else. 

Since I was actively trying to document orb evidence, especially as it related to contact, and I was curious about who had touched my hair, I grabbed my phone and set it up on a tripod, along with a full-spectrum camera and an infrared camera all covering the same area with roughly the same perspective.  When I looked at the videos later, I saw several orbs that appeared around me as I was writing, but I could only see them on the video from my phone.  The other cameras, which should have seen them at the same time, didn’t.  It was about that time that I began to wonder if it was something about my brand of phone that was causing me to be able to see these orbs.  What if something in that particular type of phone camera was able to make catches that other cameras could not?

I discounted that pretty quickly, because all of the other orb pictures I have ever taken were on non-phone cameras.  But the orb storm video was so clear and so detailed that I wanted to find out if my type of phone might be an underutilized piece of ghost hunting equipment.  I was curious enough to ask my niece and nephew to bring a different brand of phone over so we could set up an experiment with them side by side to see if two different types of phone cameras could see the orbs if we could get them to make an appearance.  If the cameras didn’t see the same thing, then I wanted to look at what made my phone different.

So, we set up an experiment to see if the orbs were present on both of them and they weren’t.  When they appeared, you could only see them on my phone.  And worse than that, when I could clearly see what I thought were orbs through my phone camera lens, my nephew saw something with his own eyes at the same time that would change everything for me:  dust swirling in front of my phone camera light. We spent several hours recreating the dust effect, which looked exactly like the “orbs” I had seen around me when I was writing.  Turns out that there is something about the light on my phone camera that makes it particularly good at picking up dust in all of its minute and circular detail.  I was crushed.  That meant that everything I thought I had learned in the last few weeks had meant nothing.  Everything that I thought had been an orb was likely dust.

And then it hit me.  That might also mean that the orb storm, that most special experience of my investigator’s life, that I truly felt was an amazing gift from my brother, was likely nothing more than dust that I had somehow stirred up and managed to capture on video. 

And that realization, that sucker punch to the gut of my belief, began my crisis of faith.

***

I have been a passionate and committed day-in and day-out paranormal investigator and have lived with one foot in the spirit world for so long that it took a few days for the enormity of this revelation to catch up with me.  In the ensuing weeks, I began to see changes in myself and my relationship with the unseen that came as a surprise, but that seemed almost inevitable given my deep disappointment and feelings of embarrassment for having been so easily fooled.  I asked myself, if orbs weren’t real, was any of it real?  What if everything I had experienced over the years was completely explainable and there was no mystery to any of it?  I had always believed that there was something out there to be discovered but now I wasn’t so sure.  What if there was a logical explanation for every experience that I had ever had and every piece of “evidence” that I had thought I had captured?  It almost seemed certain that the orb storm had been a dust storm.  If I could have been so wrong about dust being something paranormal, could I be wrong about all of it? 

For the first time that I could remember, I began to deny everything that I believed was paranormal. If I heard a noise inside my bedroom during the night, which was not an unusual occurrence for me as I had always had ghostly visitors both day and night, I rejected it and reframed it as something conventional.  If I felt a spirit come close, I said out loud, “ghosts aren’t real” and I ignored it.  If I thought I saw an orb fly by with my own vision, which has happened on occasion, I said, “orbs are just dust.”  If I felt like grabbing a piece of equipment to measure something unexpected that seemed anomalous, I told myself that it would just be picking up some random electrical noise in the room and not anything paranormal because the paranormal didn’t exist.  I put all of my equipment away and I closed the door. I completely shut off that part of myself that had been the biggest part of myself and eventually the noises stopped and so did the visits. I remember wondering at the time:  Are they giving me space to figure this out?  Are they no longer interested in me if I am not interested in them?  OR ARE THEY JUST NOT REAL AND THEY NEVER WERE???  It made me wonder if I had been creating it all myself all along.

You might be asking yourself why I was rejecting everything paranormal if I had only been mistaken about the orbs?  Why deny all of the ghosts/spirits/entities with whom I had an ongoing, if not consistent, reliable or even verifiable relationship with? And how had I invested myself so completely in orbs being real that I could be so crushed when it turned out they were not?  That isn’t my usual response when things turn out to be different than I thought they were.  Usually, I would be even more committed to finding the truth.  After all, isn’t setback part of the very nature of the investigation of the unknown?

The bigger crisis of faith, it turns out, concerned my brother. If the orbs on that video were just dust, then it meant that there had been no real contact, and the orb storm was not the special communication that I had believed it was. I had pinned all of my hopes that my brother was living on somehow after death and that he had sent me a memorable message to say, “hey sis, I am okay” on that experience. It had given me faith that he would at some point be able to give me some insight into where he was and what it is like for him now, and that we would be able to continue to communicate somehow even though he was gone.  I trusted that he would be able to give me the answers that I had never been able to find before because he was my brother, and he had said that he would come back after he died. 

I realize now that I had let logic fly out the window in my grief and grabbed onto that experience like a life raft.  But the inevitable conclusion was the same.  That beautiful experience that had comforted my grieving heart might not have been real at all.  And if it wasn’t real, maybe none of it was.  And if the orb storm wasn’t real and I didn’t actually have any contact with my brother, was he really anywhere at all?

I was deep in the dark night of the soul, full of despair, confusion, and disillusionment.  What had been meaningful now seemed meaningless.  I was teetering on the precipice between belief and disbelief not only about what this meant to me but also what it meant about me and everything that I had believed for my whole life. 

I had no peace now, only doubt, sadness and deep disappointment in all of it.

In the deepest part of my despair, a very good friend, a woman who has known much loss in her own life, told me a story about a dragonfly that she had learned in a grief group. The story goes that in the bottom of a pond there were some nymphs who couldn’t understand why none of their kind ever came back after they crawled up the plant stems that took them to the top of the pond and out of the water.  Because of this mystery, they all agreed to come back to tell the others what happened after they made the climb to the surface, but no one ever did. The story follows one of the nymphs who makes it to the top and turns into a beautiful dragonfly only to find that he can’t keep his promise because he is no longer a nymph, and he can’t go back under the water.  The beautiful creature that he has become must live above the water, not below it with his remaining family and friends.    

The metaphor was not lost on me, and it helped me to theorize why it might be difficult for those who have passed to make contact with those of us left behind.  It helped me to understand that my crisis of faith had more to do with love and loss than whether or not what I thought was orbs was actually dust.  And it raised a question for me that stirred some curiosity in my fragile investigator’s heart.  Why are some nymphs still with us under the water even after they have had the opportunity to climb out of it? 

I still wasn’t sure that there was any reason to believe that orbs were anything more than dust, but I took out the orb storm video and watched it again with a more critical eye. I asked others in the paranormal field to watch it and see what they thought too.  While the consensus was that there may have been some dust present, there was also overall agreement that there were some things that happened during that 27-minute experience that don’t fit the mold for how we believe dust behaves. There appears to be some purposeful movement in response to my requests that would seem to indicate some intelligent interaction.  All of the light anomalies in the video move at a high rate of speed that wouldn’t seem to be possible with no air blowing in the room. And then, there is the original incident of the cold air blowing over my hand that started the whole thing.  It wasn’t enough of a breeze to stir up that amount of dust and it definitely seemed purposeful. I understand that that is subjective and that there is no objective evidence to back it up, but I know what I felt.  It was the act of someone trying to get my attention. I never would have pulled out my equipment and started filming if that hadn’t happened. 

One of the most puzzling things to me about the orb storm is the way it all just stopped.  One minute they were there buzzing to and fro like traffic on an orb superhighway and then they were just gone.  After all of that activity, there was not one light anomaly to be seen anywhere, and their disappearance happened in the span of a millisecond.  You could say perhaps that I stopped stirring up dust, but in reality I was still moving around the room just the same as I had been throughout the entire experience and just like that (finger snap) every speck of dust or orb was gone.  

I also started examining some of my other orb pictures and videos. It seems to me that there is a distinct pattern in the composition and movement of particles of dust that clearly differentiate them from self-illuminated light anomalies that appear to move with a purpose.  But, how to be sure?  As always, lots of questions and no concrete answers. That is the way it always is in the paranormal field.  But at least I am starting to ask some questions again.  I might be becoming more open again to the possibilities.  Slowly, I think I am starting to come out of it. 

I am occasionally hearing a noise in my home now that doesn’t seem to be initiated by the building settling or any other natural cause.  They are like the ones I used to hear.  I am not paying a great deal of attention to them yet, but I am noticing.  Does that mean that I am starting to “create” my paranormal experiences again?  Or does it mean that I really do have to be open to them to experience them at all?  I have noticed sometimes in paranormal communication that the spirit will answer the question just as I am about to ask it.  I wonder if they are beginning to seek me out again because they are aware that I am getting ready to be open for business once more, and they are seeing the open sign before I do. 

I have also begun to entertain the possibility that the orb storm might have been real.  It may truly have been the incredible experience that I thought it was, no matter where it came from. I think it is important not to keep discounting it entirely, just because I made a mistake with some orbs that turned out to be dust.  And, I have to admit that I haven’t given up believing in the deepest recesses of my heart that it might really have been a gift from my brother that he sent to me after he climbed out of the water. Only more time and some serious investigation will help me to know for sure.

Something is happening out there that is still a mystery. Perhaps I might not give up on all of this just yet. That seems like some sort of progress to me. 

If you had asked me 6 months ago if I needed faith to be a paranormal investigator, I would have said no but it turns out that for me that isn’t true.  Faith is at its core a strong belief and trust in something, defined in Hebrews 11:1 (KJV) as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”  I can’t think of any definition that more clearly describes the struggle inherent in the search for evidence of the paranormal and, in my case anyway, the answers to life’s bigger questions that might be revealed along the way. I have learned that my belief can be shaken, almost broken.  I have learned, too, that it has always taken faith for me to keep trying. 

I also know that I have a great deal of faith and trust in my brother. I did when he was alive, and I do now.  He may be a dragonfly, but I haven’t given up hope that he may yet find a way to send a message through the water to clearly reassure me that he is okay and to maybe help me answer those bigger questions that could help to heal the wounds of so many grieving hearts.