United Kingdom - A excorcism is to be performed on a council house in the Republic of Ireland, amid claims that it is haunted.

The occupants of the house at Hollyhill on Cork’s northside have fled, saying it is occupied by an evil spirit that is determined to keep them out.

Laura Burke, her partner Ritchie and her son Kyle are terrified to remain after a spate of bizarre occurrences over recent weeks.

The young couple moved into the house last August.

Special prayers are to be said at the house to placate the spirit and a ‘New Age’ shaman (spirit worker) will perform an exorcism.

Laura said holy pictures were routinely being knocked from the wall, screams were heard in the dead of night and their son was flung from his bed.

The family received their greatest shock when they spotted what they described as glowing orbs hovering in mid-air in certain rooms in the house.

“It’s an evil spirit - I don’t believe it means us well,” said Laura.

“We tried saying prayers in the house and the next thing all you hear is banging furniture upstairs or clothes being fired out of wardrobes.”

Clairvoyant John O’Reilly was invited to inspect the house. He said he immediately felt a presence, adding: “There is someone here - someone who is very angry. I get a feeling of a younger man who would have hung himself.”

However, locals remain dubious about the haunting claims and said nobody recalls previous incidents at the house or any tragedy fitting the descriptions being cited.

Source - http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/

Tampa, Florida - Not satisfied with living in Florida, Jonathon “The Impaler” Sharkey wants to move to Washington, D.C., to become the nation’s first vampire president.

Sharkey, 45, spent Friday on a Greyhound bus with his new fiancee, Audrianna Foster, a 19-year-old girl from Ohio he met online. She too believes she is a vampire, or vampyre.

“I haven’t dated a girl older than 19 since 2006,” Sharkey said as his 19-year-old daughter and his 2-year-old grandson met him at the Greyhound station. “It’s good to be me.”

“The Impaler” claims he’s a direct descendent of Vlad II the Impaler, better known as Dracula.

He has scheduled a Monday press conference in Tampa to announce his plans to file paperwork to run for President of the United States in 2012. He recently switched his party affiliation from Independent to Republican so he can run with the G.O.P.

He ran for Governor of Minnesota in 2006 and also had short-lived bids for U.S. Senate in 2000, U.S. President in 2004, and U.S. President in 2008.

In an extended interview, Sharkey shared well-thought-out opinions on capital punishment, the abortion issue, and veterans issues. However, he also bragged about having numerous teen-aged girlfriends in recent years.

The girls have also provided several skeletons in Sharkey’s closet.

He’s accused of “brainwashing” a 16-year-old in Minnesota. The two were engaged until last month. Her family now has a restraining order against Sharkey and claims his texts to her violate it.

He reportedly admitted to harassing another 16-year-old Minnesota girl online in 2009.

He was arrested in Tennessee several years ago and is currently on probation from Indiana after he was found guilty in 2009 of intimidating a judge. He served six months in a Marion Co. jail before his release.

Sources confirm the Secret Service has had to keep him on its radar, since he moves around the country.

Sharkey was once on the Executive Committee of the Hillsborough Co. Republican Party (HCRP) in the 1990s, but A.J. Matthews, HCRP State Committeeman, says he didn’t show any of the extreme behaviors he’s exhibiting now.

Sharkey, meanwhile, continues to develop a movie on his campaign, The True Impaler.

Source - http://www.cbsnews.com/

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If it really is possible for a person to be endowed with the gift to see into the future, then why aren’t all psychics filthy rich? Driving expensive cars and lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills from their lottery winnings? The simple answer is: real psychics aren’t motivated by money and all the nice things it can buy. Oh no, what winds a real psychic’s clock is the chance to help, and be of service to their fellow human beings. I learned this truth the hard way. Playing poker with Ed Dames during a psychic dream, he revealed this to me, just before he revealed a full house - aces over queens - and squealed like an insane leprechaun before de-materializing with all my chips.

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Humans rejoice. There is water on the moon. After diligent efforts to pollute every ounce of water beneath the stratosphere of our own planet, it’s just a matter of time till we expand our efforts to our lunar companion. Here’s hoping we may someday discover a rain forest on Mars.

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Phantoms and Monsters continues it series of Humanoid/Cryptid encounters reports starting with a story of an Air Force photographer taken on a two-hour drive inside an Air Force vehicle, with the windows blacked out. Finally arriving at an underground installation, he says he was ordered to disrobe, given a white smock to wear, and taken to a room which contained a disc shaped craft suspended in a heavy net hanging from a large crane. He was ordered to photograph the inside of the disc and took pictures of alien bodies dressed in blue jumpsuits. The year was 1973 and blue jumpsuits (usually polyester) were in fashion. Although it was not explained how the aliens died, chances are it was during a disco competition. There is also an equal-opportunity story featuring a White Bigfoot.

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The story of a haunted village - and it’s ghosts - are the subjects of a new movie.. Those involved say the film, The Ghosts of Zoar, Ohio, will not be a documentary, but a full-ticket-price feature.

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Triangle, Virginia - More answers have surfaced in the case of two mysterious tombstones found inside a Triangle home Wednesday.

Sarah Bolton said Thursday she found two headstones in a tool shed outside the home shortly after moving in last April. She and her then boyfriend moved them to the basement “out of respect.”

They told no one about the stones and moved out in December.

Just before noon Wednesday, the stone slabs were found by a man and woman who were helping to ready the home for the rental market.

The tombstones bear the names Mary J. Fitton, alive between 1880 and 1935, and David M. Ingram, alive between 1957 and 1980. Both were processed as evidence and are now stored at a Woodbridge police station.

Edward Grogg, who found the slabs, notified police on the advice of his landlord, Elliot Diamond.

A check of local records uncovered information that Fitton and Ingram could be buried somewhere in Alexandria. A Prince William historian said most times when headstones are found in the county they were either moved or stolen from a grave site, or replaced after they showed signs of age.

As police search for the rightful owners of the headstones, some of the eerie stories about the house still go unexplained. The house is now getting the attention of local paranormal investigators.

Bolton said she moved into the house about a year ago, and while she never saw a ghost, she said her boyfriend saw an apparition of a large woman in a dress. She also said her children regularly heard noises that kept them up at night.

“The kids would say that they heard things like footsteps walking around, but I just chalked it up to being an old house and creaking floors,” said Bolton.

Grogg said he, too, had a strange account inside the house, on Sunday. After shutting off the power to the house so he could do electrical work, Grogg, who lives next door, said he and his roommate saw a single light bulb unexplainably burning in the kitchen. Tenants who lived in the house prior to Bolton both left because they heard sounds of slamming doors and footsteps where no one was walking, added Grogg.

The stories perked the ears of two local ghost hunters.

Kenneth McLein and Jessica Lovegrove are a newly formed team of paranormal investigators. Their group, Virginia Paranormal Organization of Research, or VAPOR, uses night vision goggles, meters to measure electromagnetic waves and recording devices to measure what has widely become known as Electronic Voice Phenomena.

Lovegrove used the tools last year during a ghost hunt at Dumfries’ Weems-Botts Museum. The search yielded an EVP of voices that said “Hello,” “Is anybody out there?” and “Get out.”

They are now waiting to hear back from Diamond for permission to investigate his home.

During the day, Lovegrove works for a major Northern Virginia health care provider and McLean works construction.

Searching for ghosts is a hobby for the two, but McLein said it’s important to be a skeptic.

“When you have someone on an investigation who is just really excited about the possibility of seeing a ghost then that person is most likely going to think everything they see is a ghost,” said McLein.

In addition to the Triangle house, Lovegrove and McLein hope to investigate sites at Gettysburg and at a Leesburg home later this month. - Uriah A. Kiser

Source - http://www2.insidenova.com/

Triangle, Virginia - A man helping ready a Triangle home for the rental market found two tombstones in its basement Wednesday.

For the last week, Edward Grogg has been doing handy work at the a one-story home on Triangle Street, helping landlord Elliot Diamond get the 60-year-old house ready to be rented again, after two “unfavorable” tenants abruptly left with little notice two weeks ago.

While in the basement, Grogg said he saw slabs of concrete lying on the floor.

“When I picked them up I could feel the grooves, so I took them and turned them around, leaned them against the wall and then I realized they were real tombstones,” said Grogg. “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I was kinda spooked.”

According to Grogg, the tombstone discovery is the latest in a series of eerie events in this house, including a light bulb that inexplicably turned on while power was shut off to the house.

The headstones of Mary J. Fitton, alive between 1880 and 1935, and David M. Ingram, alive between 1957 and 1980, are now in a police evidence room in Woodbridge. Grogg called authorities on Diamond’s advice and reported what he’d found.

Prince William library historian Don Wilson said a check of local records showed Fitton lived with her husband, Hanson Fitton, on Saint Asaph Street Alexandria before her death on Oct. 6, 1935. Social Security death records showed Ingram lived in Washington in 1971.

Wilson said both people could be buried in Alexandria, and that their headstones could have been stolen or replaced.

“Usually, when we find a tombstone in Prince William County, it has been removed from a grave site and replaced with a new one, after the stone begins to show wear,” he said.

Investigators do not know how the stones got into the house, but they’re trying to find out.

Diamond bought the house as an investment property in 2003, and said his last tenants were a man and a woman who argued frequently. He said the man left without notice, and the woman weeks later surrendered the key to the house, leaving no contact information behind.

“The headstones weren’t there when I was in the basement about a year ago,” said Diamond. “The police are going to have to track down where these guys went and ask them about it if they are going to find out who they belong to.”

While Diamond said he doesn’t know about any paranormal activity in his house, Grogg said the tenants previous to the man and woman who abruptly left moved out because they heard strange voices, doors slamming and footsteps on the wooden floors where no one was walking.

Grogg lives next door with his fiancée, Sabrina Ham, on the first floor of a house also owned by Diamond and below a woman who helps Diamond manage his properties. For a few dollars off the rent, Grogg agreed to help Diamond clean the vacated house.

Three days ago, Grogg was doing electrical work there and had shut off power to the house. While back at his home, he saw a light on in the vacant house, and so did the property manager, who asked him about it.

“She said ‘Look inside the house, the light’s on,‘” said Grogg. He pointed Wednesday to a single round light bulb that hangs in a light fixture above the kitchen, saying it had inexplicably turned itself on.

With much of the cleaning nearly finished, Grogg said he will not volunteer to paint the house or do any other side jobs there. He said he’ll leave them to someone else. - Uriah A. Kiser

Source - http://www2.insidenova.com/

United Kingdom - “Normality is death,” wrote Theodore Adorno. So what does that make paranormality? Well, evidently something beyond death. Do we really want to go there?

Despite the decline in religion, it seems that more and more of us do. In fact, it’s maybe because of the decline in religion that belief in the paranormal is now the new normal.

Last weekend, the Scottish Society for Psychical Research held an open study day in Glasgow’s Hilton Hotel and, by all accounts, this was an organization more at ease with itself than ever before, perhaps because its interests were now widely seen as legitimate.

One explanation for this is that, while we’re losing faith in religion, we’re getting fed up being skeptical and smarty-pants about everything.

Besides, let’s face it, we all need a little mystery in our lives, something to make us shiver or thrill. Many of us suffer from achluophobia, while some poor souls have terrible pneumatiphobia. And I don’t mean a fear of tires. A former partner of mine used to see a shadowy figure standing at the end of the bed. And no, it was not me, it was her deceased grandfather.

Personally, I found it a bit rude that he should just stand there uninvited. This spectral poltroon comes over from the Other Side and says: “I think I’ll just gawp at them for a bit.” My partner, who experienced this in that state half way between sleeping and waking, not unnaturally used to scream in the middle of the night. All of which meant that I got all the funny looks from neighbors the next morning.

Fear of the dark or of spirits surely calls for a light to be shone, though we’re not just talking ghosts here. Minds are opening to UFOs and Highland second sight, too. These were among the subjects that came up last weekend, as was temporarily traveling through time, which is fine if you’ve a spare five minutes.

Nick Pope, a UFO expert, spoke at the study day of “an exponential rise in the data”. He was referring to the paranormal generally, and it could be - in my view - that our confessional culture has led citizens to feel less backward about coming forward with what used to be kept secret for complex reasons of personal sanity, shame and guilt. From ghastly war experiences to childhood abuse, it’s legit to let it all out.

Having a ghost in your house can even be a source of pride. The Sunday Herald quoted Dr Ann Winsper saying: “A couple of years ago, people who had a ghost in their house didn’t want to tell anyone. They were scared. But now people are, like, ‘I’ve a ghost in my house - brilliant.’ And people are jealous of them.” This is probably true. Still, I wouldn’t mention it in your property schedule.

It’s easy to mock this stuff, while at the same time experiencing a kind of spooky suspicion there are more things in heaven and earth than we can imagine. The trouble, as ever, is evidence. It’s arguable that you believe what you want to believe and, accordingly, see what you want to see. As a side-note, it’s sometimes thought that the heaven you envisage is the heaven you get, so it could be bucolic fields or a bookie’s.

But most of the increasing volumes of anecdotal evidence, so to say, comes from citizens who’d no previous interest, while with the typically infuriating paradox that lies at the heart of human experience, dedicated investigators - such as the SSPR - rarely see anything themselves and, beyond witness accounts, very little is independently corroborated.

It could all be wish fulfilment, hallucination or plain old flummery-tummery.

But, according to SSPR president Nick Kyle: “The consensus among scientists is that the existence of paranormal phenomena is no longer in doubt. The nature of that phenomena is what is being studied.”

I’m aware there’s a conflation of subjects here. You might believe in ghosts but not UFOs.

You might find time travel bleedin’ obvious, while seeing nothing in second sight.

The key lies in keeping an open mind while constantly affirming that one isn’t daft.

Source - http://www.heraldscotland.com/

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St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada - The weathered building in the city’s core houses Pete’s Pizza and a 40-year-old mystery.

For about 10 days in February 1970, a series of strange occurrences is said to have plagued 237 Church St, Apt. 1. Pictures flying off walls. Bookcases crashing to the floor without cause. A police officer sitting in a chair that was picked up six inches off the floor.

The kind of spooky stuff made for movies. The root cause of this otherworldly chaos?

Legend has it, an 11-year-old boy, Peter, who remains anonymous to this day, was taken over by a poltergeist.

At the time, the paranormal tale made headlines across Canada and the United States. Even former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson mentioned it in his monologue back then.

Decades later, the story of a ghostly presence wreaking havoc in the modest downtown apartment has endured.

“I think it’s been unshaken, as far as the evidence goes,” said Michael Clarkson, a former reporter who wrote a 2006 book called Poltergeists: Examining Mysteries of the Paranormal.

“I’m not a devotee of the paranormal, but I can’t think of a case that still stands up after 40 years. The witnesses ... no one’s come forward to say it’s a hoax.”

Forty years later, retired police officer Richard Colledge is still a believer.

Now 70 years old, Colledge was one of a handful of officers from the former St. Catharines Police Department to visit the Church Street apartment.

He remembers going into the unit after reports of things moving around on their own. He was 30 at the time. A constable with five years experience who had spent six years before that with the Canadian Armed Forces. And he was skeptical—until it happened.

Colledge said he was standing in the kitchen in front of the sink when a picture came flying off the wall in the adjoining bedroom.

“All I know for sure is when it came off the wall it didn’t fall down on the single bed that was underneath it. It came out and landed on the floor, and I watched it,” Colledge said with a laugh. “I thought it was violating the laws of psychics and gravity.”

He didn’t stay much longer after that.

Colledge wasn’t the only police officer to witness strange goings on at the second-story apartment. Several police notes written by his colleagues at the time chronicled the events.

Const. Bill Weir wrote about witnessing phenomenal occurrences during a visit to the residence on Feb. 10, 1970. He was there with his buddy Const. Bob Crawford.

He called in the city building inspector to see if the odd movements could be explained by structural problems. No luck.

“My only solution to these occurrences is that the boy Peter, whom all the occurrences surround, has been inhabited by a spirit of a poltergeist,” Weir wrote in his investigation report.

“This is the spirit which inhabits the body of a young child about to enter the phase of puberty and has been described as a mischievous spirit that does not generally seriously harm anyone. Briefly, this boy can’t sit on a chair without being thrown off and items are hitting him for no apparent reason. I the writer (Weir) witnessed the boy being thrown on at last a dozen occasions. “

Two days later, Const. Robert Richardson reported visiting the residence with four other officers and a raft of tape recording and movie cameras.

He joined a circle of people in the living room that day. The paranormal-plagued boy, his eight-year-old younger brother, the boy’s parents, two doctors, a local priest and the family lawyer.

Then, the unimaginable.

“At this time, the chair that (name blacked out) was sitting on lifted abruptly about six inches off the floor, and then slammed down again. On examining the chair, there was no explanation for this happening,” he wrote.

Doug Croft was just seven years old when his police officer father, Lebert, told him about his experiences at the Church Street residence. Croft grew up in east St. Catharines, just a few blocks from the cursed apartment.

At the time, most of the guys tried not to broadcast their chance encounter with the dark side. They were worried people would think they were crazy, he said. And they were frightened of what lurked behind the felled bookcases and picture frames.

“They were scared to death,” said Croft, who is a 47-year-old police officer with the Niagara Regional Police.

“At first it was kind of like, ‘Geez I hope I get a call there to see what the hell’s going on. You guys are shooting a line of s---or something.’ But guys came out of there, they were scared to death. It was something weird.”

Clarkson’s brush with the supernatural started with a simple Halloween spook story.

He wrote about the Church Street poltergeist investigation for The Standard in October 1980. Soon after he got a call. It was the boy, then 21 years old.

He was plagued. Not by ghosts, but by family problems. His family was upset that Clarkson had drudged up the past with his story. The memories were painful. During the media storm of 1970, the family was forced to leave town for a few weeks. Embarrassed by the events, the family didn’t want to relive the past. Clarkson had opened old wounds.

The poltergeist-riddled-boy-turned-young-man called Clarkson from a pay phone on Halloween night 1980. He asked if he could come to Clarkson’s Niagara Falls home.

Before long, they were face to face in Clarkson’s office. He was not what the young journalist expected.

“I thought there would be something strikingly different about him,” said Clarkson, a Toronto freelance journalist.

“When he came to my house it seemed to me, initially anyway, that he was like the boy next door. Very clean cut, well dressed, very well spoken, quite sure of himself. The young man didn’t discuss what happened to him that February in 1970. He was there to protect his privacy, his future in St. Catharines. He was worried about what other people in the community, a very conservative community like St. Catharines, might think about him, especially when he’s dealing with young people.”

Over the years, Clarkson saw him a few times. Walking downtown, hand in hand, with a girl. In the pages of The Standard. On a golf course.

Clarkson said the boy has gone on to become an upstanding man in the community. He works with youth.

For all these years, Clarkson, who worked as a daily newspaper reporter for 38 years, has kept the man’s secret.

But decades later, Clarkson, who highlights the St. Catharines case in his Poltergeist book, can’t shake the eerie legacy of that downtown Church Street apartment. His skepticism enduring, Clarkson calls the Garden City poltergeist case one of the best examples of a true ghostly encounter.

“Nobody has been able to shake the facts of the case,” Clarkson said. “In this day and age when so many things have been revealed as hoaxes, this stands up as a real mystery.” - Monique Beech

Source - http://www.stcatharinesstandard.ca/

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Rockport, Texas - For two nights a crowd of people watched in amazement as four humanoid beings repeatedly emerged from a starship as it hovered over the beach where they stood.

There were reported sightings of UFOs from Papua, New Guinea, for three months during that strange summer in 1959. But it was sightings on the nights of June 26 and 27 that amazed the world.

Reverend William Booth Gill, an Anglican Priest, and at the time a missionary at the seaside Boainai Mission station, walked out the front door and casually glanced toward the sky. It was 6:45pm on June 26.

“I saw this sparkling object,” Gill recalled later. “It was very, very bright - then I realized it was descending toward us.”

Stunned, Gill called two other men to his side, and within a short time, about 30 other people gathered to stare at the incredible sight in the sky. Above them hovered a disc-shaped mothershlp and three smaller brightly-glowing UFOs.

Suddenly a shaft of blue light angled upwards through the sky - streaking from a deck above the mother ship.

“As we watched, men came out onto the large, flat, main area of the huge mother ship,” Gill said.

“There were four men in all, occasionally two, then one. then three, then all four. We noted the various times the men appeared.”

The reverend recorded the minute-by-minute activities of the ship as it came within 300 feet of the stunned on-lookers. Dozens of witnesses later signed their names to the Reverend’s detailed account of the spaceship’s movements.

“One very peculiar thing was the shaft of blue light, which came from what appeared to be the center of the deck,” Glll said. “The men appeared to be illuminated not only by this light reflecting on them. but also by a sort of glow which completely surrounded them and the craft. The glow did not touch them, but there appeared to be a liltle space between their outline and the light.”

Suddenly, the gigantic craft - about 350 feet wide - took off with a blaze of red light and seemed to be gone. But later, at 11pm, it re-appeared. Shortly after that, heavy rains began to fall and nothing was visible in the sky.

But early next evening, a medical student at the mission Anna Borewa, again saw the lights of the alien craft.

Gill rushed outside and, along with others, watched as the human-like figures once again emerged from the ship.

“l stretched my arm above my head and waved,” he said. “To our surprise, one of the figures did the same. Then, a native waved both arms over his head, and the two outside figures did the same.”

The native and I began waving our arms together and all four figures could be seen waving back. There seemed to be no doubt that our greetings were being acknowledged.”

The overtures continued for several more minutes - until the strange beings seemed to lose Interest in the people on the ground and disappeared back inside the ship. - Dean Terry

Source - “UFOs and the Limits of Science” - 1961 - Ronald D. Story

Information may be updated several times during the day - so check back often.

Information may be updated several times during the day - so check back often.