A Year of Blogging and Time for Me to Give Back

I have been blogging for one year now.  Today is my blogs birthday!  Last year,  the night before my birthday was the winter solstice and it felt like a night to make changes.  I was frustrated with my writing career and had just been moved by my publisher  from an 18 month contract to a 3 year contract meaning that they may not publish my book until 2014.  Part of me wanted to give up and another part of me just wanted to write about something I loved and enjoy it and not worry about publishing houses or agents or anything else.  So I picked something I loved, ghost stories, and began writing everyday, well, almost everyday.  I fell in love with writing all over again and fell even more in love with ghosts and hauntings and old buildings that creep and moan and speak of forgotten histories rich with tragedy.  Blogging was wonderful!

I was helped along the way by other bloggers who found my blog and encouraged me to keep writing.  Courtney Mroch from Haunt Jaunts was and is amazing.  Her blog inspires me every day.   Autumn Forest of Ghost Hunting Theories was also there with ideas and inspiration from the very beginning.  And what have I gained from my year in blogging?

*  I have posted 299 posts of ghosts, hauntings, and all things dark and beautiful
*   I have met numerous other bloggers, artists, and ghost hunters and found a world of wonder that I have    enjoyed exploring
*  I got to travel all over the country and go to some amazing places looking for wonderful stories.
*  I was invited by a publisher to write a book based on my blog and it was published this year
*  I am working on my second book that will come out next year
*  I have a column in the Valley Planet and I can write even more ghost stories there!
*  I have learned that sometimes if you just do what you love everything else will follow.

If you had told me a year ago that I would gain all these things just by sitting down almost every day and writing I wouldn't have believed you.  It has been a wonderful year filled with travel, hauntings, and fun and I accomplished all this in one year of blogging and I owe it to all of my readers and those other bloggers who have helped me on the way.   So,  in order to give back to my blogging friends,  I will be giving away 2 Barnes and Noble Gift Cards for $25 dollars  on my birthday, tomorrow.   Spread the word.  All you have to do is comment below and twitter or facebook about this post to enter to win!  Thank you all for a wonderful year of blogging, it has been an amazing year.

I also made a promise to the Mobile Rape Crisis Center 6 months ago that when by book came out I would give them  five cents for every follower I gained on twitter.   Well,  I am now on a three year contract with my publisher, but since I've had a wonderful year with blogging I'm celebrating by doing that now.   I have 2,800 followers on twitter today and I'm writing a check.   I learned from Courtney Mroch from Haunt Jaunts who gave to the Leukemia Society on her 1 year anniversary that the best way to celebrate is to give back.  So I'm giving back to victims and I'm giving back to my readers.

Ghost Hunting at South Pittsburgh Hospital in Tennessee

Hiding in the verdant hills of Southern Tennessee, hidden in the rural landscape of the South is a famously haunted hospital  that was once the South Pittsburg hospital.  Situated  at the base of a hill by the housing projects the old hospital decays.   You would expect it to be a silent place, filled with ghosts and old tears, but it is strangely alive, living someplace on the edge of a surreal dream.

The hospital is broken and decaying and filled with random odds and ends that don't always fit the setting.  The smell when you step in the door is so overwhelming I almost turned and headed to the first Holiday Inn available, but I pushed forward because the place was so surreal it felt like it belonged in a Tim Burton film rather that part of the real world.  This hospital isn't dead, despite the decay.   When you pull into the parking lot the front entrance has been taken over by an antique store.   Fountains and water features cover the steps that lead up to what used to be the main entrance to the hospital.   This sound of running water cuts through the loud music blaring out of the projects across the street.   It cuts through the broken, overgrown parking lot and adds a magic to the hospital that looms above it.   Only a small portion of the hospital is taken by the antique shop, and the rest sits empty, glaring out at you with vacant windows.

To enter the ghost hunting section of the hospital you must drive past the housing projects to the back of the hospital, which is pressed right up against a very steep and very large hill.   You enter through the emergency room doors.   The emergency room waiting room has been converted into a large sitting room that seems like a temple to Tim Burton.  Movie posters and art celebrating his movies line the walls.  After you get over the the heat, you move forward into a hall  with an alpha romeo parked in it.  Pressing on is imperative at this point as the oddness of the place only grows with every step forward.  

I was then introduced to the hospital's keepers.   A family lives in an apartment amidst all the rubble and stench with their little boy giving ghost hunting teams access to this strange place.   This little family was interesting and their story I will save for another day.   The ghost hunting team I joined was lead by Steve from Southern Ghosts.   His team were very professional and set up their many infrared cameras, DVRs, EVPs, etc at different points throughout the dark hospital.  Electricity was limited to only a few rooms so flashlights were imperative.   I will discuss the actual ghost hunting in more detail later too.

Exploring the hospital was like walking through a horror movie.  Walls molded and pealed.  Junk sat cluttered in rooms.  The clothes of the dead had never been removed from the hospital and sat piled up in the rooms people had died in.   As we travelled from room to room the KP and EVP meters went off from time to time, indicating some supernatural presence.  The darkness grew and stretched and your eyes played trick on you turning shadows into monsters.   The trigger items left to record paranormal activity moved.   A pair of little girls boots flipped. There was a strange mattress in the basement that lit up the EVP's like a Christmas Tree.   The hospital wrapped around a courtyard with a gazebo and an incomplete fountain that was overgrown and filled with mangy looking dogs that barked at you when your light shone out the window.  At night, when you wonder alone,  the sounds of the water outside fill the dead silence and the whispers you hear could be formed from a collection of your imagination and the ever running water. 

I was lucky enough to go to this hospital with Courtney from Haunt Jaunts!   I just hope I get to ghost hunt with her sometime again soon she was a really joy to meet and work with.  She was even more wonderful in person and I know she will have some very interesting things to say about our journey into darkness.   So,  over the next week I am going to post blogs about the different aspects of our trip to South Pittsburgh.   If you still crave more, visit http://www.hauntjaunts.com/ to hear Courtney's take on the visit.    Also visit http://www.southernghosts.com/ to see the ghost hunting data collected at the site.  Keep an eye on http://www.ghosteyes.com/ for more information too.  Tomorrow I will blog about the ghost hunting itself and then I will blog about the amazing family that calls this bizarre place home!!  

On a side note,,,, Unfortunately,  I never got to sleep here because the sleeping arrangements here were not good.   Most of the team stayed to ghost hunt all night, but I retired to the Comfort Inn at 3am and put my pj's on there.

What PJ's Does One Bring to Stay in a Horrifically Haunted Hospital?

A group of regional paranormal travelers and investigators recently invited me to stay with them at a very haunted hospital in South Pittsburgh's Tennessee. This team includes people that are much more experienced than me.   It includes Jeremy Morgan of Rocket City Paranormal (RCP_GatorFan on twitter), Ghosteyes_Steve, Courtney Moroch from Haunt Jaunts, and GhostEyes_Angie.  This sounded like a fun night so I said yes.   I'm not sure I knew what I was in for.  I think I still don't know what I'm in for.

This kind of feels like that opening scene in every horror movie when the protagonist does something no one in their right mind would do.   That scene when the heroine decides the most haunted hospital in the country would be a great place for a birthday party.  Or the scene when the group of kids decide to go into the old abandoned ghost house on a dare.  I guess I'm that idiot.  The sad thing is, what scares me most is that no one else is planning on sleeping or even bringing Pajamas.  I love sleeping and putting my pajamas on at the end of the day is what I look forward to most in the world, and now I don't even know what pajamas to bring or if I should even bring them at all.

 I googled the South Pittsburgh Hospital to try to begin to understand what I was in for and maybe make myself scared of more than the pj situation.   I found an article in which the hospital's owner's son is interviewed and he describes the haunting.  "Telephones will ring when there's no power, you'll have things fly at you, you'll have little girls, as they've caught on tape, saying 'play with me, why won't anyone play with me'," he says.   The hospital has no power and apparently lights still flicker on and off.  Some members of the Ghost Hunter's team did investigation there and found many things that couldn't be explained.

I'm still more worried about sleep and pj's. 

Anyhow,  outside of that,  I can't wait.  I'm hoping that a little girl will ask me to play and I won't be to sleepy to say sure and pull out a deck of cards.  I will be twittering from the hospital all night long.   Friday night is going to be a long night.