ArtRojasDesign

Slaughterhouse Ghosts:

John heads out to meet with a client who claims her horse is getting scratched by an unseen force. She also hears banging and scratching on the walls of her room. She lives in a 200 year old barn and the area is known to have been the site of some battles. She also tells John that she had a wood carving, made by the previous owners’ son who met an untimely death, that she buried at the crossroads. In the house she also has some scythes and wood carvings of gargoyles.

John sends Chris and Brian to find the carving, but they don’t do much with it. They scan it with the EVP and imager but basically ignore it from then on.

While doing an EVP session they claim to get a Hungarian voice that says, “Open him”. They discover the barn was built in 1899 by a Hungarian family, and that its original role was that of a slaughterhouse. We’ve got some bad juju brewing here.

For the investigation they find a hotspot in the room which turns out to be a knife. John holds the knife and says it’s cold, but the imager shows heat signatures. John takes the knife to an expert and he explains that it’s a skinning knife and more than likely would have been used in the slaughter of animals. John takes the knife and hopes things will calm down.

I can certainly see the knife as a disturbing reminder of the past, but if there is one holdover of that time there will be dozens. The barn is hundreds of years old and stacked with “junk”. If an object was the cause of the problems saying you find the right one amidst all that is pretty wishful thinking. That would be like finding the needle in a haystack.

Supernatural Sword

John gets a letter from a client who claims her husband is under the influence of some dark things. She says he blacks out, gets scratched and has experienced things. They have separated because of it, but she wants some answers so they can try to put their lives back together.

As John shows up on the property he gets scratched. This is the same claim the owner is making. They meet with him and go over the supposed cursed objects. There are a lot of crystals, several swords, and a tiki figure in the house with a hearse in the back yard.

Beth and John check out where the swords are located and get EMF spikes off them. They look around the walls and the outside but don’t see any wires which might explain the readings. When they come back in they claim the crystals fell off the wall and hit them. Brian checks out the shelves and decides they are pretty loose and the crystals just fell. Brian says coincidence, not paranormal.

During the nighttime investigation they bring out the Ghostbox which says “upstairs”, “no”, “Zaffis” and then repeatedly says “Eric”. They asks questions and get an admission this is the spirit that scratched John and has been bothering Eric. They feel the knocks are coming from the floor so they pull up the carpet. Low and behold they find a symbol which turns out to be the Cross of Salem. The cross has been used for good, but is also linked to Aleister Crowley and his dark magic. Aimee discovers there is rumor the previous owners may have practiced dark magic. That is a whole lot of rumor and speculation and so far they have no real evidence to support that. A scratch while getting out of a car isn’t conclusive of anything.

They have a symbol drawn on the floorboards. That’s not really indicative of anything either. For all they know that could have been put there by pranksters when the house was being built. Or maybe someone superstitious put it there as a protection symbol. But John feels the swords need to go since they could have been used in ceremonies and he’ll deal with that symbol and get rid of it. Again, I think they’re jumping to conclusions. They have the rumor of rituals, swords that are ceremonial more than practical and a symbol on the floor which may or may not harmful. Lots of conjecture in this one.

And that’s it for the first season of Haunted Collector. What did you think? Are you a believer that items themselves can be haunted and causes paranormal activity in a location? Did John and his team find enough evidence to support that claim? Should be a second season of Haunted Collector?

Drop me a comment and tell me what you think.

Other Articles of Interest:

• Haunted Collector – The Sanitarium & Firehouse Phantom – S01E04
• Haunted Collector – Ghost of Geneva and Fort Fear – S03E07
• Haunted Collector – Emmitt House Ghosts and Shadow Intruder – S03E05
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Bayou/Library Ghost – S01E01
• Haunted Collector – Cigar Bar and Childs Play – S03E02
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Seminary and Ghost Games – S03E11
• Haunted Collector – Casino Phantom and California Nightmare – S02E07
• Haunted Collector – Farm Stalker and Echo Club Spirits – S03E01
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Mansion and Ghost Mill – S02E01
• Haunted Collector – House of Pain and Antique Spirits – S03E12

Haunted Collector – Uncivil Spirit & Revolutionary Ghost – S01E05

For the first investigation John heads to a home with ties to the Civil War. The homeowner claims that when her now ex-husband dug up a lead bullet that activity started in the house. This ranges from her feeling pressure on her chest to seeing apparitions moving around the house. Her ex-husband claims to have seen an apparition with a bullet in its mouth.

John and Beth wander around the house and when they get to the basement Beth feels ill. She keeps getting worse until she has to leave before she throws up. No real explanation so who knows? Meanwhile the guys are digging in the backyard trying to find a bullet. They eventually find one as well as a buckle and a button.

Since Beth felt ill in the basement and this is the sighting of the apparition John takes the items they found in the yard and puts them downstairs. As they start asking questions about surgery and operations they get activity on the meter. They also get a loud bang that supposedly puts a hole in the wall. And then for some unknown reason they bring the investigation to an end. What for? Stuff was starting to happen?

John takes his newly found items to an expert who says they’re from the civil war and more than likely the bullet was used during a surgery. The soldier would have bitten down on it during an amputation. John decides these items need to come home with him and that’s the end of that. But I have to ask, if the bullet is the problem wouldn’t it still be there as there are probably hundreds of bullets in the ground that have a similar story? If one bullet carries that kind of energy they all would.

For the next investigation John visits the home where a young man, Ken, is the focal point of paranormal activity. He claims to see apparitions and has the feeling of being stabbed and pinned to the bed. As John wanders around the house he makes a really big deal about a lock and a carved Tiki head. He’s basically trying to play the voodoo angle as though that’s the source of the problems. When they do the investigation however they find out that the guest room has high EMF readings and so does the drawer below the Tiki carving. There is all this dramatic buildup including the ominous music and then it all turns out to be nothing.

During an EVP session in the guest room they ask if someone died in there and as if on cue the lightbulb in the lamp explodes. That’s pretty dramatic stuff, right? Well, it turns out to be nothing but a power surge for the neighborhood. All I can say is at least they called the power company to debunk the problem, they didn’t just say it was a supernatural force.

The actual investigation of the house doesn’t turn up any results. They break out the Ghost Box but all it does it make that annoying noise.

With nothing else going for them John decides to look into the Baylor Massacre itself. There is a chance the house is on the site of the massacre. John also finds out the average age of a soldier during this time is 21. When the men were killed in the night they were stabbed with bayonets and pinned to the bed. John instantly draws the connection and claims that Ken in the trigger object for all this activity. John basically says if Ken moves out (which he should since he’s 21 for heaven’s sake) the activity should stop. I suppose we should forget about all those high EMF readings all over the house. We should ignore that perhaps Ken has an overactive imagination and is just having bad dreams.

But as you may expect, when Ken moves out of the house all the problems go away.

Other Articles of Interest:

• Haunted Collector – My Mother’s Ghost & Paranormal Predator – S01E02
• Haunted Collector – Slaughterhouse Ghosts & Supernatural Sword – S01E06
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Bayou/Library Ghost – S01E01
• Haunted Collector – Cigar Bar and Childs Play – S03E02
• Haunted Collector – Enfield Horror and Masonic Spirits – S02E11
• Haunted Collector – Hulbert House and King House – S02E02
• Paranormal Lockdown – S02E11 – Scutt Mansion
• Haunted Collector – The Sanitarium & Firehouse Phantom – S01E04
• Haunted Collector – Ghost Tavern and Terror House – S02E09
• Haunted Collector – Burning Spirits – Ghosts of the West – S01E03

For this episode John investigates a house that sits on the site of a former sanitarium. The owner claims to see apparitions walking around the house and has felt hands pushing down on her. The claims go so far as to say a little girl was scratched repeatedly by an unseen force. Judging from the stories it sounds like a whole lot of activity is going on.

Aimee talks to a witness who sets up the old sanitarium like it was from a horror movie. People would go to there but would never be seen again. Groceries were never delivered there. And there was an ill tempered woman who kept people away. I’m surprised there was no mention of a swamp creature.

As John and Aimee investigate the house the digital recorders keep cutting out when they go near an old poor table. This doesn’t happen once, or even twice, but multiple times and with different recorders. Unfortunately, nothing really comes of this. I was expecting all sorts of things to happen in this area but all they got was the word "suffer" when they got the recorder working several feet away. Was the recorder malfunctioning? Is there something sinister in that corner? It seems like we were set up for a whole lot of nothing with that one.

For some reason John wants to have a look in the crawl space and sends Brian in there to check it out. He finds some broken glass that ends up being the remnants of a poison bottle. Keep in mind poison bottles were very common during this era. Mice and other rodents carried horrible disease so people laid out the poison like Pez candy to get rid of them.

The bottle is what John takes to his museum and puts under glass.

The Firehouse:

Next John investigates a firehouse in Pueblo Colorado (a town I used to live in) where there are reports of fire trucks driving themselves. They’ve also had several veteran firefighters die while on duty and there is a report of a boy falling down the fire pole.

The fire truck story sounds a bit suspect so it was good to see John debunk that. That model truck could shake violently as it idled and could release the brake. Obviously the truck could then take without a driver.

The team uses something called the Ghost Box which I assume is the same thing as the Spirit Box we’ve seen used on Ghost Adventures so frequently. As it runs Brian and Chris feel they’re talking to William who used to work there. William wants to speak with John. Unfortunately when they get him the conversation is pretty much over. They get the word "blaze" and not much else.

As they investigate they come across a bookshelf which has a broach in it. It’s a mourning broach and could have been worn by a widow of a firefighter. They feel this is the item to take out of the station and off it goes to John’s museum.

There were some interesting aspects to this episode. I really liked the debunking they did with this one. They didn’t take the story of the truck at face value and when they saw the little cars had moved while investigating the home they checked to see if the floor was level and found out it wasn’t. I still think the daytime sweep is something other investigators need to take up. Checking out the location by day seems like a pretty smart idea.

The thing I didn’t like is how the items John felt were the source of the problem were handled. Both of these items point to a problem I brought up before. All John does is put a glass cover over the. Why couldn’t he do the same thing for the owners and give the items back? Sure, giving a broken glass bottle back would be pretty pointless, but that broach belonged to someone and is a symbol of their loss, it seems like they should treat it like the heirloom it is and leave it in the firehouse not display it as some haunted trinket.

I still don’t understand why these items are the source of the problem when John can store them just fine with no ill effects.

Other Articles of Interest:

• Haunted Collector – Uncivil Spirit & Revolutionary Ghost – S01E05
• Haunted Collector – Firestarter and Haunted Museum – S02E10
• Haunted Collector – Shadow Boxer and Ghost Storm – S03E08
• Haunted Collector – My Mother’s Ghost & Paranormal Predator – S01E02
• Haunted Collector – Burning Spirits – Ghosts of the West – S01E03
• Haunted Collector – Stirring the Dead and Ghost Writer – S02E06
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Bayou/Library Ghost – S01E01
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Villa and Spirit Springs – S02E03
• Haunted Collector – House of Pain and Antique Spirits – S03E12
• Haunted Collector – Casino Phantom and California Nightmare – S02E07

John heads down to New Mexico to investigate the Backside Ale House with alleged haunted activity. There are claims of shadow movement while in the women’s restroom, beer taps that open on their own and gas burners that turn on by themselves.

John fixates on an old detonator used in the coal mines. He casts an inquisitive eye over the tomahawk and the old whiskey jug as though thinking how they might look in his collection. John immediately jumps on the idea that the tomahawk must have killed people and is therefore evil. By this same logic all hearses are haunted and evil because they’ve carried the deceased.

The idea that the detonator caused people their lives is equally as illogical. It may have caused explosions that killed people. It may have trapped workers. Then again, it may have done none of those things. John is making massive leaps of logic and causation. This is truly assigning cause and effect regardless of how the items are related.

When it comes to the taps pouring beer when no one is around would have nothing to do with pressure in the line I’m sure. Same with the knobs on the stove. There is no way pressure could push them open. There is no way it could be the work of faulty equipment. Clearly this has to be the work of the paranormal.

John then heads down the road to the St. James Hotel where guests are running out in the middle of the night because of all the activity. People claim to get attacked and thrown over the railing. They’re seeing faces in the mirrors and the owner wants some answer before he gets run out of business.

The investigation at the St. James Hotel is a complete farce. Not a single experiment John does has any merit whatsoever. There are dozens of causes for a glass of water to get cold not the least of which is something we like to call "ice". I’ve never seen this type of experiment done before and it just happens to get an effect in the exact spot John puts it in. What are the odds?!

And the odds of someone getting a nosebleed in New Mexico are unheard of. Clearly that is the work of spirits and has nothing to do with dry air and dust.

Honestly these experiments are as bad as the ones we used to see in Ghost Lab. John’s like of thinking and methods of inquiry are sketchy at best. This show is turning into a comedy with each new episode.

Other Articles of Interest:

• Ghost Adventures – Winchester Mystery House – S05E04
• Haunted Collector – Emmitt House Ghosts and Shadow Intruder – S03E05
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Bayou/Library Ghost – S01E01
• Haunted Collector – Stirring the Dead and Ghost Writer – S02E06
• Ghost Adventures – Old Town San Diego – S05E03
• Ghost Adventures – Lizzie Borden House – S05E05
• Haunted Collector – Enfield Horror and Masonic Spirits – S02E11
• Haunted Collector – Uncivil Spirit & Revolutionary Ghost – S01E05
• Haunted Collector – Haunted Mansion and Ghost Mill – S02E01
• Ghost Adventures – The Queen Mary – S10E01