I was asked to write about the ghostly stories of my family by a woman I'm good friends with and ended up posting this story on my site and thought that you might enjoy hearing a yarn from an age past - Thus I share with you the story of Grandma Bater's Ghost:

Many years ago, in the early 20'th century, a woman by the name of Grandma Bater was a fixture of the community in the little town of Sterling City in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

Grandma Bater was known throughout the area and she was somehow associated with the principle industry of logging that was the main business of the town. Grandma Bater spent many an afternoon rocking on the porch, probably knitting or crocheting while watching life pass through the streets of Stirling City. Hers was a typical life and she was quite a lovely person from the way it has been told to me.

Going on the recollections of family, my mother told me of her encounters with the ghost of Grandma Bater. She died sometime in the 40's and her home passed through a number of hands over the years. My mother had the occasion to visit the house as many of our family hunted and fished in the area and spent time in Sterling City.

Not long after Grandma Bater died, the next inhabitants of the house, whom I presume were immediate family, began to notice that at 4:00pm every day, the rocker that Grandma would sit in would take to rocking by itself. No one ever thought to remove the rocker. It just seemed that it was an unspoken thing that went without saying.

Not knowing what to make of it, we are posting this odd photograph from the Queen Mary of a doorway photo taken on March 7'th, 2009.

The photo original is shown later in this article. It is at the original size with zero edits.

We would love to hear what you have to say about it!

We're looking for other folks to accompany us! Having investigated there once before, we are excited to return to this incredible ship.

It would be great for GRI to visit the ship in force and/or guests of GRI to visit as a group! If you are interested, then see below! If interested, we'd like to carpool. Jon can take one in the GRI Mustang and then one more vehicle for another couple of folks.

Let us know if interested in banding together for the drive down!

Journey Paranormal Society™

will be returning to

The USS Hornet

for an overnight investigation on

Saturday, July 11, 2009

with special guest

John Michael Capaldi

Whats included:

• Pizza Party Dinner
• Special Private Investigation exclusively for JPS™
• Sleeping accommodations in Sick Bay
• Continental Breakfast
• Bottled water, soft drinks, light snacks included

Activities include:

• Investigating with psychic John Michael Capaldi
• Learn How to Set Up a DVR System
• Experiment with an Ovilus and a Shack Hack
• Try out a Thermal Imaging Camera

"Attended the U.S.S. Hornet investigation on Oct 31, 2008

and really enjoyed meeting this great team!" 

-  Jon, Ghost-Rider-Investigations

All for $189.00 per person

Limited to 35

It doesn't look like much now, but in about two months, the GRI Teardrop Trailer will be a huge addition to our group's capabilities!

I got interested in these unique trailers when I saw one while returning from Oregon back in 2007 and decided that one day I would have to build one.

June Update : The wheels are on and we're going to start the woodworking up next weekend! I'm doing the last bits of metal work and getting the frame finalized, but it's coming along. A photograph will be posted shortly to document our progress!

Continuing on...

Since then, GRI has come into existence and it just makes sense to combine the trailer as both a recreational vehicle and also to use it for mobile investigation work at remote locations.

The photo at right is a preview of the form the trailer will take. It will be a "Benroy" style, which affords maximum use of the overall trailer length and will give us extra room for stowing gear. The trailer will have enhanced power capabilities to support a built-in flat screen monitor and will have a side panel for connection of video/audio/power to all control and monitoring of an investigation right from the trailer. A rear hatch will allow for basic food and drink to be prepared  and we'll be able to put two people up in the unit for overnighters should this be needed..

We're set for a busy spring, summer and fall so I wanted to take a moment to appraise everyone of our upcoming outings:

1. May 30'th, 31'st - Gold Hill Hotel and Virginia City investigation. For those who wish to attend this event, we promise a good time for all! We'll all arrive at the Gold Hill Hotel and investigate for an evening there and also to explore Boot Hill and to sight-see at the same time to have a relaxing time while also getting in some good investigation time in the evenings. The point of this trip is FUN! Ghost hunting is great but we'll also be just out there rubbernecking too! We'll leave the morning/afternoon on Sunday. Several of us will stay overnight in the miner's cabin to see what we pick up on EVP/Video. This investigation is now closed and set to 3 people only.
   
2. June 19'th - Two days in Bodie - the ghost town! Banner investigation for year.
   
3. June ?? - Indian Grinding Rock state park. - local investigation. Worth doing before this park is closed by the state due to budget woes.
   
4. July - U.S.S. Hornet  - Jon going out to celebrate 50'th birthday in style! Other GRI members welcome to come...
   
5. July - Cary House Hotel. - local investigation. Overnighter.
   
6. July 4'th- Possible camping investigation in Covelo, California. Banner investigation for year.
7. July - Las Vegas (4 day vacation and a Belly Dance competition - Yes, you heard right!).
8. August - Haunted lighthouse investigation.
9. August - Sierra Nevada House investigation - local investigation
   
10. Alcatraz - September - night-time trip!
    
11. St. George Hotel training investigation - September.
12. Jackson haunted inn investigation - local investigation. - September.
13. Goldfield Nevada - October.
14. November - December - local investigations.
15. Early 2010 - Rachel Nevada - UFOs on tap near Area 51 ;>) A fun investigation and just plain-old rubbernecking to enjoy some time out! A "Yeah... Been there done that" investigation.
16. DONE! May 23'rd - Indian Grinding Rock state park.
17. DONE! May 15/16 - Overnight investigation at the Bookery in downtown Placerville. We will have a maximum of three investigators to spend the evening in this bookstore to investigate potential haunts. EVPs have been recorded here in the past and we're looking to see if we receive any further evidence. For those who wish to investigate the evening only and not the entire night, feel free to drop in for 3 or 4 hours while we investigate in this historic building. We will also be doing our radio show from this location! The investigation starts at 7:30pm May 1'st and ends at 7:30am on May 2'nd. Three investigators maximum for the evening stay-over.
18. DONE! March 21 - Pilot Hill Private Home investigation!
19. DONE! Early March 2009 - Queen Mary Investigation

We'll be doing other events to be sure, but these are some of the events I can see coming our way. Will continue working the schedules and will keep you all updated as we get these locked in. If you have events you think are good to add in, please email me with them and we'll see what we can do!

Broadcasting on BlogtalkRadio is a blessing, until you want to start doing professional-level things like mixing content and adding other inputs to the broadcast, as well as to improve the voice component to get rid of that "telephone voice" from your broadcast. As such, we've been putting considerable effort into building a truly effective broadcast method by coupling a dedicated Skype desktop phone to a mixer-board and to begin broadcasting using this method.

Our research was helped considerably by looking at the following video link. Because of this, we opted to use Skype for the transmission medium for our show, but with a twist... We decided to use the Belkin Skype phone to handle the audio input and output to the mixer-board via a coupler device and to avoid the problems of using a dedicated computer with the attendant difficulties this presents. See:

http://www.digitalpodcast.com/podcastnews/...st-using-skype/

This link is a very informative link about how to optimize your system using Skype and a USB phone connected and how to tune your network for the best connection. It's not for the faint of heart and it discusses a whole range of options you may want to examine to improve quality. It is really a great resource and hopefully more people will pass the link around.

I studied the problem of broadcasting using Skype and decided to go with a Belkin Desktop Skype phone and integrate an Excalibur HC-1 handset coupler to tie into my mixer board. It made the most sense and my first test broadcast of my own paranormal radio show with just the Skype phone worked nicely, though the PIN number was a challenge for reasons as yet unknown. I'm backing up the Skype phone with a land-line to be safe. (changed as of March 2009!)

The advantage is that the desktop Skype phone suffers none of the maladies of the PC variety, namely it's dedicated and no other process tries to compete for it's bandwidth or memory resources. Next, the audio tie-in is just so much easier and I can bypass having a phone stuck to my ear and focus on traditional studio layouts to do my show. Yep, it costs a little extra, but for $79 on Amazon, I didn't get a bad deal. Latest price is around $100 on the Belkin site.

http://www.bswusa.com/proditem.asp?item=HC-1 for the handset coupler. Our first tests are now underway with this device and it's proving to be a trick to integrate since the default cable couplings need to be customized due to hum in the audio. I found that the tips of the connectors need to be rewired to handle a slightly different arrangement, based on advice in the handi-coupler instructions. A trip to Radio-shack this weekend garnered the parts needed to build the necessary custom cable and it should be up and running this weekend. (As of March 2009, this is still a tough little problem for us - the connectors are jury rigged and we're still trying things out - plan to use the patch only for conventional phone dial-ins straight to the studio).

Update as of April 11'th 2009

The studio continues to evolve. We made a few operational changes.  Primary in the change list is that the broadcast computer is now broadcasting the show via Skype  using our wireless connection to our access point. The support computers are either wireless and we have one dedicated CAT-5 line that handles a secondary computer that is hooked into our audio mixer. We dial in using the old method with the land line to start the show and  then just place it on mute. If we lose the network for whatever reason, we can be back on in a few seconds with the telephone running things to continue the show.

We are also adding a  directed antenna to improve gain for the wireless card so we get better bandwidth for the broadcast computer. We have a Cantenna and will also be building a mast-mounted antenna to get the most db for our $$$.

We are going to examine using the Skype dedicated phone to dial in over the dedicated CAT-5 line next and to keep our long-distance costs down by doing things that way. The big issue is to see how the overhead of two Skype connections impacts the show. A test show will be done to evaluate this and we think it should become the new and final method.

Updated as of March 17'th, 2009

We tried a broadcast with the first setup with the phone patch system and noted that the show would fade in and out as some sort of mysterious audio issue plagued our "Ad-Hoc" show.

So, I went back to the drawing board and decided to do the following:

1. The Skype Desktop phone is now used to call into the show and then is put on hold. It is the emergency backup in case we lose the other phone line that calls in (the broadcast computer).
   
2. A PC with Skype loaded is used to dial into the show through another SkypeOut line and thus we always have two callers minimum on the show. This computer has the input via the USB connection to our conventional sound board and inputs from the sound card and other external inputs to drive the show audio and special effects.

Our first test, using a simple desktop microphone, went quite well and left us convinced that our action to take the show into the next step will be successful. So we're going to rig the sound board to tie in, temporarily, into the line-in with audio inputs to run the studio microphone and a seperate computer with sound effects and EVPs in so we can gain total control of our audio setup.

A unique car chase that ends in an unbelievable fashion...

We loved this one and thought we'd share it here...



The original link is at http://www.comcast.com/fastestfast/