by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground Magazine

My thoughts on the paranormal seem to shift and evolve regularly. For a while, I went through a period of absolute belief in ghosts, defined as sentient spirits of dead folks. My experiences at Wellington triggered that belief, and I wrote about it in my book. I still absolutely believe that something happens at Wellington, and that unexplainable events occur there. Often, the interaction at Wellington seems to be with some intelligent force that reacts to what we do and say, and makes an attempt to interact.

My experiences at Wellington were powerful, and I cannot discount them. Something happened there; however, we spend long months away from Wellington because it is buried under deep snow and inaccessible for at least six months a year and usually longer. And while I visit reportedly haunted places in my annual absence from Wellington, very seldom do I have experiences that further the case for ghosts.

Most teams have that one place about which they will tell you. The one that seems to open up like a flower from the minute they arrive until the moment they leave. Those places are other teams’ Wellingtons – the locations to which they return time and time again in order to document the ongoing activities.

I have been blessed that many teams have taken me with them to their own personal Wellingtons. I am fortunate that so many generous investigators have been willing to share those special places with me, and I know how they feel. It is the same way I feel when I share Wellington with another. I sit like a proud parent and watch the site open up to them. Resultantly, I approach each of these special places with the same reverence and respect that I have for Wellington.

And yet…

I last drove away from Wellington in early October of this year. The snow came shortly after my last visit, and I have been away for five months. In that time, I’ve explored many haunted places. I’ve walked away with a few little experiences and a couple of EVPs, but nothing concrete. This seriously bums me out, because I find my thoughts shifting once again in a different direction.

Why do some places open up to certain teams, I wonder? Is it the emotional connection, the familiarity, or is it something else altogether? It takes a huge leap of faith to arrive at the conclusion that the experiences we have in “haunted” locations occur resultant of sentient spirits of the dead. This holds true for Wellington, as well. With Wellington, I originally took that leap of faith, but I really wonder. Is my emotional connection to the location, the town, the history, and the story causing some of the activity that I experience there? Does it occur because I expect it to? Is it real, or merely a projection of my mind?

The more I delve into unexplained happenings, the more I question what we are experiencing. Could an EVP be our own thought projection? Could an apparition? To what extent do our own feelings, expectations and connections to the locations we investigate generate activity? And if the activity is related to those things, do we control it subconsciously, or does it occur in response to us?

My connection to Wellington is deep. I love everything about it, including the spirits that remain there. What I don’t know, however, is if my love is for my own thought projections, or if it is for actual disembodied spirits. Scientifically, the answers to that question matter a great deal. Emotionally, they do not.

I’ve never made a secret about my non-proclivity towards faith. I’m not good at it. My belief in things unseen (God, ghosts) ebbs and flows, something ephemeral that I can never quite hold onto before it slips away from me again. I envy those with faith. I’ve always wanted just a little bit of my own, but it seems that the more I reach for it, the further it slips from my outstretched fingers.

I often hear paranormal investigators scoff at the idea of faith, at belief in God; yet, don’t we often make a similar leap of faith, when we take a disembodied voice, a hit on an EMF detector, or a shadow we see out of the corner of our eye and attribute it to a conscious being that just happens to exist without a body? As investigators, we often rely on faith to explain what we don’t understand. My current truth, however, is not faith based, and it is this: we just don’t know. We think we do, but we don’t. How can we know what causes an EVP, a disembodied voice, an apparition? Our explanation of ghosts is one that we arrived at culturally, and many of us bought into the explanation so we assume it to be true.

But we don’t know. It could be a ghost. It could be our own projections. It could be something else altogether. That’s why we need to keep open minds, and step away from assumptions that many of us don’t even realize we make. If we allow ourselves to be trapped in the assumption that ghosts are disembodied spirits, then we may travel down the wrong path altogether in our quest for the truth.