by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground Magazine

This week’s paranormal evidence of the week is a personal paranormal experience that I relate in my book, Avalanche of Spirits: The Ghosts of Wellington. It is the one thing that my uber science-geek husband, Jim, has been unable to explain away and is, perhaps, the one thing that has him pretty darn convinced that ghosts are real – or at the very least, that something paranormal that defies a natural explanation is going on at Wellington.

A little background. Wellington is the site of a 1910 avalanche disaster in which at least 96 people were killed. You can read more about Wellington and the disaster on my Wellington website, or by using the search term “Wellington” in the Paranormal Underground blog.

About the site itself: The site is entirely outdoors up in the mountains. There is no power wiring for about a mile all around the site – it is quite isolated. When you walk through with a Trifield meter, the baseline reading is always zero. The site sits along the Iron Goat Trail in the Cascade mountains. As you walk along the path, there is a huge, 1/2 mile long concrete snow shed. There are also a lot of granite deposits in the mountains around the site.

Our experience occurred in the snow shed at a certain spot where a lot of sightings of black shadows and apparitions have occurred. Some people (me included) often feel a great deal of anxiety and other physical symptoms when passing through that area. The Trifield regularly reads zero in this spot, as well – so there is no naturally occurring electromagnetic activity there that we can tell.

We were up filming – me, Jim, our two sons Tanner and Kevin, and two of their friends, Matthew and Mackenzie. Jim had a Sony hi-def handi cam that was mounted on a GlideCam camera stabilizer. On top of the camera in the hot shoe was an IR light that was connected to the camera’s power supply. Mounted to the GlideCam, he also had two driveway security IR lights that Jim has modified to work on separate battery packs, which were also mounted to the glide cam. The two IR lights have separate mechanical on/off slider switches (the kind that it takes some effort to slide and it will actually click into the on position or the off position.) My step son was carrying another Sony HandiCam. My son was carrying an Olympus DS-40 recorder. I was carrying a Samson Zoom H4 recorder.

We reached the spot where people feel anxiety (an area that NWPIA has termed “area 61″ because of a 61 that has been painted on one of the snow shed’s support poles) – and every single piece of electronic equipment we were carrying turned off simultaneously. I suspected battery drain – and on all of the equipment except for the two modified IR lights, that made sense. When Jim checked the two IR lights, the mechanical slider switches had slid to “off” and clicked into the off position. When the power source dies on these two items, the mechanical switch typically stays in the “on” position.

Me, standing in Area 61 at Wellington.

We were all able to turn all of our equipment back on and resume filming. The odd thing for me (and for Jim) is those two mechanical switches sliding to the “off” position. That and the simultaneous nature of the event. Everything was on a separate power supply with the exception of Jim’s camera and the hot shoed IR light, which ran from a common power supply (the camera battery).

I’m open to alternative explanations for this one. Anyone??

Enjoy Karen’s evidence from Wellington? Her book, Avalanche of Spirits: The Ghosts of Wellington is now available on Amazon.com and other book e-tailers.