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I don’t believe in making resolutions in the dead of winter when you're cold, exhausted, broke and half sick, but, as a person who has managed depression my whole life, I know the value of having something to look forward to.
Sitting at the kitchen table doom scrolling on Instagram, I was struck with a brilliant idea. “Let’s each write down a bunch of different activities, adventures, dates, whatever, that we can do together and put them in a jar,” I said to my partner, Carl. “Each month we can draw one and plan it out.” Being a super adventurous Gemini, he was immediately on board, and we got to work jotting down our top-secret ideas.
To my delight, he drew one of my ideas for January: go on a paranormal ghost hunt. Flip a coin; heads, we stay in a haunted hotel, tails, a haunted campground.
I’m a big hotel girly, and Carl loves to camp, so I wanted to make it fair. Flip. Flop. Tails. Carl got to work searching for a campsite, and I got to business researching the best ghost hunting equipment for newbies.
As a scientific-minded electrician, Carl was fascinated by the gadgets and gizmos available for communicating with the unseen using radio waves and electromagnetic frequencies.
One PSB7 Spirit Box, one EMF detector, and one thermal imaging camera attachment for an iPhone later, and we were scheduled for our spooky getaway. Carl found a campsite near Hillsboro. I don’t want to give its name away until our mission is complete, because its remoteness was one of its selling points. Carl isn’t eager for an audience to our misadventures. What I can say is that there are some fantastic old buildings there that I’m dying to photograph, while he can finally get to experiment with night sky photography.
Carl and I are best friends, but we are also opposites in many ways. I love room service, he loves cooking over an open fire. I love to daydream, he loves to create. I love to go barefoot, and he loves a good pair of boots. With an open mind and willingness to step out of our comfort zones, we usually manage to find a middle ground where camp cooking becomes better than any restaurant, he turns my ideas into reality, and I just stop a lot to screech and pull goat heads out of my calloused toes.
Even so, I was not expecting him to be as gung-ho about ghost hunting as he’s turned out to be. I’m so excited for our January adventure that I’m not even mad about having to sleep in the cold and go potty behind a tree, because I know this will be a fantastic way for us to combine his passion for the outdoors with my enthusiasm for the macabre.
Already, my crew of creepy friends is recommending other campsites and ghost towns across the state for us to investigate, and if you have ideas, please email them my way. Our preference is ghosties and Bigfoot, with UFOs and cryptids coming in second because they are scarier to me, and a hard no on anything known to be evil or possessed because this girl ain't got no time for an exorcism right now.
That said, if this all goes well, heck, I might even convince him to start that podcast with me that he’s been refusing for the past two years… Stay tuned.
