When I’m asked to pinpoint the moment my belief in ghosts started to waver, I choose the time I was mistaken for one in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, when I was 27. Until then, I’d enjoyed several years of ghost-hunting, and was convinced I’d encountered many supernatural entities. Growing up in the 80s, my interest in the paranormal was piqued by TV shows such as In Search of … and Unsolved Mysteries, which documented cases of unexplained phenomena. In my 20s, I got hooked by the possibility of experiencing the “other side” and the idea that life continued after death.
While browsing ghost stories on the internet, I found a local ghost-hunting group in Philadelphia and joined them on trips to cemeteries and allegedly haunted buildings such as Fort Mifflin and the Eastern State Penitentiary. There were six of us around the same age, all determined to prove ghosts were real. To us, anomalies in our photos such as glowing orbs or mist signalled spirits, as did any surprising noise caught on cassette. Like most ghost hunters, we operated in the dark, which inevitably fed our imaginations.
