My girlfriend and I did the Ghost Adventure tour last night. Overall it was fun. My favorite parts were when we were given historical backgrounds about the areas in which we were hunting ghosts. In retrospect, I would probably have enjoyed a straight up historical tour so long as it had the gruesome stories in it (and would have traded that for the ghost hunting parts). But hey, it is Halloween time, so I suppose it's good to get your spook on.
You will be given a couple pieces of equipment. One is an EMF meter and the other is a spirit box, like the kind you see on Ghost Adventures on the travel channel. The EMF meter never picked up anything unless I held my phone near it (proving that it at least works), but the spirit box produced different results, so read on...
I am a complete skeptic and remain to be after the tour, however, I did have a couple interesting moments that made me take a step back, if only for a moment or two. All of those moments had to do with using the spirit box. It cycles through radio frequencies and outputs white noise. You'll often hear snippets of actual radio content here and there (music or vocals from different stations). In one particular area, I broke away from the group and started asking questions in the darkness (like who is here with me, what's your name, etc...). On a couple of occasions, I did hear what sounded like responses that occurred in a timely fashion to my questions. At one point I heard the name "Ann" in response to asking "what is your name".
The strange thing about that is that earlier, you are given some history about a person named Ann Hopkins. During the talk about that, I was distracted by a lot of the Halloween partying happening around us, so did not catch the name of the person the story was about.
Later when I told my girlfriend that I thought something responded with "Ann", she thought I was making it up (because I do tend to be a joker). Honest truth is, this had nothing to do with the story from before because like I said, I totally tuned out at that part of the tour. I was drawing no line between what I thought I heard and the story from earlier (unless it was on some subconscious level). So yeah, that was kinda weird...
The likely explanation in my mind is that when you hear what you think are snippets of responses, you are likely only picking up chatter from radio stations and when the timing is right, one believes it is a response. But in a couple cases, it seemed a little strange. Still not a believer, but it was fun and makes you wonder, if only for a moment. My girlfriend tried and did not have any luck. All of this happened in the old red light district (the one uphill).
My only complaint is that I'd like to be able to explore more indoor locations. Perhaps there is more of that on other tours. The only indoor location was an old Catholic Church. It was dark and creepy inside, but a bodiless bust of Jesus that revealed itself to me when I ran my flashlight over it freaked me out more than any potential ghosts.
Overall, it was a very good time and I would recommend it. Even if you are a skeptic like myself. read more