Hunting Ghosts with TRIOPS

It's October. That means it's time to do scary things, right? Like visiting haunted houses, or hunting ghosts with real ghost hunters. Something spooky to set our hearts racing. We decided to roam through the darkened floors of Ryan's Tavern in Hamilton, Ohio with the TRIOPS crew (Tri-State Ohio Paranormal Society) searching for ghosts, or spirits, or paranormal entities. They've investigated Ryan's many times and claim it as one of the most active sites in the area.

We'd been ghost-hunting once before at Waverly Hills Sanitorium in Louisville, Kentucky, so thought we knew what to do. We brought our digital camera, ready to capture orbs and shadows where there shouldn't be shadows. We had our digital recorder, too, in case any of the spirits tried to tell us something. We were ready to hunt ghosts -- or so we thought until we saw the equipment that TRIOPS brought.

Naturally, they had several cameras set up around the building. They also had something that projected dots of green light in the basement so that we could see if any shadows suddenly blocked the green lights. They had divining rods that we ended up using in every room as well as electromagnetic detectors that lit up whenever we were near energy fields. And they had their own EVP recorders to capture sound. Luckily, they were generous and let us all try some of their equipment as we peered through darkness in room after room.

We were trying to communicate with a few known spirits at Ryan's: Elizabeth (a cook), The Boss, Henry, Stanley, another Stanley, and other previously identified spirits. The most successful tool seemed to be the divining rods. We were invited to take turns holding them loosely in front of us while we asked the spirits yes or no questions. If the answer was 'yes,' we asked them to make the rods cross. They acquiesced again and again. We got more inventive and asked them to point toward the area where they were. They obliged us on this point as well, though I couldn't help notice that they were usually in the vicinity of my step-sister. Her house is haunted, too. I think the spirits like her.

My husband did not want to put the divining rods down. He loved using them and got answers from the spirits on each of the four floors where we asked them questions. In fact, he enjoyed the experience so much that he wants to start ghost-hunting on the weekends with the TRIOPS crew.

I suppose the spirits have now claimed my husband. We can't claim for sure that we made contact with them (or at least, I can't), but whether or not we found ghosts on our ghost hunt, my husband found something that set his heart racing.