The Ghost Diaries recently received an email requesting we put eyeballs on a ‘ghost’ photo. The email seemed to be from a young ghost hunter, or perhaps even a cabal of young ghost hunters at the Floyd Central High School in Southern Indiana. We were referred to an article published in The Bagpiper Online, the school newspaper.

This article is about the Waverly Hills Sanitorium, where in the early 1900s people with tuberculosis came to die. It’s also about the young ghost hunter Hunter Hampton (did you hear that echo?)…

We were eating dinner while reading the article, and soon found ourselves immersed in a lurid description of diseased corpses tumbling 500 feet down a “Body Chute”. We stopped eating (actually, we just switched to dessert, Ben and Jerry’s new ‘Cold Corpse’).

The Waverly Hills Sanitorium is a famous paranormal hotspot and has been featured on a gaggle of ‘ghost’ shows. But, from the sounds of it, hunter-Hunter took a solo mission to the long-abandoned hospital and spent the night there…alone. That’s more than a TV crew can say. Throughout the night, hunter-Hunter claims, he heard whispering, giggling children–perhaps vagrant souls loitering a hospital well known to have practiced child seclusion, as well as shock treatment, and ritualistic abuse.

The Ghost Diaries believes that ghosts are information patterns, the quantum relics of past consciousness. These fragments are lost in the ether, looking for a home. And when the living approach, they are absorbed and their information is passed along to a new host. Hauntings and possessions are merely meme warfare between the living and the dead.

The apt pupils of Floyd Central High School have since experienced their own bouts of paranormal activity. Junior paranormal journalists Bryce Romig and Rachel Nguyen report that multiple students and even a teacher have experienced unexplained orbs, anomalies, and troubling dreams that seem to continue on into the waking hours.

When the Ghost Diaries’ writers were younger and accruing student loan debt at the University of California at Santa Cruz, a similar sequence of creepy disturbances occurred. Nearly all the occupants of the first floor of one of the Porter College dormitories experienced terrifying episodes of sleep paralysis, during which they felt an entity was holding them down and, in some cases, choking the life out of them. Paranormal nightmares have been known to kill, and these freshmen students appropriately took the mystery seriously.

Many of these students are now working dead-end careers in a swampy American Dream.

So our message to hunter-Hunter and the students of Floyd Central High School is simple: believe in the paranormal, because it makes just as much sense as the insidious mental environment you’re growing up in. Also, don’t take the red pill and chase it with a spirit–you may wake up hungover in a friend’s backyard.