Last night, we had the pleasure of hosting a fundraising event. We conducted tours of the downtown area, with all proceeds going to help defray costs of the upcoming trip to the State History Fair for the students at Fort Pierce Westwood High School who won at district competition. We really enjoyed the chance to showcase some of the more unique aspects of Fort Pierce’s history, and loved getting to spend time with so many local residents. We managed to have some photographs taken (thanks to Stacy Reckard for manning the camera!) during the final tour. Hope you enjoy them! “The GRIM Society Haunted History Tour in downtown Fort Pierce, April 14, 2012. This event was a fundraiser, with all proceeds going to help pay for students from Westwood High School to attend the State History Fair competition.”

From The GRIM Society Haunted History Tour, posted by on 4/15/2012 (20 items)

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Daily we are surrounded by cell phones, wireless Internet, cordless phones, satellite TV, AM/FM radio and all kinds of other forms of communication. For that reason, our group has long been hesitant to point to EVP’s as iron clad proof of a paranormal experience.

A few weeks ago I was contacted by a gentleman that is at his wits end. He explained that he has been hearing voices, beeping and other sounds in his home for nearly two years. During the discussion, he and I agreed that there was certainly no paranormal activity going on due to the fact he was hearing (and recording) TV programs and phone conversation along with a  beeping sound. We also agreed that he had exhausted his mainstream options and was desperate for help. I saw it as an opportunity to do some research on sound and to lend a helping hand to someone in need, so I agreed to bring a small team to his home to see what we could find.

This Saturday, Tamara, Samantha and myself  went to the home and were surprised at what we discovered. Our client is a gentleman in his 60′s and widowed. Apparently, two years ago, he had one of the large cable companies sell him on installing their service in his home. Almost immediately, he began to hear the sound of conversations and other noises in his home. As we sat talking to our client he explained what lengths he had gone through to eliminate the sounds in his home. He has contacted three cable companies, his alarm company, the electric company, electricians, the FCC and several other municipal agencies. He has also purchased six voice recorders and has hours of sounds and even about 15 minutes of a Jeopardy episode recorded in May of last year. He has gone as far as purchasing a complete map of cell phone towers in the county. The gentleman has even visited several doctors to have his hearing checked among other things. He is desperate for answers and hopefully a solution.

Most of these groups that he contacted were more than happy to sell him a new service or upgrade his existing service, but all ignored his claims of noises. That is how we ended up in his home, after two years of calling, letter writing and pleading for help, we were the only people that would take him seriously. As we sat and talked, our group actually heard voices in his home and the mysterious beeping.

We went to work and quickly discovered the city has installed individual sewage lift stations at each home through the area. We found that when any of these systems have any kind of issue, a loud, continuous beeping alarm begins. The current economy has hit this area hard and many of these homes are vacant or in foreclosure, so often these alarms will beep for days without anyone coming to turn them off. Fortunately, one of the neighbor’s was beeping. We were able to walk the client around and point it out to him. With one of the mysterious sounds identified, we began to look into the voices.

As we search the home, the client pointed out an intercom system he had disabled hoping to stop the sounds. It was disabled at the panel, but the speakers and wiring are all still in place. Our suspicion is that when the cable company did the installation two years ago, they either connect or disconnected something that has allowed the speaker and wires to make an antenna of some sort. We have a lot of research to do in the next few days to find a way to solve the problem. We are hoping that some of our friends in the music and audio fields can give us some suggestions to help this man.

Our client was very happy to have anyone that believed him and would take their time to help. We not sure we have the knowledge to solve the problem, but are going to try. This case is not going to provide our group with any evidence of the paranormal, but we are helping a person in need and it feels pretty good.

The whole family visited our county fair last night. We had a blast!

When I was a kids, it was an annual tradition to go at least once. I was never much interested in the rides, but my favorite part has always been the food. Things haven’t changed much as an adult.

But what good paranormal investigator can past up an obvious chance to do a little investigating while spending time with the family?

I am excited to report frequent activity of screaming banshees, animated skeletons and moaning zombies.

Research, research, research! That is what we have been up to lately. Well, and recovering from the plague that has bounced around the house.

We have a few investigations on tap in the next couple of months that we are very excited about.One of the locations is a place we have been trying to get into for years now.

We will update with results as soon as we get the ok from the clients.

I recently read an article on a major news outlet that discussed the upcoming series on The Discovery Channel. The Exorcist Files will use re-enactments to discuss cases of possession. We have all seen plenty of shows like this, but this one was actually granted access to the Vatican’s case file. They will also be interviewing  the church’s top exorcist.

The producers ultimate goal is to accompany religious officials on an actual exorcism. This is a huge change for the Catholic Church-not too long ago they denied the existence of the Exorcism Ritual and that there were priest trained to perform it.

I am very curious to see if they deal with all “hauntings” as demonic or do they make a distinction.

Over the weekend, we had the pleasure of visiting St. Bernard de Clairvaux Spanish Mission. It is an amazing place that offers a really unique look at history. The Monastery was built in Sacramenia, Segovia, Spain between 1133 and 1144. It was dedicated to the honor of the Blessed Mother and named “Monastery of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels,” then later renamed in honor of Bernard of Clairvaux, a famous Cistercian Monk. The Cistercian Monks occupied the monastery for nearly 700 years before the Cloister was seized, sold and converted into a stable and granary in the mid 1830s. That is where the story gets really interesting.

William Randolph Hearst, a famous American businessman, purchased the Cloisters and outer buildings in 1925. He had workers dismantle the structures, packing each stone in hay inside one of 11,00 wooden crates, intending to ship the entire Monastery home to the United States. The process would have been a smooth one, had the stones themselves been numbered in some way, but instead, the workers labeled the boxes. Enter the US Department of Agriculture, who realized that there was an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in Segovia and, afraid that the crates would spread the illness in the US, they quarantined the shipment. During the quarantine, they broke open the crates and burned the hay, which was a possible carrier of the disease. Then they put the stones back- without ensuring they went into the correct crates.

Hearst suffered financial losses right at the time that the crates were released, forcing the entire Monastery to go up for auction in its disassembled form. The stones remained in a warehouse for 26 years before W. Edgemon and R. Moss purchased them. It was 1953, and they decided the Monatery would make a great tourist attraction. It took 19 months and 1.5 million dollars to put the pieces back together; the process was time consuming and there are still stones left over.

I highly recommend a side trip to the Monastery if you’re ever in the area. The story is fascinating and the scenery beautiful, so don’t miss it if you ever get the opportunity!

The GRIM Society is putting together a collection of great stories of ghosts and other paranormal activity. If you have a ghost story that occured along the Treasure Coast, we’d love to hear it!

If you decided to send in a story, be sure to include as much information as possible- the location, date and number of people involved, etc.

You can email your story to thegrimsociety @ gmail.com (without spaces). We can’t wait to read them!

Our group is comprised of mostly family and friends. For that reason, safety is always our primary concern. No investigation is worth risking injury or death, and this applies to both strangers and our own group.

I just read an article about a group of hunters and enthusiasts waiting on a railroad bridge for the return of a spectral locomotive. Well, the tragedy occurred when an all too real one came down the rolling down the tracks.

Please remember to use good judgment. Nothing is worth the risk of becoming a ghost yourself.

Kudos to these researchers for doing the hard work.

Sometimes a ghost story can be used to start an investigation that leads to a injustice being corrected. Hopefully, this will cause the record to be set right for these people and their families.

We spend countless hours doing research, digging through microfiche, squinting at census records and bouncing ideas off each other. Often, we uncover information that completely unravels the urban legend or debunks a ghost story, but it usually opens up doors to a more interesting story. Like they say “Truth is stranger than fiction”.

Grandfather’s ghost story leads to mass grave.

I love a ghost story. Any ghost story. My book shelf is loaded with books on Florida ghosts, Irish Ghosts, New England ghosts, lighthouse ghosts, battlefield ghosts; basically, I have a lot of books with ghost stories in them.

Likewise, I find myself often watching T.V. shows about ghosts. I enjoy the stories for what they are – entertainment. The problem comes when you start looking into the actual facts of these stories. Often, the tales are impossible to research because they fail to give important details such as names and dates.  Do stories that are unsubstantiated have less value than those with verifiable facts? I suppose it depends on your outlook.  If all you’re looking for is entertainment, then no.  But if you’re looking for something more, something deeper, you have to be able to weed out the urban legends and get down to the bones of a story.  That is where historical research comes in.

I know we don’t update the website very often, but that isn’t because we’re not active.  While you won’t find us posting endless hours of EVPs or countless orb photographs, that doesn’t mean we’re not hard at work.  We’re usually plodding away in search of a stray fact, some dusty truth hidden below the fantastic tales told by so many websites and books.  Here is where we conduct most of our paranormal investigations:

Yep- we do most of our investigating at the local library.  You’d be amazed what you can find in there! The items in that image are the tools of the trade that often get overlooked when you drop by a ghost hunting website and check out their recommended equipment. A pen, some paper, old newspapers on film and a microfiche reader. They pair nicely with HeritageQuest, NewsBank and Ancestry.com. In fact, it doesn’t need to get much more high-tech than that to debunk most ghost stories we come across.  Fact checking the tales is tireless, often unrewarding work.  Often, we discover some tidbit of information in an old newspaper article or locate a headstone that proves without a shadow of a doubt that the tale we’ve been investigating is, well, complete make believe.  It can be quite a let-down, and being the voice of reason when everyone else wants to hear a good story can be daunting at times.  It’s a bit like being a detective, a genealogist, a historian and a lawyer arguing an unpopular case all rolled into one.

Despite all that, there is sometimes a reward; a pot of gold at the end of the research rainbow.  A good example of this can be found in the Boston House.  We’ve been researching the claims attached to the building for years.  Many of them have proven to be nothing more than a really great story to tell around a campfire.  Yet as we debunked those tales, a different picture emerged.  The Boston House has been dubbed haunted for many, many years- something well documented in the local papers.  Those reported paranormal encounters pre-date the currently popular explanation for the hauntings.  Even more interesting is the fact that the home played host to a number of tragedies, any of which could have resulted in paranormal activity.  Finally, as if it were icing on the cake, many credible witnesses have come forward over the years to share their experiences.  These experiences create the perfect situation for furthering the investigation; specific claims that can be investigated on site.

I often wonder how other groups work through their cases.  I find it hard to believe we’re alone in the stacks, the odd group out as we sift through the sensational stories to find the gems that call for further investigation.   I can only hope there are, and that groups with this methodology prevail in finding out the truth behind all the ghost stories we love to tell.