The Ghost Inside The Phone

 It's been way too long since my last post! You could say I've had a writer's block of sorts. but the opposite is true. I've been writing plenty in my diaries and my creativity is a'blaze. Honestly, I've been spending most of my energy dealing with tourists and fearing for the sanity of my co-workers as we deal with staffing issues among all the other worries one has in a time like this. I leave the bliss of my home-life for short periods of time. I can't go longer than 5 hours or so in this summer's shenanigans. Once I get a little past 5 hours, my brain starts to malfunction, I feel weak and flee to my home where I can turn my tuna-melt brain back into LindsayLoomisLand. Having an amusement park as a brain has it's delights and challenges. As always, I'm sharing this with you all not to complain, but to show that you are not alone in your everyday experiences. It's concerning that I can't work more than my strict 20 hour limit per week before I go mad but that's my life. I've set those boundaries for this very reason. I come home and stare at my phone for a few hours or fall asleep. I silently apologize to my friends, family and passions that have sat untouched and I grieve for the compassion I once had for everyone and everything. Although my therapist assures me it's all still there but I'm just SO. TIRED.  So, that's been my life for the past several weeks. Oh, I've had getaways and secret adventures though. Time to write about it! 

Eddie and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary this past weekend. We got married August 29, 2015 in Virginia City, Nevada. It was a surreal ghost town in the mountains adventure with a secret Masonic ceremony, the first ever of it's kind to be performed in our country. I planned to write blogs about it to present for our anniversary this year but maybe that's more a of a 2021 type thing to happen. The end of summer and the passing of our wedding anniversary always signals the arrival of spooky-bitch-season and all things creepy, macabre and other-worldly. Bring me the fall! The death and decay of seasons! The candy and sugar-buzzes! Let us go mad before the winter coops us up December through April! I want scary stories to tell in the dark of the shortest days of winter. 

This is the cue for my re-introduction of my sister-in-law's passionate devotion to all things Halloween and her wonderful podcast, "Ghost Magnet". Anytime we have a car ride to endure, listening to Bridget's podcast helps us pass the time. My dear and faithful readers may recall my post from last year describing our ghost hunting adventures with Eddie's family in Detroit. I want to remind you of our trip visit to the old asylum, the extremely historical and haunted Eloise with Detroit Paranormal Expeditions. We took a tour during the safety of daytime and admittedly, Eddie and I were not impressed. At least not with the paranormal activity. The building itself- My God! It's beautiful and the items left behind- such as pianos, office furniture and dentists chairs- made this place a urban explorer's dream. but I had no hair raising moments or chills. Maybe we had to be there at night to experience something? I also have to remember, I was a completely different person a year ago. I was still barely used to leaving the house and socializing. So maybe the newness of post-California-depression was blocking my senses. We took tons of photos and enjoyed a fantastic meal at a Mexican restaurant and just like that, the night was over and everyone went home. We made plans to come back as soon as possible because I believe our thirst was not yet satiated. 

Fast forward to a couple months ago. Eddie scrolling though his google photos account and came across something...not quite right. The photos we took at the Eloise had been tampered with. How? This isn't an old school camera with film nor did we spend time in a dark-room to cause these kinds of effects. This is the part where my mind wonders into the difference between taking photos with a smartphone and taking photos with a real film camera. I had literally never seen anything like it. In one of the photos, the image of Bridget on a hospital bed is seen as a stenciled image over another photo like the memory of another photo was showing itself. These photos had been viewed by us a few time already and we didn't see them before. Did we miss something or did something follow us home and changed them to get our attention? See examples of the photos mentioned at the bottom of this blog.

Let me bring your attention back to the title of this blog, "The Ghost Inside The Phone" which is an ode to the physiological theory of "The Ghost Inside The Machine" which hints at a cognitive dualism between body and mind;

There is a doctrine about the nature and place of the mind which is prevalent among theorists, to which most philosophers, psychologists and religious teachers subscribe with minor reservations. Although they admit certain theoretical difficulties in it, they tend to assume that these can be overcome without serious modifications being made to the architecture of the theory.... [The doctrine states that] with the doubtful exceptions of the mentally-incompetent and infants-in-arms, every human being has both a body and a mind.... The body and the mind are ordinarily harnessed together, but after the death of the body the mind may continue to exist and function. -Gilbert Ryle (1900-76)

Thinking about where the mind's energy goes after our body dies is just as spooky to me as a thinking about ghosts. Because, to me, they are one in the same. and then there's our connection to our personal computers and cellphones. My body, my smartphone, my self. My phone is an extension of myself as it is always with me. Even during sleep it only sits mere inches from my brain. Even when I take a shower, it provides entertainment for me in the form of music.  How does this electronic device to look to ghosts from our past? Spirits interact with us not only in physical ways, but electronically as well. This is where the machine we were using at the time the photos of Bridget were taken, comes in. It's use to contact spirits from beyond the veil perhaps allows an introduction to the ghosts in how to manipulate our devices to show us that they are there. Did a spirit jump it's way from one machine to another? And is our body just as much of a machine in which to carry human energy as an electronic device is?

Bridget sent the photos to an investigator who was with us that evening at the Eloise. After he looked into it, he was stumped as well. We are at a loss as to what happened to the photos, buts surprised we are not by the strange happenings at this haunted location. It's developed a cult following of it's own as events like this continue to happen time after time. 

As Eddie and drove on the country roads this past weekend, passing corn fields, beautifully dilapidated farm houses and abandoned silos, we listened to one of her more resent episodes of Ghost Magnet. She had Josh Malerman (musician and renowned horror author who wrote the novel behind the record breaking netflix-streamed film "Bird Box") as a guest. He was also with us the during the day-to-night adventure in haunted exploration in Detroit and they discussed the photos that Eddie had found in his phone. This episode was already one of my favorites before we heard the conversion about our haunted photographs. It makes me giddy to think that a small and inmate group of people from the around the country, made of authors, bloggers, celebrities, ghost-hunters and a funeral director/embalmer, can be brought together again and again by the trickery of ghosts and technology. Working together, between people in California and Michigan, the photos were investigated and debunked for the most part as anything explainable. If we can come together through technology to discuss ghosts, surely we can come together to discuss the ghosts in our own minds that may or may not be a part of our mental health. I have witnessed both now, and briefly, my faith in humanity has been restored. 

I almost don't want to stop writing this today as I've experienced so much comfort in the process writing to you today. I feel like I'm talking to my closest friends, and in a way, I am. You readers are my true friends and family. I tell you everything. Every single day I think of more things I want to tell you about. Do things really happen to me if I don't write about it? I have so much to update you on. Fertility journey stories, vacation travel blogs, mental health crisis', and everyday experiences. 

I'm teaming up with some wonderful organizations and can't wait to share with you what I've been working on! I'm wrapping my brain around making an online class of sorts about how to write and publish a blog and how it helps my mental health. If you have any suggestions on what you would like to learn from a class like this, please do let me know. Secondly, at the moment I am working on an article discussing women's mental health and the what the covid-19 quarantine/lock down did to hinder or help it. If you are a reader, new or old, and are a female willing to share your quarantine experiences, please reach out to me in any fashion. I could use your information anonymously if you choose. I'm asking for females in this instance as a this article is for a website focusing on the women's issues. Of course I want to hear from everyone, no matter your gender. When it comes down to it, we are all just a brain inside a box.

Promise to see you again soon!