The Ghostbuster

The Ghostbuster!
It seems there’s more to life than just what’s going on in our physical world!

Bird and ghost people Jodi Chavez and Michele Hardison.

I’ve always suspected that bird people don’t really have their feet on the ground. And now I have the evidence. It turns out that when they’re not watching over our avian guests at the sanctuary, they’re looking out for astral visitors around the canyons here.

Michele Hardison and Jodi Chavez spend their days working at Feathered Friends, the sanctuary’s home for birds that need special care. But after hours, they can be seen with a camera, and sometimes even audio equipment, tracking down ghosts.

This is no joke. It turns out they’re very good at it. Michele became the Southwest representative of the American Ghost Hunters Society seven years ago, long before she came to work at the sanctuary. She’s also a member of the American Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena, and she shows up regularly on the Travel Channel visiting haunted houses, and the History Channel investigating historic ghosts, as well as on Fox TV whenever there’s breaking news of a ghost-busting investigation.

But she’d never investigated the ghosts of Angel Canyon, home of Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, until I learned about her. So we sent her off one evening with Jodi (for whom it’s a relief to get an hour off from having her ear pecked off by unruly parrots), and her trusty camera. (“Any old camera will do. And we never use digital cameras. It’s too easy to doctor the photo.”)

At Angels Rest, Michele says that the light at the bottom left is part of a giant orb of spiritual energy.

Great Balls of Light!
First stop: Angels Rest, the sanctuary’s pet cemetery, which also includes the special memorials you send in for your own pets that have gone over the Rainbow Bridge.

“There was a very strong presence registered on my meter,” said Michele, “and I shouted to Jodi to take a photo. The white patch you see at the bottom left corner of the photo on the right is the top of a giant orb of spiritual energy.”

Michele explains that orbs are balls of light that don’t necessarily signify a single entity, but rather a general spirit presence. “This one was so large,” she explains, “that I think Angels Rest must be a kind of portal between this dimension and the other realms. It would explain the atmosphere of peace and tranquility that people always comment on when they first visit there.”

At the Underground Lake, here at Angel Canyon. (And that’s not a giant orb – just the top of the cave.)

Next, it was on to the Underground Lake, which is at the far end of one of the horse meadows. The Underground Lake feeds a spring, which, according to the horses, makes for very tasty grass and other herbal treats.

“There were some strange presences there,” Michele commented. “But it was difficult to see anything in the photos afterward.” (The big white thing you can see above Michele’s head in the photo is not another giant orb; it’s just the wall of the cave at the water’s edge!)

“First, the cat is staring at the place where the vortex is appearing. Then the vortex is growing bigger and the cat is shrinking back. Finally, the vortex is quite big, and the cat has leapt out of the young girl’s arms and raced out of the room!”

“We were once called out to a house where the family cat had been behaving strangely. She would go to the same place in the house, and start playing with an unseen friend. We went and sat in the room with her one evening, and I began to feel a presence. The cat started focusing on it, too, and I started taking photos. You can see what happened. In the first photo in the strip at the bottom, the cat is staring at the place where the vortex is appearing. In the second, the vortex is growing bigger, and the cat is shrinking back. In the third, the vortex is quite big, and the cat has leapt out of the young girl’s arms and raced out of the room!”

“At a nightclub in Las Vegas, where the owner had died two days before, and the people at the club were experiencing some weird phenomena. We got a remarkable photo of a mist. Mists are shapes that can take on the form of the deceased person when their presence is still hanging around.”

Animals are often a lot more sensitive than people, according to Michele. “I did an investigation at the Goldfield Hotel in Nevada, the scene of an old murder, for Fox TV’s Scariest Places. We took a dog, and went from room to room until we arrived at the scene of the crime. The dog, who’d been very bouncy and eager until then, suddenly cowered down and refused to move.”

What’s Going On?
What if you feel the presence of a departed pet in your own home?

Michele says that the bond between person and pet is often so strong that the pet keeps manifesting for a period after its passing. “Some people keep seeing them. Or you feel like they’ve just jumped up on the bed. Just accept that this is what’s happening. It can be quite comforting.”

And what does Michele think of all the things she’s witnessed, photographed, and recorded on tape?

“I’m just a reporter,” she says. “I’ve seen what I’ve seen, and that’s why I like to keep doing it. I don’t try to interpret what I see, but it’s certainly had an effect on me. I can’t doubt that there’s more to life than just our physical world.”

Or, as Hamlet once said to his stodgy old pal, Horatio: “There are more things in Heaven and on Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”