Picture Yourself Legend Tripping: Your Complete Guide to Finding UFOs, Monsters, Ghosts, and Urban Legends in Your Own Back Yard -- Jeff Belanger’s new book, DVD, and Web site. Enjoy the trip! http://www.legendtripping.com/

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Dear Ghostvillagers,

It’s here… it’s here! October. The most haunted month in the calendar (according to everyone but those of us who look for ghosts and the paranormal year-round). For years now, October has meant it’s my busy season; full of media interviews, lectures, and events that celebrate all things supernatural. This year it’s no different, but what is different is the change in perception. For eleven years now, Ghostvillage.com has been online providing a voice for people who have had experiences or who want to share their theories and research. In those eleven years, there’s been a cultural shift in how the paranormal is perceived and discussed in the mainstream. Ghostvillagers have had a hand in that shift.

Sure, there’s still some reporters who scoff at us and only have interest in writing pieces that attempt to make us look foolish (be sure to read Chris Balzano's editorial further down), but for the most part there’s an acceptance of the phenomena that wasn’t there a decade ago. The debate will rage on as to what is behind the paranormal, but it’s getting more difficult to debate that it’s here -- all around us like a blanket. UFO sightings make the news with regularity, haunted buildings are constantly being mentioned, and the personalities who look for this stuff are now a staple of reality television. We’re arriving, Ghostvillagers.

This October I want to say thank you for all you’ve done for our community, and for paranormal research. I’d also like to challenge you to go further. To push the discussion to new levels, but more than anything to stay focused on what we do. It’s always been about the story, the experience, and exploring the unexplained. It’s not about getting yourself in the media. It’s not about hierarchy in your group. Stay on track, do what you love, and everything will fall into place.

We live in an amazing time, folks. All of our cell phones are armed with recording devices and cameras, and we’re connected through social media like never before. Legends can be born and travel at break-neck speed. Though we’ll never get to all of them, ask yourself why some haunts and stories draw you in while others aren’t worthy of a second glance. To understand the paranormal is to understand ourselves. I can think of no better pursuit. It’s an honor to be out there with you.

Before Halloween, Ghostvillage.com will be hitting another milestone: our 1,000th published ghost encounter. How cool is that? 1,000 of you have already shared your experience, we're still waiting on the rest of you. I’ve been giving a bunch of lectures this month and had the chance to meet many of you. Thank you for coming by and sharing in the experience with me. I look forward to seeing many more of you in the near future. Check out my schedule further down in the newsletter. Have a happy and safe Halloween. Get out there and do some trick-or-treating, but please save the Swedish Fish and Peanut M&Ms for me!

Enjoy the rest of the newsletter below!

Supernaturally yours,

Jeff Belanger
Mayor of Ghostvillage.com
MySpace: www.myspace.com/ghostvillager
Twitter: @THEJeffBelanger
Facebook: Jeff Belanger

Jeff Belanger's Upcoming Events

This is the place to find out where author and Ghostvillage.com founder Jeff Belanger will be speaking on the subject of the supernatural. If you're interested in booking Jeff for a conference or other event, please email us for more information.

Events Scheduled:

A "Weird" Massachusetts Evening - Fiske Public Library - Wrentham, Massachusetts - October 19, 2010, 7 PM

ParaNight 2010/Spooky Southcoast - Water Street Cafe - Fall River, Massachusetts - October 20, 2010, 6:45 PM

A Supernatural Evening with Jeff Belanger - Beaman Memorial Library - West Boylston, Massachusetts - October 26, 2010, 7 PM

A Supernatural Evening with Jeff Belanger - Tewksbury Public Library - Tewksbury, Massachusetts - October 27, 2010, 6:30 PM

Legend Tripping with Jeff Belanger - Amazon.com Corporate Headquarters - Seattle, Washington - October 29, 2010, 6:30 PM

Legend Tripping with Jeff Belanger - Morrill Memorial Library - Norwood, Massachusetts - November 2, 2010, 7 PM

Beyond Reality Events - The Stanley Hotel - Estes Park, Colorado - November 5-8, 2010

Ghost Adventures Crew and Darkness Events - Waking the Dead - Seattle, Washington - November 11-14, 2010

Ghost Adventures Crew and Darkness Events - The Queen Mary - Long Beach, California - December 2-5, 2010

Phenomenology 103 - Gettysburg, Pennsylvania - March 24-27, 2011

Info Coming Soon! - Austin, Texas - October 8-9, 2011

Monthly Contest

Congratulations to Jane Byars of Rome, Georgia, who was last month's winner of an autographed copy of Jeff Belanger's book and DVD, Picture Yourself Legend Tripping and a Ghostvillage.com window sticker!

How to win: Entries will be accepted up until 5:00 PM (eastern time) tomorrow (October 16, 2010). At 5:00 PM, we will draw a winner at random from the correct entries that have been received. You no longer have to be the first, but you only have until 5:00 PM to get your answer in. If you click on this link: http://www.ghostvillage.com/index.shtml#winner, you see today's date, and "We have a winner!" that means the contest has ended. Sorry, please try again next month. To submit your entry, simply reply to this email with the correct answer.

On to this month's question: This question can be answered by reading a page on Ghostvillage.com. Remember, reply by 5:00 PM tomorrow to be eligible to win.

Who was the first person to coin the term "Ghost Hunter" and in what year?

At 5:00 PM tomorrow, we will announce the winner on our home page. Good luck! (Only Ghostvillagers who have not won a prize from us in the last year are eligible.)

This month's prize: We're giving away an autographed copy of Jeff Belanger's new book and DVD, Picture Yourself Legend Tripping and a Ghostvillage.com window sticker!


Didn't win? Want to buy a copy? Click on the graphic.

Supernatural Calendar

The Supernatural Calendar is the place where thousands will learn about your events of interest to the supernatural world. The service is only available to registered members of the message boards, and it's free! Ghostvillage.com now syndicates our calendar of events so other Web sites can also display these supernatural happenings at no charge! To learn more about installing our calendar of events RSS feed, please visit our syndication page. Adding your own local events to our calendar is more important than ever!

October 15-30: Festival of the Dead October 15: New Madrid Missouri Ghost Tour
October 16: Paranormal Month-America's Stonehenge, New Madrid, Missouri Ghost Tour
October 19: Jeff Belanger at Fiske Library - Wrentham, MA
October 20: ParaNight 2010 - Fall River, MA
October 22: New Madrid, Missouri Ghost Tour
October 23: New Madrid, Missouri Ghost Tour
October 26: Jeff Belanger at Beaman Library - W. Boylston, MA
October 27: Jeff Belanger at the Tewksbury Public Library
October 30: Paranormal Month-America's Stonehenge
November 2: Jeff Belanger at the Morrill Library, Norwood, MA
November 5: Scarefest Horror & Paranormal Convention, Beyond Reality Events - Stanley Hotel - Colorado
November 12: Waking the Dead - GAC/Darkness Radio
December 2: Queen Mary Voyage of the Damned - Long Beach, CA

Who's Who in the Village?

Get to know some of your fellow Ghostvillagers.

>>ryuu<< - member since February 8, 2010

What is your name?
Corey Prout

How old are you?
19

Where do you live?
Tampa Bay, Florida

What do you do for a living?
Right now I am a student at Pinellas Technical Education Center in the Web design program.

How did you get interested in the paranormal?
I am a novice paranormal investigator. I have always had kind of a click with the paranormal. I started watching Ghost Hunters one day years ago and didn’t stop. I found other shows of the same concept and it all fascinated me beyond belief. One day my mother told me of an experience I had as a toddler at my grandma's old house which hyped me even more, but of course I was young and didn’t think anyone would take me seriously, so I decided to deepen myself into the knowledge of the field and learn as much as I could until I was old enough. During that time for a period of time I was with Encounters-With-The-Paranormal radio show as a host with five others (now off air). I also started going on a forum called Ghostvillage.com and am still active there. When I was old enough, I started looking into groups in my area and when on Ghostvillage I found a post advertising that a group in my area by the name of Safe Harbor Paranormal Investigators was looking for members and I took the opportunity in a heart beat and applied to join, which is where I find myself now.

What’s the most compelling evidence of the paranormal you’ve ever seen?
For me it has to be the evidence captured at the Stanley Hotel when Ghost Hunters investigated there, the EVP of the female entity saying "hello" three times and the table moving was just wow.

Do you or your family have any Halloween traditions? If so, what are they?
No specific traditions, just the traditional give candy to Trick-or-Treaters. I will sometimes be a part of my Uncle's haunted house. They do a competition each Halloween -- I enjoy doing that a lot.

Features

Our "Features" section is a place for editorials, research articles, open letters to our readers, and other content of interest to Ghostvillagers. If you have a topic on your mind, agree or disagree with something you read recently, we want to hear from you! For guidelines, click here.

New features added since our last newsletter:

The Haunted Victorian Mansion By 30 Odd Minutes October 13, 2010 [VIDCAST]
Halloween is for Everybody by Lee Prosser October 11, 2010 [COLUMN]
A Brief, Unofficial History of Ghosts and their Hunters by Deonna Kelli Sayed September 21, 2010

Last Month's Theme - Featured Content

Our last month's theme was haunted schools. Here's what you missed if you haven't checked in since last month:

Encounters: My Aunt's Spirit at Meling School
Encounters: Ghost of the School Caretaker
Encounters: Haunted High School
Encounters: Angry School Spirit

Recent Encounters

We receive personal encounters from all over the world. Many are scary, some are touching, but they are always profound. If you would like to share your own experience, please click >>here<<. Since our last newsletter, we added the following new encounters:

The Ghost Cat - Belleville, Illinois
Tingling My Skin - Wayzata, Minnesota
My Grandfather's Voice in the Field - Bihar, India
A Vision of Lucifer - Rockford, Illinois
Meeting My Spirit Guide - Arlington, Texas
Our Haunted Adobe - Taos, New Mexico
Huaka'i Po/Night Marchers at Keawaula Beach - Yokohama Bay Makaha, Hawaii

News

This is the place to find news items on paranormal happenings around the world. If you have a news item you'd like to submit, please see our guidelines.

From the desk of News Editor, Christopher Balzano
I try to never make myself the story. Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I am famous for saying the story is always more compelling than I am. For the most part that is true, but this week things changed a bit. I became part of a story that played between only a handful of people for about twenty-four hours, and will be noticed by a few who read the fine print of a local paper. Oddly enough, it started when I was not part of the story.

While scanning through my daily news releases I noticed a headline from the Nashua Telegraph out of New Hampshire. I would have avoided it, mainly because I could tell it was just a retelling of ghost stories from an area I knew well, but it mentioned Pukwudgies, my favorite paranormal subject, and Vale End Cemetery, the only place I ever left in fear. In the writer’s retelling of the legends surrounding the location and some of the other local paranormal hot spots, I began to notice the term “ghost hunters,” “paranormal investigators” and “psychics” were being used, but no names were appearing. By the time I got to the section on Pukwudgies I was fuming, and as I read the brief description of their connection there, I recognized my own words and ideas. More importantly, my name was nowhere in the article.

This writer had taken a familiar path. He had done some Internet research (it took about a half hour of keyword searching to discover the five sites he had been to), and had gone out and taken a few pictures. He pieced things together, switched some words around in a process my middle school students would have used, and spiced it up with some of his own, uneducated conclusions.

The whole thing would have been over quickly, but I was in a mood. Too often paranormal researchers have been used during the Halloween season, and we use the media during that time. This, however, was a serious case of plagiarism, and more importantly, the writer committed a fatal flaw. He assumed because we were wacky ghost people, we took no pride in what we wrote.

I contacted the writer with a nasty e-mail, CCing his editors and some of the people I knew he had stolen from. Within minutes I got an apology and request for help on his next article. The guy just didn’t get it. Things hit the fan the next day as researchers, writers, and the entire editorial staff from his paper contacted me. I was at work and unable to respond, but I watched as arrows were thrown back and forth. I have never read so many euphemisms for the word “steal” and “thief” in my life.

Ultimately, the article was reprinted with citation to the groups where the man got his information and a formal apology. I was told off the record (I am a reporter and I don’t like you…what makes you think anything you say is off the record) they would seriously consider never using this freelancer again. I consider that a victory, and what was going to be a seething article with the man’s e-mail and phone number (I got it when he called me the next day crying…really…crying), but I have mellowed in the past few days, and really the story has shifted and become something else.

Instead it is now part cautionary tale and part call to action. At one point the editor wrote she did not want to seem as if they were taking the subject matter lightly, and that paranormal investigators should be taken seriously, a position I did not agree with. She missed the point again. So many of us give of our talents and time freely in this business. I could care less whether some random person in Nashua, New Hampshire, takes paranormal investigating seriously. I do object to not being taken seriously as a writer, and I am more offended someone would thing any of us are so unimportant to not warrant consideration.

So be careful of who has their hands on your information. They are sneaking it in between references to Ghostbusters and bad plays on words. Make sure to call them on it because we may be the only watchdog to what we do. Who knows. You might get a good story out of it.


BLACK FOREST HAUNTING FOR SALE
Is Lincoln's Assassin Haunting the Nats? NBC Washington Washington, D.C. - September 14, 2010 [External News]

WANT THESE HEADLINES ON YOUR SITE FOR FREE? Syndicate our news! If you have a Web site or blog, you can syndicate our news feeds to your site for free. Join the growing list of Web sites who carry our news by visiting our syndication page.

Hot Threads and the Ghostvillage.com Community

In the past month, hundreds of new people registered for free to join our supernatural discussion! Have you?

If you have registered for our message boards but haven't validated your account yet, it's simple to do! Look for the email that was automatically sent to you when you registered and click on the account activation link in the email (note: some bulkmail filters may block this email, so you'll need to check your bulkmail folder if the validation email didn't immediately come through). There are always great discussions going on in our huge message board community. We hope you'll get involved. It's free to register if you're not already a member. Here are some of the hot topics this month:

Religion and Spirituality
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ghostcommunity/index.php?showtopic=31173
Religious denominations and ghosts.

Skeptics
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ghostcommunity/index.php?showtopic=31143
Are ghosts real or just a figment of your imagination?

General Board
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ghostcommunity/index.php?showtopic=31234
Haunted trees.

Personal Encounters
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ghostcommunity/index.php?showtopic=31278
Bad feelings.

Paranormal Equipment
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ghostcommunity/index.php?showtopic=31172
Zoom H4n or RT-EVP?

Evidence Alley
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ghostcommunity/index.php?showtopic=31203
An opinion on an audio clip.


Board of the Month -- Halloween/Samhain 2010
http://www.ghostvillage.com/ghostcommunity/index.php?showforum=27
What are your Halloween/Samhain traditions, customs, and beliefs?

Ghostvillage.com Advertising Opportunities

Each month Ghostvillage.com reaches tens of thousands of people interested in the paranormal. We offer the most effective and best-valued advertising and sponsorship packages of any paranormal media outlet. Please visit: http://www.ghostvillage.com/advertising.htm for details.

If you're ready to put Ghostvillage.com to work for your company or organization, send us an email to get started.

Ghostvillage.com Quick Stats:

312,107 Posts in the Town Square Message Boards
28,617 Members in the Town Square
995 "Personal Encounters" published on Ghostvillage.com
1,564 Paranormal Web sites in the Ghost Links directory
30,554 Subscribers to this newsletter
4,442,681 Total Web site "hits" for Ghostvillage.com in September

Support Ghostvillage.com

Ghostvillage.com is the Web's largest supernatural community, the central place where people come to share their experiences, thoughts, and research. Please help us continue to grow by buying a copy of The World's Most Haunted Places, Communicating With the Dead, The Encyclopedia of Haunted Places, The Nightmare Encyclopedia, Our Haunted Lives, Ghosts of War, The Ghost Files, Weird Massachusetts, Who's Haunting the White House?, The Mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, Picture Yourself Legend Tripping or shopping in Ghost-Mart. Every little bit helps run our servers and helps the site get bigger and better! Please also click on our banner ads and support our advertisers -- when you do business with someone who advertises with Ghostvillage.com, let them know you saw their ad with us and thank them for the support.

Please email us anytime at info@ghostvillage.com. Your comments, questions, and feedback are always welcomed.

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