Life as a Ghost Buster

This morning I ran across a blog entry from 2006 about the first investigation of Old Town (then Odin) Tattoo - the shop that was featured on Ghost Lab and Most Terrifying Places this year. Written down write after the investigation, a few weeks before Richie "Tapeworm" Herrera's death. Several bits of information on the history of the place didn't hold up in the investigation (there was never a Walter who owned the place), but it's still an interesting read:


6/20/06
Last night's ghost investigation led us to a tattoo parlor that was a family-owned funeral home, owned by three generations of one family, from 1903-2003. Gorgeous building; there was a Tiffany fireplace in the entrance in which they had a small tombstone from the early 50's - which they'd found in the attic - on display.

The staff told us a lot of stories of weird things that had happened, including several accounts of seeing a guy in a powder blue suit sitting in the doorway.

"I didn't take my eye off him, cause I know if you look away from these cats for a second, they'll be gone!' said the owner. Others told us pretty much the same sort of story - I questioned how sober they'd been when they say these ghosts, but it was entertaining.

"Twice I felt like someone tried to push me down the stairs!" said the owner, who lives upstairs. "And you can't fight back with these assholes, you know. But I said out loud, man, if I f---ing die in here, it's f---ing ON, Motherf--er!"

With us on this trip were a couple of girls who were said to be psychic - I'm always VERY skeptical of this sort of business, but, hey, I'm of the opinion that there's no such thing as GOOD evidence of ghosts, only COOL evidence, and having a supposed psychic or two around couldn't really hurt anything.

My main job was running audio recordings, following one of the girls around. The basement was especially creepy - you can probably imagine that the basement of any given former funeral home is going to be pretty creepy. The ceiling was probably less than six feet above the ground. There were old drainage holes in the floor. Lots of weird holes in the walls.

I followed the girl to a back corner where things seemed especially odd - the temperature was changing, and I kept feeling like something was touching my shoulder. She said "there's something here!" and right then, in the headphones I had attatched to the audio gear, I thought I heard something say "Walter!"

It was a few minutes later that they told us that the funeral home went out of business after the last owner died - he'd held onto it as long as he could, but his kids didn't want to take over the family business, so it died with him. And his name was Walter.

As I've said, I'm a confirmed skeptic. There're ALWAYS other explanations for this sort of thing.

But I had to admit - that was pretty cool. I love this job.