GHOST HUNTER – WALT GAVENDA by John P. Flannery

Those of us who believe in ghosts went to the Lovettsville Library this past Saturday to listen to a pro, Walt Gavenda, ghost hunter, describe how he uses high tech devices including an EMF Field Tester to detect ghosts as well as an old stand-by, dowsing rods.  Just in time for Halloween!

At the very outset, Walt said, "Ghosts are getting a bad rap on tv."  (As this correspondent is a civil rights lawyer, he had me at hello.)  Others in attendance plainly agreed; no skeptics came to hear Walt, as indicated by a unanimous show of hands.  An AP survey in 2008 found 34% of Americans believe in the existence of ghosts.  Walt assured us, that he was “going to try to give ghosts an even break.”

Walt conceded that there are ghosts that can kill. 

Walt has worked for the federal government for 48 years concerned with international relations.  but Walt said, “I’ve been interested all my life” in paranormal activity -- ever since he lived in a haunted house while attending Georgetown as an undergraduate, when locked doors opened, and no one was there, objects moved about the room, loud footsteps came up the stairs and no one was to be found.

If you rap on a table, that’s one thing, but when there’s a rapping on the table and no one is seen to have done the rapping, that’s paranormal. 

When you see birds or fish turn suddenly, without cause, that’s paranormal. 

It’s caused by a disembodied soul. 

Walt says paranormal is “a sensory phenomenon witnessed by credible witnesses with no reasonable explanation.  It’s fossils in time.”

By way of example, he said there are accounts of hearing a Railroad train where there are no tracks, where no train has been for years. 

Another is a Williamsburg death wagon hauling the condemned to hangings, and the noise of wagons is heard today. 

Sheridan’s ride to the Battle of Cedar Creek on October 19, 1864 to rally his troops against Confederate soldiers; and in recent days, Yankee tunes were heard on that battle field.

Walt says there are intelligent residual hauntings that allow communications with “what is left behind,” as a result of what he calls, “post mortem traumatic stress disorder.” 

This is not when the person dies a “good death,” meaning in a bed at home surrounded by comforting family and friends. 

Rather, it is when the person dies a grim and grisly death as at Picketts’ charge in Pennsylvania when 12,500 Confederate soldiers advanced over open fields for three-quarters of a mile and half of them were cut down in that three-day battle by heavy Union artillery and rifle fire. 

Not only how someone dies prompts these residuals we call ghosts but how he suffered in a hospital or was buried wrongly or not at all.  These “residuals” can be found at abandoned prisons, abandoned hospitals haunted by staff, disaster sites, but particularly at battle fields.

These residual forms, Walt insists, have energy left that may be measured signifying their presence.  Thus his EMF device and his dowsing rods. 

One nearby good example is the battlefield at Balls Bluff where many Union Troops died shot in the waters of the Potomac trying to escape a terrible death, their bodies looted afterwards, and, when finally buried, it was years later and only the recovered parts of their bodies. 

At Balls Bluff, when Walt was investigating paranormal activity, this wild and desolate and isolated place, he heard the volleys and shots from that old battle in 1861 for the duration of 30 seconds one day. 

Another day, the leaves of an entire tree just dropped on him – all at once. 

One day, he heard his name, “Walt,” called out; “not a nice feeling,” Walt said.

An associate of his, a skeptic, who walked down to the river where the drowning occurred, heard, “this is no place for a lady.”

Pix they took at the site were fogged.

One young man, accompanying another visit, went beserk, running into trees, and said afterwards, “they were younger than me, and they are all dead.”

Walt finally “talked” with John Reynolds by what his dowsers indicated in response to his several questions. 

John was with the California Brigade, killed by the river, trying to swim, shot in the water by the Confederates, the only one in his company who got killed, he was tired, had less energy to communicate with Walt, but led Walt to tombstone grave site 22, on ground considered sacred to the Indians who earlier occupied this space.

Walt says we appear to these “ghosts” as a white mist.

Of course, many don’t believe in ghosts.  How about you?