Bye-Bye Big Blue

The first few years I did ghost tours, he was there every night -- hovering off the top of the LBJackson Building. He was big, blue and reliable. Night after night, there he'd be. I started thinking of the blue orb as Big Blue.

There was a psychic on the tour one night. A guy that was the real deal. Scarily so. He claimed to be able to look down into graves and see the people buried there. At one of our sites, I'd been told there were four people buried at that location. I told the ghost story and he looked down. "I see six [people], he said. I checked with another source later that week. He was right; there were six.

At the LBJackson Building, Big Blue attached himself to this paranormally sensitive guest. In every subsequent photo for the rest of the tour, there was Big Blue suspended over him. When we returned to the hotel after the tour, the orb sat on his shoulder for the last photo. Big Blue didn't show up at the LBJackson Building for two nights. I've always thought he probably went home with the psychic.

I was new to touring and didn't ask for a copy of the pictures nor his email address. I wish I had; he might have been able to tell me some of Big Blue's secrets -- who he was, where he'd been, why he was there. (I always thought the orb was male.) As it is, Big Blue no longer haunts the LBJackson Building. He disappeared two years ago. Ghost do travel after all.

Spooked, Freaked, Scared

One of the most frequently asked questions on the tour is "What has been your spookiest experience [on the tour]?" Ghost Hunters of Asheville's Downtown Interactive Tour is a family-oriented, kid-friendly tour so there really wasn't much of an answer to this ... until now.

It was an intimate, adult-only tour. There was an opportunity to enter a darkened, extremely haunted, venue. Paranormally sensitive guests and psychics had warned that a very angry ghost inhabited this structure. An older balding man in overalls, the spectre doesn't even realize he's dead. He is angered by ouside presences and photographic evidence points that he has chased away most of the numerous spirits who once inhabited the place.

Walking through a dark, haunted facility, armed only with flashlights, was thrilling, fun, and exhilarating -- until we came to the doorstep of a basement room. I lack the words to adequately describe the foreboding, heaviness, all-nerves-on-alert feeling that literally slammed my psyche. I asked a guest to take a picture of the room. It was filled with pilot blue orbs in every photo he took. There would be no paranormal photos in any other space of the building.

It may seem a fairly innocuous experience (e.g., What's the big deal?), but to someone who has never before felt this type of presence, it was shatteringly disturbing. I actually felt dirty and shaken until mid-day the following afternoon. It was, for all intents and purposes, my first truly paranormal encounter. That I "called" it -- verified by photos -- increased my awe and shock.

I've purposely stayed paranormally insensitive, but have noticed a recent intuitive awakening. I guess you can't be around this stuff as much as I am without it affecting -- and changing -- who you are. Nonetheless, I find it jolting. Believing something is "out there" is very different from experiencing what is out there.