Guest Post: Speed Dating in a haunted hotel + $10 GC Giveaway!

Speed Dating in a Haunted Hotel

By Scott Nicholson

www.hauntedcomputer.com

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I’ve done much more ghost story collecting than I have ghost collecting, but my interest in spirituality naturally leads to afterlife curiosity. One of the recurring themes in my work is the exploration of the Big Question: Why are we here and what happens when we die?

I don’t really expect to bump into Aunt Mildred’s ghost and she will spill all the secrets of the universe over a cup of tea, but I do think the belief in ghosts is a fascinating social, philosophical, and psychological matter. Whether you don’t believe in anything and think we are here to consume candy and die, or whether you spend most of your day in prayer and meditation, you are probably as close to the “answer” as anyone else.

And people from all walks believe–and don’t believe–in ghosts. Some skeptics can be changed with one bizarre incident or encounter, while some curious folks can search for evidence of the afterlife for years before concluding there’s nothing out there.

As a newspaper reporter, I went on a ghost hunt at a local hotel with a group of paranormal investigators. While the old hotel was big and spooky, I was most fascinated by the personalities of the hunters, their expectations and their reactions to phenomena that I chalked up to the usual stuff of old hotels–cool drafts, distant elevator noises, and squeaky floors.

A year later, I hosted a paranormal conference at the hotel, gathering information that I used in Speed Dating with the Dead, when a paranormal conference goes haywire. In the novel, I had to accidentally invoke some demons, because “real” ghost hunting is incredibly dull. You sit in the dark all night with lots of equipment, and then spend several weeks poring through audio and video files to get a few seconds of suggestive information.

I’ve gone on several other hunts since, and even hosted another conference, and I still collect ghost stories, but I stopped short of investing in lots of gear. I do think there is potential for devices that correlate many different kinds of data, measuring time, temperature, and location with various other data (similar to the Multiple Anomaly Coordinator, or MAC Attack, the team uses in the book).

But even if you line up a bunch of coordinates and statistics and say, “This is a ghost,” what exactly have you proven? You still haven’t answered the Big Question.

The hunt continues.

Scott Nicholson is author of Speed Dating with the Dead, The Skull Ring, and 10 other novels, five story collections, four comics series, and six screenplays. A journalist and freelance editor in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, he often uses local legends in his work.