Searching for orbs in all the wrong places

By Kelly Fitzpatrick
Irish Handcuffs
Last update: August 25, 2005

This week's column is brought to you by the letter "S," for spirits and - gasp! - sobriety.

I blame that last one on fellow Drunken Ghost Hunter Kelly, who got lost in some boy's eyes on aisle eight of Publix when she really should have been meeting the rest of us ghost-hunting flakes. For what, you may ask? A tour of Spirtualist camp/high school hangout Cassadaga, located in Timbuktu , uh, I mean West Volusia. Oh, you're still wha-whaaing on the DGH moniker, aren't ya? That's a little side project a few of us kids put together several months back that involved two of our favorite past times: drinking and talking to ourselves (kinda rare for us to get answers when talking to air in a haunted locale). But that drinking part got sidestepped due to Miss Kelly's tardiness, so we had to skip the bar and go straight to the hunt.

Or, meet-and-greet is more like it. It was a press junket for a new event taking place in the "ghost" town called "Nighttime Tours Featuring Orb Photography." It's important to note one of the mottos of Drunken Ghost Hunting: Orbs are bullshit. Unless, according to our founder, Butch, they spit blood and speak; otherwise, buy yourself a bubble machine. Butch couldn't make it this evening, however, and since our group is not scientific by any stretch of the imagination we're open to being proved wrong. Plus, the rest of the cats in our squad had never been to Cassadaga. A walk through the cemetery is a rite of passage for the poor souls who endure high school in the center of this state but, since that's illegal and stuff, that wasn't part of the plan this time around.

The tour began with an intro to what orbs are and examples of orb photography in the Cassadaga Welcome Center/Bookstore by Dusty Smith, president and founder of Daytona Beach Paranormal Research Group. The group was brought in by the folks of Cassadaga for the tour, and, unlike my group of "ghost hunters" this lady can back it up with degrees in Biology, Psychology and Theology, not to mention certification in Ghost Hunting and Paranormal Investigation. But first, what is an orb? "Basic physics dictates energy doesn't die, it only changes form," says Smith. "The easiest form for energy to take is a sphere or a ball, and that's why the most common paranormal occurrence are spirit orbs." But it's kind of hard to prove that a ball of light might be someone's Great-aunt Sally, so there are some rules of thumb when pointing one out. The orb must show three dimensions, emit light, cast shadow and/or show movement. And Smith is quick to point out that most orbs that come out on film are most likely dust, dirt, pollen, high humidity or rain.

So where did Cassadaga tour guide ChrisAnn Silver take us for our orb photo session after the presentation was over? Spirit Pond, in August, in Florida , after a rainstorm - of course. The only orbs I saw were the bug bites swelling on my arm (yeah, dum dum didn't take Silver up on the bug-spray offer), and the boys in our group, Brian, Randy and Cayce, eyeballed some orbs of the natural kind off of a fellow tour member - pigs! But Smith agreed these were not good conditions to do legitimate orb photography. "If I was on a case and worked for a client I would have never used those photos as evidence."

I'm glad we're on the same plane, I mean page. But it wasn't all raindrops on roses (or palm trees, for that matter). We did get a brief tour of a few of the historic buildings around town, some tales of children haunting the Davis Building and suspected female ghosts who are fond of the upstairs of Brigham Hall. A highlight was a sit-down in the séance room in the back of the community's church. Patrick Swayze didn't make an appearance, but there was a broken table from a recent visit. In its current state, the tour that takes place every Saturday at 8:30 p.m. is not worth the $20 they want the general public to shell out, but I was told it would be longer than what the press got to experience. That's fine, but they need to decide what they want to accomplish with this: a basic tour of the town with spooky stories included or a straight-up ghost hunt with proton packs and all (OK, an EMF detector would satisfy me).

And what did my group do after going over our "evidence"? We made up for that missing "D" and hit the local pub, investigating more credible spirits lurking behind the bar.