10 great Halloween Freebies!

The Spook season is well and truly here, and over the next few weeks the nights will get that little bit darker as the veil between this world and the next fades to almost complete transparency!

Some of us are lucky enough to live the Halloween experience all year round, in my case it is probably just as well I am passionate about the paranormal!

With that in mind, I thought I’d share with you some of my Favourite on-line Halloween freebies that are normally available throughout the year.

1) Free Kids activities

With half term coming up, and the autumn weather not always being agreeable, parents can now keep their little devils occupied with these fantastic Halloween activities! Whether making potions, or cutting out silhouettes to plaster on your nice clean windows, there’s plenty here to keep them occupied for a few minutes!

2) Halloween Fonts

If you are like me, you’ll spend ages designing that Halloween party invitation to give it just the right feel, worse still, you’ll try every font you can before settling on Times new Roman again because at least you can read it clearly!

This page is sure to contain the font you are looking for, whether you need it to look elegant and Gothic  or just splattered in blood, this page will have what you need!

3) Scary Music

Create the perfect ambience for that Halloween party with these Royalty free sound files. The site says the files are in the public domain, but always double check if you are thinking of using them for commercial purposes.

4) Spooky Screen Saver

I have actually had this screen saver on my PC for the last 3 Halloween seasons! 3D screen-savers like this normally come with a premium price tag, but this can be downloaded totally free! It includes music, sound effects, Though I have mine switched off, and also displays the time. Give it a go!

5) War of the Worlds 1938

No-one would have believed in the early decades of the 20th century that human beings would be totally taken in by a radio drama and believe it was true!

Nevertheless, this is the original “Fiction posing as reality”, and it had most of New York’s population heading for the hills!

You can listen to the original broadcast right here!

6) Halloween E-cards

Put yourself into a mini- movie with Jib-Jab & email the finished product to your friends! Last years offering was a little better IMHO when you had the opportunity to star in Night of the Living Dead, but having a go at the time warp is fun as well!

7)Prepare for the Zombie invasion!

To tell you the truth I have no idea how serious this is. It appears to be a US government campaign to encourage people to have an emergency disaster kit handy and be prepared, using a Zombie apocalypse as a frame. In any case, you can download and print posters, and read the comic while waiting for your inevitable death at the hands of flesh eating ghouls!

8) Horror Movies

This site allows you to watch full movies on line. Don’t expect the latest blockbusters here though it is a free site after all! However if you like dodgy special effects and cheesy acting you can lose yourself for hours here!

9) Ghost Stories

M.R. James is one of the best writers of ghost fiction in my humble opinion, and you can download his books in Kindle format right here! It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a kindle either, as the apps for reading kindle books on I-phone and android devices are readily available, (Blackberry too if you know the right back door!) There is also a PC kindle app, so you can read them any time and any place!

10) Slender Game

If, like me, you have trouble finding scary movies really scary you could try immersing yourself into a video game. Slender is totally free to download and hits the right buttons for terror and suspense. This game will also introduce you to the slender-man mythos, possibly the next big thing in horror. With a little digging on the internet you will find yourself overwhelmed with the multi layered legend!

Honorary mention- nightmare house 2 

I really wanted to include this in my list, but  it’s technically not free, as you have to have an active steam account with “Half-life 2 episode 2” on it. However if you have them it is well worth a look. I spent an evening playing through it the other night and found myself totally immersed. The psychological jump moments are executed perfectly, and the final boss fight is challenging to say the least! This is so much more than a zombie shoot em up, expect the unexpected!

There are many more Halloween freebies about, but I’d be here all day! I may well link them over the next few weeks on my twitter account @Roblupine.

Follow me if you want to see them!

Also let me know if you have any Halloween freebies of your own in the comments section below, I may well tweet the best!

Investigation report-The Lamb Inn 28/9/12

The Ouija board produced some amazing results!
(Photograph courtesy UK Haunted)

I was interested to see what we got at the Lamb, as there had been no investigations in this 16th century building in the past. The only history I was able to glean consisted of hearsay and friend of friend stories which patched together into an intriguing story, however nothing that could be supported by historical evidence.

However we began the evening in the function room to see what would happen.

As a side note, as I was preparing the room before participants arrived I decided to try out my EMF meter, and have a quick go on the ghost box. I picked up activity almost straight away, with voices on the ghost box quite eager to talk to me, and the needle of the EMF meter spiking on several occasions even though I was sat quite still in the room by myself!

We began the evening with an open invocation, calling out to the spirits to use whatever means to inform us of their presence. I never expect great results at this point of the evening and do it mainly to get the group used to the room and its natural noises. However the spirits had other ideas!

Some people reported feeling cold, particularly around their legs, even though the heating was fully on. Then my pendulum, that I had set up for later in the evening, began swinging by itself. upon seeing this I decided to move on to the pendulum straight away.

I have the pendulum suspended across a large wine glass, and have participants put their hands on the table with their fingers touching. I then ask the spirits to swing the pendulum and make it go in a circle. If we get good results I’ll ask it yes/no questions, with the pendulum swinging one way for yes and the other for no.

As it was responding so well on the night we got a clear conversation going. Answering anti-clockwise for yes and clockwise for no we found ourselves talking to a middle aged female who claimed she and her 3 children including a baby  died in a fire in the year 1909.*

She was confused, and didn’t know how the fire started, suggesting that the fire was at night and they were asleep. She also was unaware how much time has passed, claiming she had died in the last decade.

Moving on to the ghost box we found the ladies name was Anita. We were able to converse with her for a while, but she clearly didn’t want to talk about the fire and left us quite abruptly!

Another voice came through, adding that at that point there was “Just the one” spirit in the room.

He identified himself as “Dean” and claimed he was travelling form America and stayed at the Lamb in the 1960’s. Dean turned out to be one of the most talkative spirits of the evening, telling us about his travels around the world. though he wouldn’t tell us how he died.

Then the room got very busy, with the Ghost box spitting out various names, and calls of “Beer!” and even belches! It was like we were in a busy bar, or a raucous party! We had so many names and personalities calling out to us it became impossible to tell who was who, so we shut down the ghost box and moved onto the Ouija board.

We found the planchette moved quite quickly with one group of people, and managed to get names spelt out clearly. At one point it appeared a spirit had come through who was known personally to one of our sitters, but when I asked if it was just pretending the planchette moved to yes.

What was interesting about the Ouija board on this occasion was the planchette would only move if it was an all woman group. If any men put their fingers on it, it would immediately stop.

However one particular group of ladies had the planchette sweeping across the board so quickly it often got free from their grasp! On a couple of occasions the planchette tilted as well, with two of the feet lifting from the board completely. The main contact this time came from a child who claimed to be 5, who was more interested in playing with the planchette than talking to us!

We tried to do an invocation in darkness, but on this occasion it proved impossible as the lights outside, including a security lamp, made it quite easy to see, and so at midnight we moved down to the main building.

We started in the main bar, but found very little activity there, not much came from the ghost box, and the Ouija board proved inconclusive, however one of our participants produced a nice bit of automatic writing with the names “Lucy” and “Sean”(Or could it be Dean?) entwined within the pattern.

The back room proved more positive, and we got straight on with the Ouija board that had been working so well earlier. We used two men who hadn’t got any activity from the planchette so far and one of them almost immediately began to feel dizzy & disorientated and had to sit down.

When we put the girls back on we got a different child, four years old called Sarah. Sarah entertained us for a while, hiding under tables and tapping people on the leg. She was wary of strangers but quickly seemed to warm to us, and told us she used to live in the village, but didn’t have any connection with the pub.

For me Sarah was the highlight of the evening!

My overall feeling was that there are definitely parts of the building that warrant further investigation, and I will be coming back in the new year. the spirits we encountered felt very positive and  eager to talk, possibly because nobody had tried in the past. There was little ill will aimed at us and everyone left feeling good about the experience!

*Later in the evening I asked the landlord if he knew of a fire, he didn’t, but said that the roof of the building had been thatched many years ago. maybe one for the historians to work out!

The Mystery of the Orbs

I have never been a fan of “Orb” pictures. there are too many possible explanations for them that would often be more plausible than supernatural intervention.

For those that don’t know, “Orb” pictures are often taken at ghost hunts and show pinpoints of white light where there was none a few seconds earlier.

Mysterious Blue Orbs
Picture Copyright Sallie Harding

All too often they can be explained away by dust or moisture catching on the camera flash or some other source of light. They are incredibly easy to fake. Try taking a picture outside in a rain shower with your flash on to see what I mean.

However I was sent this picture recently by a participant of our recent ghost hunt at the Hind hotel in Wellingborough and it has me intrigued.

It was taken as we were using the ghost box and the bright lights you can see are candles that were on the table.  However it is the pinpricks of blue light by 3 of the candles that are interesting. the picture was taken without any flash.

Now I’m no photography expert, but my first hunch was that it could be some kind of reflection of the candles on the camera lens. however if that is the case why did it show up as blue? And why is there only an orb on 3 of the five candles pictured?

I always try to eliminate the impossible before I draw conclusions, so I’m opening this one up to you! What do you think?

The Hind Ghost Hunt report

It was somewhat frustrating that in a summer that consisted of some of the worst weather imaginable I was going to be spending one of the hottest evenings of the year inside.

However the vigil kicked off at 9 pm in an attempt to make contact with any of the spirits that resided there.

When I first visited the Cromwell Suite a little over a month before I got the feeling that something didn’t want me there. The Trifield Natural EM meter I was using at the time showed 2.5 initially, but minutes later the needle moved to zero.  As the meter detects change in the electro-magnetic fields you would expect it to go down, however nothing we did could get the needle to move. Even moving around near it produced no result, (Normally it does) and we tested the battery- it was fine!

It was as if something was holding the needle and saying, “Move along, nothing to see here!”

That trend continued on Saturday.

It wasn’t that nothing happened, rather that  something was trying to prevent things from happening.

One of the first things we did was suspend a pendulum over a large wine glass and asked the spirits to move it, and make it swing from side to side while four or five participants concentrated their energies on it. There was a few times it would start swinging, but when it stopped it stopped suddenly, as if some invisible force was grabbing it and preventing it from moving. We did however manage to get a yes/no system going and the responses we got suggested to us that we were talking to a male spirit who had been with spirit for over 300 years.

This entity was quite mischievous in his answers, and I got the impression he was listening to ideas put forward by the participants and telling us what we wanted to hear rather than the facts.

Two “Orbs” appeared in a photograph taken during the pendulum session. An identical picture taken seconds earlier showed nothing. (Many thanks to Andrea Taylor for the Photograph)

However we pressed on to using a device called a ghost box, this little toy was easily the star of the night, and we had 3 sessions with it at different points throughout the vigil. An all 3 occasions the same information came through.

For those who don’t know, a ghost box is a digital radio that has been modified to constantly scan through the radio transmissions on the FM or AM band. You hear the whole thing including random words as it scans through various radio programmes. At three different points of the evening, and using both bands in alternating sessions we got the same information. We got the name “Jim” many times and “Jim” was imploring us to “Leave”, “Just Leave” and “Go, go, go”. The answers seemed very consistent with the questions, When asked how many spirits were in the room, “Jim” said, “11” although he was reluctant to share the limelight with them, He named “Mike” but when we asked to speak with him “Jim” declared, “He cannot”.  At a later ghost box session we heard a female voice come through, we asked her name and got “Sharon” but before we could ask any further questions “Jim” came back like a grumpy landlord at last orders, “Go,Go,Go!”

The ghost box technically shouldn’t have the capacity to stop scanning, however in my experience it does sometimes freeze on vigils. On the first ghost box session it stopped scanning almost immediately, following in the pattern of someone trying to hide evidence. On later sessions it stopped on demand, when I asked the spirits to make the radio freeze it did so almost immediately. We also noted it stopped on the frequency 1600 suggesting a civil war connection and tying in to being dead over 300 years. When the spirit was asked how long it had been here we got a clear scentence, “Since about 5.30” and as we were laughing at this it froze once more, this time on the frequency 530.

The Ouija board was not a great success on this occasion, with the planchette stubbornly refusing to move and at times it seemed to be stuck even when I asked the participants to try and push it! after nearly 45 minutes however we got a couple of random letters followed by a clear movement to goodbye. This happened several times.

The evening closed with a dark vigil. where we switched off the lights and invited the spirits to do their worst. Several people saw shadows moving around, there were reports of people feeling tickled and tapped, at one point the ambient light coming from street lights beyond the closed curtains seemed to dim to almost total blackness. This was experienced by almost everyone.

In the end I would call the evening a successful failure, something was certainly happening but it seemed to be wanting to hide all evidence of its existence from us.

The next Hind Ghost vigil will be happening in October, a little closer to Halloween, I will be interested to see if the spirits are keener to talk then!