© 1 June / 2026 Levite
http://themediadesk
1.
Over the last few years I had been invited to be a guest at a paranormal conferences and conventions, and until now, I turned all of them down.
But this hand written note, delivered by the US mail to the office in a big cardboard envelope, with fliers and a proposed schedule, and brochures from a couple of hotels, and a booklet from the convention center itself, which wasn't all that far from my apartment. Made me consider at least going to their event in a couple of months.
The hand written note was from a retired officer from the Ohio State Highway Patrol.
He had heard about me through various channels, and appreciated that I was keeping a low profile. He even suggested that if I agreed to be a panelist in his sessions on Law Enforcement and the Paranormal, that I could wear a disguise and go by the name of "Mary Worth".
The note came with his business card with a couple of ways of contacting him. So I sent him a message from my department account, just in case it was something wasn't what it appeared to be, I would have an official record of the contact.
Trooper Stewart called me on my office phone within minutes.
We talked for a cup and a half of coffee by my reckoning.
"Before you say yes, Detective Elaine. I'm coming out there next week to meet with the convention organizer, if you don't mind, I can come by your office afterward and we can talk about the panel's topics and how we're going to present the information."
"That's a wonderful idea, do you know where the office is?"
"I can find it."
In the mean time I had some mundane tasks I needed to take care of.
First I was training one of the newer deputies how to do the safety and security inspections of county facilities. And after a couple of those, I dropped her off and I went to do an investigation into somebody that had supposedly set up a campsite on some county owned property that wasn't a designated campground. Namely, inside one of the ramps of a major highway interchange.
If there was anything to the report, I would call the County Police to come in and evict the squatters. But, most of the time, these reports were of transient homeless who would stay someplace for a few days, and then move on. By the time the report came in and we could get out there, they were usually long gone, and all we'll do is send out a crew pick up some trash, instead of telling the people to move on, or, occasionally, call social services to come help them in some way.
This time I parked off the road near the spot and followed a footpath through the bushes and small trees in the parcel along the highway interchange.
I didn't find one campsite. I found three different ones. Or at least, where two others had been some time ago, and one that had been abandoned recently. I checked where their campfire had been and could tell that it hadn't been used since we'd had a light rain the other day. In a grocery bag to one side I found an advertising paper with a date from last week. Whoever had been here had spent some time, and then left quite recently. I got out my phone and sent the GPS location to the county works office with the note that it was homeless trash and it wasn't too bad. Then I started walking back out to my car.
I had parked well off the road, and the car had its amber warning lights flashing, and the license plate was registered to the County Sheriff's Department. But when I came out of the bushes there was a marked local police car sitting behind it with its lightbar on. By instinct I reached into my pocket and got out my badge wallet and then kept my hands in clear view of the officers in their car.
A uniformed officer got out of the passenger side of the police car and walked toward me.
"Can I help you, officer?" I asked him as he looked at my badge and ID being displayed in my outstretched hand as we got close to each other.
"That your car?" He asked as I noticed the Sergeant stripes on his sleeve.
"Yes, Sergeant. I was checking on a report about the campers."
"Yeah, they were there."
"They're not now. Last one left about two days ago."
"They'll be back." He said. "I suppose you wonder what he's doing," he nodded toward the cars.
"Trainee?" I asked, he nodded, "first day on patrol?"
"Second. He's driving today."
"How's he doing?"
"Not bad," he snorted half a laugh, "I think he's less nervous about everything than I was when I was in his shoes."
"Sergeant!" We heard a voice that sounded very young call out to us.
When I looked toward the cars the trainee was standing next to the marked car, with the door open.
"Do you want to tell him about doing that, or should I?" The Sergeant asked me.
"I'll do it. Might be fun."
"All yours, Detective. His last name is Addams. No, I'm not kidding, it really is."
I got my badge back out and was holding it up for him to see, and walked over to be on the shoulder next to the cars.
The trainee just looked at me and stayed where he was with the door open.
"Officer Addams, close the car door and come here," I said firmly.
He looked at the Sergeant who nodded, then he closed the door and walked toward me.
"I'm Detective Elaine of the Suffolk County Sheriff's Office." I said still holding up my ID.
He looked at the badge, and read it this time, "Yes, ma'am."
"First off, you're not in any trouble. But what I'm going to tell you is very important."
"Yes, ma'am."
I went through about how some drivers would go out of their way to sideswipe a police car with its door open on the side of the road. And even if he was uninjured, the car could well be out of service for a long time.
The Sergeant had joined us, "That, and they could well sue the city because the door was in the travel lane."
"I didn't think about that," the trainee said.
"It's OK, now you know. Let's hope you remember it. What came back when you ran the tag?" I asked him to change the subject.
"That's its a county car assigned to the Sheriff, and... she can park there while she's on duty."
I was still chuckling about the trainee on my way back to the office.
Back, a few years ago, when I was just starting out. Well, OK, it was more than 'a few years ago'. I had some similar incidents occur. And now, I'm rather surprised that I had done as well as I had.
2.
Trooper Stewart, retired, appeared in the office one morning. Walking around talking to the Sheriff and one of the other deputies. I had been out to a site redoing a safety inspection that had revealed that not only did the fire alarm system in the building not work properly, it hadn't worked for over six months because the wired telephone line connection it used had been disconnected during a financial audit because nobody knew what the old dial up line was for. Now, with a wireless system in place, they passed their inspection.
"Ahhh, here she is. I told you she'd be back," the Sheriff said. "Detective Elaine, this is Trooper Stewart of the Ohio State Highway Patrol."
"Retired," the gentleman said, "A real pleasure to meet you at last."
Trooper Stewart was an older, tall, thin, dignified, black man with a genuine smile. I liked him immediately.
"The honor is mine, sir."
The Sheriff grinned at me, "he's been telling me that he plans to volunteer you to be one of the keynote speakers at their convention in a couple of months."
"Only for our own breakout session," the Trooper said with one finger raised. "Unless you would be agreeable for more."
I shook my head, "Let's just do the breakout session this time and see how that goes."
"Understandable."
The Sheriff nodded with a knowing look in his eye, "Why don't you borrow the conference room and talk about it."
Trooper Stewart was impressively organized. He had come to know about me through working with Karen and Buddy from a local paranormal group, had become curious, and with the contacts a career State Police Officer developed, it didn't take him long to find out more about me and my unusual cases. I played a few of the better EVPs for him and was now going through some of the photos I thought might be good to show at the session.
"So how did you come into doing this?" I asked him while I showed him some of the more interesting photos I'd taken in the last few years. Including a nun standing at the top of the stairs.
"I've always been into it you might say. My Aunt Thelma, my mother's older sister, was a sensitive. She could hear and see things that nobody else did. And she knew things. She could tell you things about people and places that she shouldn't have known."
I clicked to the next picture. This one showed a light where no light should have been near some old pilings along a river, and he continued his story.
"As a kid, I didn't know whether to believe what everybody said or not. Some said she was a witch, others that she was a psychic, and all like that. So one day, when I was twelve years old. I remember it clearly. I was at her house when she and my mother were out, I sat in her favorite chair in the living room, a big old rocker, and asked if there really was a family spirit there to let me know it by doing something that couldn't happen any other way." He took a quick deep breath and let it out. "And boy did it. I like this kind of belt to wear." He showed me the canvas belt he was wearing with a square brass buckle with a slider.
He continued, "I always have, even as a kid. I couldn't wear them with my uniform, but with everything else, this is my belt. I had one on that day. I was still sitting in the rocker. And my belt started to get tighter on me. I could feel it moving. I tried to stop it, but it was getting tighter and tighter. I couldn't breathe. I got my fingers in behind the buckle, like this, and undid the buckle from the belt, and it pulled it half off me, then let it go."
I waited for a moment, "That would get your attention," I said.
"Yes it did. I never forgot it, and I never doubted that there was something there with her ever again." He took another breath. "But, in the State Highway Patrol, you don't come across things like that all the time. But when there was a case where something out of the ordinary was going on in my district, it would find itself assigned to me. I just didn't go looking for them."
"And now?"
He smiled that smile again, "And now," he nodded, "And now I can go looking for them."
"What have you found?"
"My area isn't as old as yours out here. We've got some Indian settlements, and like that. But where your old houses go back a over a hundred years before the Revolution, we're lucky to have a few left that were built in the Eighteen Thirties."
One of the EVPs I'd played was of the Deacon that was still watching over the old, small, parsonage built just after the Revolution.
I nodded, "Yes. But not everything is a ghost. I was on a case not long ago that involved a series of poltergeist type events that were being generated by a young woman who had way too much emotional energy within her."
"I've heard of things like that, but I've never seen anything about it."
"Got a minute?" I asked, and when he nodded I went back through my files and found the evidence from the case with the sisters Sue and Jill.
"Astonishing," Trooper Stewart said as he watched the aura around Jill change.
"Think about how much emotional energy it takes to radiate that bright of a light around her like that."
"I'd rather not," he answered and leaned back in his chair shaking his head.
By lunchtime he had over half of my presentation outlined for me, complete with which photos to show, which audio segments to play, and even the video of whatever old man was trying to get people out of bed to go to church, to open with.
The Sheriff stopped by the conference room and asked if we were game to go to lunch, and we both welcomed the break.
But it turned into a working lunch as Trooper Stewart and the Sheriff discussed how to bring most of my work into the realm of the Paranormal and Law Enforcement.
The Sheriff mentioned the hoax element and how a theatrical producer tried to hoax his way into a land deal to finance his other less than noble enterprises.
"I've got some interesting video and photos of that," I said to the Trooper.
"That's exactly one of the things we have to determine. If it is a real spirit it's very difficult to get an arrest warrant."
The Sheriff agreed, "And if it is a real inhuman spirit, like the one involving the Sergeant from the County Police. A demon effectively killed a law enforcement officer, but getting a warrant for its arrest for murder would be...." He shook his head then looked at me, "Would you call the Pope on that one?"
I shrugged and didn't answer.
The Trooper chuckled and nodded, "I've heard about that case. That would be one for the evening session. I've got a title for that one as well, 'Law Enforcement in the face of Evil.'"
The Sheriff and I exchanged looks, then we both said, "The Irishman's House."
After lunch I stopped by the office and got the key to the place.
Then I met them there, and without any warning or explanation I unlocked the door and we walked in.
"So this is it," the Sheriff said, "smaller than I was expecting, and a bit more cluttered."
"Those have been brought since the last time I was here," I said looking at a stack of three cardboard file boxes. The two on the bottom had printed labels on them talking about contracts and agreements, the top one had been written on with a marker, "off network files".
"What's an 'off network file?" Trooper Stewart asked.
"I'm not sure," I said. Then I opened the box and looked in and said, "I'm still not sure." I reached in and picked up several flash drives and a DVD in a case that said '2017 /18 fuel usage reports.'
"Well, now we know."
We continued the tour and nothing happened.
"What were you doing that one day when it ran out out of here?" The Sheriff asked.
"We were just sitting in the kitchen, and watching and listening," I said, and I had an idea since whatever was here was probably watching and wondering who Trooper Stewart was.
"Derek was talking about how their dealership was looking for off site sales offices. But he didn't think this place would serve without ripping out walls and putting in a new restroom and all. So do you think it'll suit your needs as it is or will you need to do things to it?" I asked the Trooper.
He played along instantly. "I don't like it at all. It's small and dumpy, and from what I can see of the electrical service, it needs to be totally rewired, and I don't even want to look at the plumbing or the heater. And it doesn't look like it has air conditioning. You'd be better off tearing the place down and letting the car dealer build a new showroom."
You could feel the atmosphere get heavy in the living room.
"Did you hear that?" The Sheriff asked. "It sounded like a cabinet door closing."
"Yeah, in the kitchen," Trooper Stewart answered.
"But all the cabinets were closed when we came in," I said thinking about it.
Trooper Stewart nodded, "Yes they were, so what made that noise when I seriously proposed simply tearing this place down and hauling all of it to a landfill and starting over with a brand new shiny building with bright lights and a lot of big windows?"
This time the sound was louder, and from the other side of the house.
The Sheriff turned quickly and checked the bathroom and the back bedroom where the hard slamming of a wooden door came from. "There's nothing in here, and that cabinet has a lock on it. It couldn't do that."
The Trooper grinned, "Something here doesn't like that sort of talk, and it will like it even less when I send a crew in here to carry all this stuff out, and then bring in an excavator to knock this place down and load it into a dump truck. We'll take it all the way down to the dirt, and maybe even haul off most of the dirt."
Now instead of a single slam there was a low, slow, regular, thudding sound coming from somewhere in the house, but we couldn't decide where it was originating.
"You can feel it in the wall and the floor," I said with my hand on the door frame going into the kitchen.
"Yes. About every second and a half, maybe two," the Sheriff said as we listened to the thuds.
In a minute, Trooper Stewart shook his head, "Is that the best it can do? That won't even slow my guys down. They'd have all this stuff out of here in an hour. I'll make a couple of calls, I can have a demolition permit by Monday afternoon."
The Sheriff was looking around, "something is staring at us, judging us."
"Let it," the Trooper said with a bit of an attitude, "I've dealt with worse than this on my day off. If we're going to do anything with this place it'll be as a vacant lot. Even if we sell it to a developer, it's worth more that way than it is as this crappy old house that they'll have to tear down."
It was about twenty five minutes later, we were standing outside a convenience store with hot cups of coffee and some sticks of 'honey cured' beef jerky that the clerk said we had to try. The coffee was better than the beef jerky.
All three of us agreed that we had heard something say " you - will - not " in a powerful bass voice.
"It wasn't raspy or multi-tonal, nothing like that, just really low pitched. And slow. And it was deliberately slow." I said as we went through it together.
"I thought it was rather plain, and almost flat, but it clearly said 'you will not'." Trooper Stewart said.
"That's what I heard, and I still couldn't tell you where it came from," the Sheriff added.
"No. But I can tell you one thing." I said, the two men looked at me. "I'm glad we left when we did."
"Yes, I think we upset it enough for one day," Trooper Stewart said.
While we were in the neighborhood we stopped by the Evan's place and walked through what had been the old Convent, and orphanage, and brothel, and everything else it had been.
They gave us permission to both use the images and audio I had, as well as mention the place.
"Might be good for business," Clay said.
Back at the office the Sheriff got an odd expression on his face.
"What?" I asked him.
He looked from me to the Trooper, "You said your session is about Law Enforcement and the Paranormal. Not just ghosts and spirits, but other things as well."
Trooper Stewart nodded. "We're doing two breakout sessions. One about when the paranormal becomes the subject of a legal proceeding, and the other is about how to approach reports and what to investigate and how."
He looked from the Trooper to me and back. "It's OK, Elaine, I'm going to bring it up, and you two can use it if you want to."
"What you saw?" I asked.
"What I saw. And what was recorded on the dash cam, and left evidence all over that park." He took a deep breath and looked at the Trooper, "While on duty, on an official outing, in a department car... I ran into a UFO."
It took a moment for the Trooper to digest that and then answer. "Sheriff, you have my undivided attention."
We watched the video, and reviewed the evidence, and by the end of the afternoon, Trooper Stewart was speechless.
"There's no doubt in my mind at all, as a Career State Trooper, that what you said you saw, and what left all this, was exactly that." He nodded at the screen that was still zoomed in on one of the visitors from out of town. "If it is OK with you, and you, Detective, I'll incorporate this into my own presentation as something that simply is beyond the scope of law enforcement, and that we just have to do the best we can when it turns up. And, don't worry, I won't use any identifying information that points to this office."
"Thank you, sir."
Trooper Stewart spent one more day with us, and we went over more of the presentation I would make after his own presentation about Law Enforcement and the Paranormal.
Then he headed for the airport, after we had a lengthy discussion about the closet in the airport's office. Which he also related to Law Enforcement as it did involve a possible security issue at an airport.
And then I was back to my regular duty for a couple of months.
3.
Part of that duty was going with a female sales person from Derek's dealership that I'd come to know to a local gym where somebody had been rumored to be taking photos and videos people, men and women, in the various areas of the gym and then posting them on an overseas website. But so far, the members she'd talked to about it had been unable to find the cameras or how the data was getting out of the building to then be uploaded from outside. But instead of sneaking photos in the locker rooms, these were images from the public areas and everybody was fully clothed. Which I thought was odd.
After talking to Amy, the automobile sales lady, and her male friend who was an amateur bodybuilder, and who had also been the subject of some of the photos, and then going to the website and digging through the images that appeared to be from their gym, we figured out when and where most of the images and videos were taken, and then we set up a couple of days when we could go and I could try to identify the signal if something was going on. And most were taken during the busiest times of the day, instead of in the middle of the night, that's when we went.
The gym was a nightmare of competing electronic signals. I sat at one of the workout machines with my bag full of sensors and tried to figure out which video monitor, or health screening treadmill, or whatever was giving off which wireless signal.
And that's when I solved the case. Not with my EMF sensor, with my eyes.
I had given up trying to isolate the signal from everything to see if I could find a stealth camera, and simply looked up in frustration. And that's when I saw it.
Some of the televisions that were showing the news or workout videos were actually computer monitors, and had a built in camera above the screen. I pulled out my phone and looked at a couple of the images that had been posted on the website and started looking at the angles of the photo and how the image had been cropped. Then I walked around the gym, looking up to judge which monitor's camera had taken which photo.
Amy joined me and I pointed at one of the monitors with the camera that was lower than most of the others and showed her the posted picture of one of the other members working with a barbell on a rack. The angle was exact to watch them do their curls.
"That's it," she said, "I never noticed that before."
We found two other cameras on monitors that had had images posted from them, one of them was part of a four way group in the middle of the room and was pointed at the back side of anybody on three of the treadmills. The other one was near a couple of the machines and was at the perfect spot to watch the facial expressions of whoever was working out on the cable machine.
"Now all I have to do is figure out who's hacked the cameras."
"I've got a better idea," her boyfriend said, "I'll be right back."
He went out to his car and came back in with a roll of black electrical tape. We went around and covered every camera we could reach.
"Now we'll see who takes it off."
A couple of days later my friend Amy, the sales lady, called me to have me stop by the gym with her and talk to the manager about why we'd put tape over all their cameras.
"I didn't tell him what you do for a living, I thought we'd save that if he gets out of line." Amy said.
"OK by me."
We walked into the manager's office and my friend introduced me as a friend of hers that had been thinking about joining the gym until we found out about the cameras. He started to explain that the cameras were part of their security system in case something happened in the open areas of the gym.
Amy showed him that somebody had hacked the system and was posting images of members online without anybody's permission.
The manager hemmed and hawed and talked about they had had to have bypassed their security firewall and how he was going to have somebody look into increasing the security on the system.
When he stopped, I stood up and took out my badge and ID and showed it to him.
"I didn't know...." he started to say.
"That's fine. I'll check back in a week or so and see if the new security provisions are sufficient to protect your members from that sort of invasion of privacy," I said, "thank you for your time."
And left.
My friend caught up to me in the parking lot.
Laughing.
"He was all over himself apologizing, then he got on the phone to their tech guys in the main office and told them about what had happened," Amy said.
"It wouldn't surprise me if the office tech guy was the one posting the pictures," I answered. "But I bet they stop."
"Now," she said, "Before I go back to the lot I need some lunch," she grinned knowingly, "pizza?"
"Yes, ma'am. And I know just the place."
Then I had an assignment that simply involved sorting through a bunch of time sheets, and time clock card punch ins, and print outs of sign ins, and paper copies of sign in sheets, and log ins via written telephone call log entries, and then sign outs and log outs and, actual time card clock punch outs and.... and none of it was consistent, from last year at a couple of the county parks. Some of the seasonal staff had hand written their full name on sheets of paper, some used a nickname, or wrote down their badge number, a set of brothers went by T. Swearingen and P. Swearingen, and neither of them had ever won a penmanship award in school.
Now, as to why, this many years into the Digital Age of the Twenty First Century, all of this wasn't computerized and automated, we'll just skip and move on.
The reason I was wading through all this stuff was that, supposedly, county parks had paid at least two employees for over a month of work, each, last summer, and neither person existed.
I had a list of workers at the two parks from payroll, and the first thing I did was sort through the box of papers and compare the list to the documents, and the ones that immediately jived, I had a good name with valid cards or sheets, I filed off to one side and kept going.
It took some digging and looking, but I found out that "Butch" and / or "butchie" was actually named Shelia McWithers, and had spent the summer as both a lifeguard and a volleyball coach for the children's day camp.
And so it went. While some of the time cards, especially the one numbered "7 or maybe 1 (something - something)983" were a bit questionable, it looked like Jonas Randal had been in a hurry that day and never fixed the sheet before he signed it with an autograph that could have been just about anything. But it matched his other sheets well enough, and one of them had his full seasonal employee number "190983" on it.
For two days I sorted that mess. And in the end, I had one time card with valid stamps on it for one week in July, but the name was illegible, and there was nothing else to match it, and two spoiled, and somewhat moldy beach sign in sheets that had gotten wet at some point in their lives. But no mysterious non-existent employees that had gotten paid for more than a week. If that.
I submitted the report to County Parks, and they thanked me for my thoroughness.
I gave the gym two weeks, then I went looking at where the photos and videos had been posted. Then I searched for new posts by the two user names that had been doing it, and then I did some more digging here and there.
Oddly enough, about three days after our pleasant chat with the manager, those accounts had become much less active, with one of them now posting things that were obviously lifted from other websites, including images clipped from various advertisements. The other one had simply become inactive.
And I still had a month to go before the convention.
Trooper Stewart had supplied me with a topic outline to use based on our conversations for my part of the first session. Complete with suggested images and audio files to use. And he even had breaks written in where he would make an additional point or have one of the other panelists make a comment. My portion would run for about fifteen minutes.
All of that was based on my telling him that I wasn't real comfortable in front of people, "Unless I'm doing a Muay Thai routine," I smiled at him, "I could do that for them," I said and feigned a couple of arm blocks and a punch.
"Maybe in the evening session," he said.
Instead of Muay Thai, for the afternoon session I had a similar outline, with more information, and more breaks for questions from the audience.
Then I got a presenter package from the host organization for the convention. And it was as Trooper Stewart had promised. This was a get-together for those who investigated the paranormal WITHOUT a camera crew for a TV show walking along behind them, which is why he was involved, and why I agreed to take part. Very few of the ones listed even had an online site where you could review some of their evidence or comment on their report about odd smells without a known source. There were a couple of social media groups listed, two of which were listed as private and invitation only.
Several of the listed speakers were professors at various colleges and universities, others were longstanding private investigators with several books and serious articles to their names.
One highlighted speaker was an inventor with several patents listed for developing new technological devices for investigating the paranormal, including some proximity sensors that were smaller and more responsive than those currently in widespread use.
Another speaker was a half-baked sheriff's deputy from some county way out on the end of Long Island who had taken some of the new sensors out and, not only detected the paranormal, had documented an earthquake with them.
At least they had used a decent photo of me.
4.
A few days before the convention started, Trooper Stewart and his totally classy, and very charming wife, Lauren, arrived in town.
On Derek's day off we went on an extended double date to the best Non-Touristy places on the Island, and I included a stop at a certain museum where Ms Sandy told them all about how Jane still reported for work, but now they'd figured out what they needed to do to keep her from moving stuff around the turn of the last century office display. And that the Director still worked there, although he had been spending a lot less time on the second floor lately.
By the end of the date, Lauren had talked Derek into taking time off from work to sit on the end of the first row, next to her, to be our moral support for the sessions we were in.
"And I've got a few suggestions for your wardrobe as well, if you don't mind. I've been to several of these over the years, and I learned a few things." Ms Lauren said to me in a very soft voice.
"I need all the help I can get," I answered honestly.
The next day she coached me about how to "look pretty without being too pretty" and how to "dress down just a bit without looking like I was dressing down". Neither of which I had ever had to think about before. Then she explained about eye makeup so I didn't look dead on the videos, and how to keep the lights from destroying my hair. Then she told me that a couple of years ago a woman whose name I had heard before had given a presentation while dressed like she was spending the evening as the escort to a high roller at a casino, "her outfit wasn't only distracting, it was in poor taste."
"You sound like you've been on the panel before," I said to Lauren as she told me what color of eye shadow I should use.
"I have been, and the first time, I looked ashen in the video. It never happened again," she smiled, "I've been the subject matter expert on how the investigators own personality and emotions can influence whatever is around when they are investigating. It doesn't happen every time, but it happens enough to be considered."
"If they're expecting something scary, whatever is there will manifest as frightening." I answered.
"Exactly."
And then I was sitting in a pre-convention dinner. Several people I had been in contact with over the years were there, like Karen and Buddy from the local group, so I wasn't as uncomfortable as I had expected to be.
I sat next to Derek and tried to smile when somebody spoke to me, then I was introduced so I stood up and nodded, then I sat down and tried to become invisible.
The next morning I arrived at the convention center bright and early. Dressed as directed, with my laptop loaded and ready, and my kit bag of gear in case somebody asked about something I used.
I was immediately greeted by a set of young convention guest hosts, who towed me to a side room where I checked in, was handed a large coffee, and then pointed toward a table loaded down with everything you're not supposed to eat for breakfast.... and a selection of fruit and granola bars at the far end. I got a small Danish and some fruit.
In a little bit I heard a ruckus and looked over and saw Trooper Stewart working the room like an A-list celebrity.
It wasn't long before Lauren disengaged from all that and came over smiling at me. "It is so good to see you."
"He's having a good time," I said nodding at her husband.
"He knows how to do it so he gets invited back for the next one. They do this every other year, someplace like this, and we make it our vacation. Two years ago it was in Tampa."
"It looks to me like he really likes what he's doing."
Lauren agreed, "If he didn't, he wouldn't do it, and we couldn't make him do it."
There was a main floor session at eight. We walked in, and found seats just before that, and, surprisingly, at eight AM sharp, the session got underway with a call to order and an introduction of the honorary chair for this convention, a professor from a New York University. She spoke for a few minutes welcoming everybody and stating how she was looking forward to learning as much as she could. Then there were a few announcements, including a revision of the lunch menu because the crab cakes that had been ordered were unavailable in quantity.
"That's the problem with wanting fresh a product instead of frozen, sometimes nature has other ideas." They said.
The general meeting broke up after a reminder for everybody to check out the vendor's floor and the information displays and booths in the main hall and the lobby, and then we were dismissed to, one, find more coffee, and two, find our room and set up for our panel in the second round of hour long sessions.
And then Trooper Stewart found us next to the coffee station and said that our session had been moved into the Grumman Conference Room because there had been so many requests for seats in Conference Room F.
"Where's the Grumman room?" I asked.
"You were just in it. The main convention room, we need to take them our slide shows," he answered with pride.
That case of nerves I had earlier returned.
"Derek had to stop by the dealership, he should be on his way," I said to his wife.
Lauren understood, "I'll make sure he finds you."
I had even met the convention's tech guy before, he belonged to the club at the college. He had my laptop connected and we did a preview of my images and diagrams. He did a sound check and even had some 'walk up music' for when Trooper Stewart came up front after welcoming people at the door for the session.
Our first session wasn't standing room only, but there were a lot more people than would have fit in the smaller classroom. And after all my preparation, thanks to Trooper Stewart, it went almost too smoothly.
The other panelists did their parts, then we took turns answering questions, and one of the panelists asked me a question about the geology of the Island being conducive to residual paranormal activity. Which I answered in terms of the glacial moraines and the limestone gravels that they contained, which, when combined with the groundwater present through most of the Island, and the high background load of electrical activity over most of it makes a very charged environment. Which is perfect for some types of activity to manifest.
And that point brought me into discussing the manifestations at the social service agency which was drawing on the energy from the old DC transformers that had been forgotten about in the ceiling. After the power company removed the antique devices, the paranormal activity dropped off to almost nothing.
I really enjoyed just sitting at the front table and listening to the others and watching their presentations. Trooper Stewart opened with a brief introduction and a very short presentation of his last investigation, which he did for a small town near his home. It reminded me of some of the things I'd done for agencies who didn't want word that the place was haunted getting to their clients.
He had a few images from the office's security cameras, then he did a quick review of how he investigated the place, and then he promised that after all of our presentations, he'd tell everybody what he'd found.
After the other two presenters did theirs we all sat and listened while Trooper Stewart showed some photos of the old house that had been turned into the town offices.
"The activity was only reported by office staff on Friday evenings when some of them were there late for meetings. And a few had seen anomalies on a couple of other nights when the building was otherwise empty. So I started on a Tuesday evening and sat in the hallway in the old section of the house, and just waited."
He had an interesting sound file of what sounded like somebody sweeping the floor with an old broom, and then he showed a couple of photos of an odd shadow in the hallway that moved this way, and then that way, and you could tell that it wasn't against the walls, and you could see through it most of the time.
"And, like Detective Elaine said, this was something of an odd presence. It appears to be residual, but it is just a touch interactive, when I spoke to it, it paused, and once it seemed to move away from me. But it never broke its routine, and it is usually seen in this part of the building. And, yes, the office manager wants me to come back and see if I can get any more."
After that he thanked all of us, and then thanked the audience, and we got a great round of applause, and then we had a break before lunch.
I had read about some of the other breakout sessions, but none of them caught my eye.
There was a group discussing photographic equipment, of which I already had everything I wanted or needed. Then there was another that was talking about EVPs, which I had plenty of. And things like that. In the afternoon there was one that was going to be about hauntings in and around water, which, really, involved most of Suffolk County when you came down to it. And another that focused on deciding if something was intelligent or residual. I thought about going and asking them about a residual that had some intelligence to it, or the other way round, but decided to skip it.
I walked around the vendor room with Derek, and had to stop several times to meet people that had been in the breakout session. And that killed the hour before we got to retreat into the dining area for lunch.
Just like the morning breakout session, our panel was moved into the main convention room, so after lunch we attended the afternoon opening main session, where the honorary chair made another short presentation about some of her research, we simply stayed there and set up our equipment and did some test run throughs, with a good number of the attendees milling around the room. And then when the time came, we took our seats and the tech guy changed the screens from a slideshow of ads and promotions to the welcome screen Trooper Stewart had created.
The afternoon session was almost spectacular.
Trooper Stewart opened with more about Law Enforcement and the Paranormal, including some dash cam videos from a police car of an illegally parked UFO, "Which, although it wasn't a ghost, it was most assuredly- Paranormal."
I sat and smiled and didn't say a word.
Then he concluded with some other evidence, and a good wrap up.
Which led right into a impromptu panel discussion for almost twenty minutes about the "Observer Effect" of us, and our electronic equipment, influencing, or even creating, the very paranormal phenomenon we were investigating. Which then led directly into Trooper Stewart's presentation about Law Enforcement in the face of evil. During which time I got to mention that I had been doing this as an semi-official function of my job as a Detective for four years, averaging about one case every other week, or so, and had only run into anything I'd call evil, twice.
"And one of those was summoned up from... elsewhere, by the subject of the investigation," I added.
Trooper Stewart concluded that presentation with stating that while true spiritual evil, "and even the demonic, exists. They are rarer than what you have been led to believe by the media and even other paranormal researchers. It is out there, and like Detective Elaine, you may run into it. But, if you understand what you are dealing with, and are prepared for it. You won't have to run home and hide under your bed when, and if, you do encounter it."
The four of us had a nice supper in the restaurant with Karen and Buddy from a local paranormal group and prepared for our evening session.
Sort of.
"I don't have any notes. You didn't give me an outline," I said to Trooper Stewart.
"I know, remember, I said it was an open format question and answer. I can ask the others questions, and so can you, and they'll ask us, and the audience is involved, and we all answer, and all that."
"For an hour." I said almost as a question.
"Or longer."
Ms Lauren chimed in something I didn't want to hear, "At the one in New Orleans a few years ago, this session went until after midnight."
He nodded, "And I wasn't the one that kept talking."
She grinned, "he did some, but not all."
After the convention I went back to the gym with my friends and took a tour without distraction. One thing I was interested in was in a separate area dedicated to combat sports such as boxing and MMA, so I went in and just looked around.
A small group of the 'gym rat' type guys were in there and seemed to be a bit put off by examining the equipment.
"Nah, it's OK, just we don't get a lot of women in here." One of them said.
"This isn't a woman's kind of training," another one said, "you know, we don't want the ladies getting hurt doing this kind of thing," he added and punched at the speed bag hanging there.
I don't know why I did it, I just did.
"Oh, you mean if I was to work out on this you're worried that I might hurt myself?" I said and slapped the bag with an open hand that was just over shoulder high to me.
"Yeah," he answered with something of a smirk on his face.
In Muay Thai the 'back heel kick' is one of the most powerful. It is also difficult to master, and some never get it down pat.
Which is all the incentive I needed to spend months practicing, and honing it to where I could deliver the spinning high kick instantly, and with devastating results.
I took one step to my left, away from the guy closest to the speed bag. I jumped up just slightly and spun in place, and delivered a high back kick with the heel of my right foot to the center of the bag. The bag responded to the unleashed energy by making considerable racket as it bounced around.
The smiling guy who was worried about me hurting myself jumped backwards and said "DAMN!"
The other guy looked at me with wide eyes, "how did you do that?" he asked.
"I was visualizing the logo on the bag as his nose." I answered and turned to walk out.
My friend Amy from Derek's dealership had been watching from the other side of the room and was still wide eyed. I couldn't tell whether she was upset, or laughing.
Then the worried guy said something that wasn't stupid, "Ma'am. You can work out in here any time you want. I'll even help you with the equipment if you need it."
"Thank you," I answered from the door.
Half an hour later Amy looked at me and asked me if I was going to "smile like that for the rest of the day".
"Probably."
-end Convention-
[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the features of Long Island exist, including known Native American sites, as well as Colonial Era burial grounds, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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