OPRAH'S DONE IT ALL!!! EVEN HAVING HARPO STUDIOS IN A HAUNTED BUILDING WHERE HUNDREDS OF DIED BODIES ONCE LAID

She has it all!!!  Including ghosts!!!  That's right...Oprah's Winfrey doesn't talk about it much these days but when she had her show, she and her staff experienced MANY paranormal events.

Here's the story...

On July 24th, 1915, Chicago-based company, Western Electric Company, chartered four ships to take employees and their families to the annual company picnic in Michigan City, Indiana. The ships, including the rusting steamship The Eastland, were docked along the Chicago River as employees and their families boarded for a day of fun on the company's dime. At the time, Western Electric employed more than 10,000 people. 

The Eastland was docked by the Clark Street bridge and had a history of balance problems. On more than once occasion since its christening in 1903, it nearly capsized on Lake Michigan. And when new rules and regulations were implemented in the wake of the Titanic's sinking in 1912, rows of life boats and preservers on the upper deck made the Eastland even more top-heavy. Unbeknownst to the passengers, the crew had emptied the ballast compartments which are designed to keep the ship stable to help accommodate more than the 2,500 capacity--the reason why is still a mystery.

It is documented that more than 3,200 people boarded that July morning--breaking capacity--and when the Eastland pushed off from the dock, it immediately started to list due to the uneven weight of the passengers on board. Many were on the already top-heavy upper deck so they could view the city as they pulled out of port. When the vessel listed, water quickly rushed in through windows and doors creating mass chaos on board. In seconds, The Eastland was on its side with hundreds trapped with no way out. 

Individuals were pulled to safety through portholes as mothers screamed for their children. By-passers jumped into the river to help pull passengers to the shore. At the time, women wore long dresses, so many were pulled underwater from the sheer weight of their clothes. Others were trapped inside the cabin with no means of escape. Those who had been able to break away from the confines of the ship were met with the challenges of fighting for air as they were forced below the waterline and continually pushed down by the people above them. The horrific site was described as a "moving sea of bodies." 

In less than fifteen minutes, The Eastland came to rest on its port side in no more than 20 feet of water, entombing hundreds of people inside. 

Keep reading after the jump to learn about the rescue efforts and how this tragedy on the river haunts Harpo Studios...

Rescuers immediately began looking for survivors in the water and worked well into the night recovering the deceased. The sheer volume of bodies was more than the city could handle and thieves began rummaging through the pockets of the dead. Local stores loaned their wagons to help cart bodies away from the scene; so rescuers transported the corpses to one of the only places in the city equipped to handle the aftermath of that magnitude--the 2nd Regiment Armory on West Washington Avenue.

There, a makeshift morgue was set up with countless blocks of ice where they laid the fallen until they could be identified by family members. 

In the 1980's, the 2nd Regiment Armory facilities were renovated and reopened as Harpo Studios. Since the production studio opened, Oprah and team have been haunted by the restless spirits of those who perished on that fateful day. Workers claim to have seen an affable shadowy figure, aka "The Grey Lady" presumed to be one of the mothers who lost her life on the Chicago River--and it has been reported that she has even been caught on the security cameras. There have also been confirmations of doors slamming without reason, phantom old-time music, unexplained footsteps and disembodies voices like children laughing, people sobbing and screaming for help.

But that's not all...

Today, a memorial plaque marks the spot of The Eastland tragedy on Chicago River between Clark and LaSalle Streets. And to this day, claims have been made of hearing moans and blood curling screams from the Clark Street bridge. Is it the helpless cries of the spirits still trying to escape the Eastland? That's for you to decide. 

In the end, The Eastland disaster took 844 lives, including more than 20 entire families. What you may not realize, is that the tragedy claimed three times the lives than the historic Chicago Fire, making it one of our country's worst maritime accidents on record...and one of the least talked about.

Here Oprah's encounter with a GHOST of her own.

Heart breaking photos of this tragic event:

   

   

   

   

   

Below is some of the first known video of this heartbreaking day.  I had never heard about this before I saw somewhere that Oprah's building was haunted.  But now, I understand why.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2947748/Footage-1915-Chicago-ship-disaster-killed-844-found.html

FUN HALLOWEEN NOTE:  Be sure to check out the October schedule for Goatman's Bridge Ghost Tour and a SPECIAL EVENT CALLED FRIDADY BOO BASH at the very haunted Hill House Manor.  More information on BOO BASH under EVENTS!!!

DEADLIEST SCHOOL MASSACRE REMEMBERED 89 YEARS LATER.

NICOLAS MCCABE, NINE YEARS OLD KILLED IN AN F5 TORNADO. HIS FATHER SAYS HIS SPIRIT IS STILL HERE AND HE HAS PROOF!!!

We are having bad weather here in Texas this week, so I thought I would write about ghosts victims of Tornados.  Does a natural disaster cause more ghosts to hand around?  Well that would appear to be the case. 

Tornado Victim Ghosts
On May 22, 2011, an F5 tornado struck Joplin, MO and surrounding regions. Over 150 people died, but one family believes some of the victims have yet to move on.

In an episode of Syfy’s Haunted Collector, the Wilson family in Joplin share tales of the paranormal. The family noticed that each time they took a photo of an old mirror in their home, different lines and shapes appeared on the glass. An EVP session conducted during a paranormal investigation also yielded a faint voice and shuffling sounds on the stairwell. The noises came in response to a question about the 2011 tornado. A Joplin author claims that many first responders noticed paranormal activity in their homes after helping tornado victims. The homeowner, Bob Wilson, assisted with the rescue. Did he attract the attention of a ghost?

Last May, another F5 tornado tore through Moore, OK, killing 24 people, including nine children at school. Nine-year-old Nicholas McCabe was one of the kids who died that day, but Scott McCabe, Nicolas’s father, believes his son is still around.

The elder McCabe told an Oklahoma news station that Nicolas appeared in a photo taken on the 4th of July (below). The girl in the photo is Nicolas’s cousin Madison, but the blurred face behind her is Nicolas, or so his family believes.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Scott said. “Nicolas loved the Fourth of July and he loved firecrackers. My brother, when he saw it, he said the hair stood up on his neck.”

Though some people believe the numerous, and often sudden, deaths caused by natural disasters lead to widespread hauntings, Thai psychologist and media commentator Wallop Piyamanotham offers a different explanation:

“This is a type of mass hallucination that is a cue to the trauma being suffered by people who are missing so many dead people, and seeing so many dead people, and only talking about dead people.”
What do you believe?
 

SHEPPTON MINE DISASTER-A SECRET FROM TWO SURVIVORS THAT THEY SWORE NEVER TO TALK ABOUT.

This is kinda' a long story but an AMAZING TRUE ONE!!!

Over fifty years ago,  in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, two men wearing football helmets and parachute harnesses, were guided through a borehole to safety on the morning of August 27, 1963.  The two men had a secret between them that they felt the world would never believe!!!  But when their fourteen-day ordeal was revealed to the public, the strange revelations of their experiences where told.

Fellin, who was fifty-eight at the time, recalled Throne, the twenty-four year old worker had been buried alive.  David Fellin thought the world should know who had given them the strength to survive.  Both men, interviewed separately, described with amazing accuracy their visitor,
who had stayed with them during the last eight days of their ordeal when they'd all but given up.  Who was the dedicated spirit that made its presence known?  Who never left them......who never gave up on them......None other than Pope John XXIII, who had died just weeks before.  David recalle da span of time when he left his body, saw a beautiful marble door, and witnessed scores of Egyptian men going about their work.  He was in awe at the sight before him, as he studied the men building pyramids.  He went on to say that the Egyptians did not move the stones as many people over the centuries have thought.  Rather, twenty-five men carrying buckets of sand and water poured the mix into wooden forms and built each million ton block one at a time.

There may be some that think Fellin and Throne were hallucinating.  Fellin swore an oath on the Bible, that everything he experienced while trapped in the mine was true.  He passed at least two polygraph tests about his experience trapped in the mine.  In 2002, a researcher studying the pyramids shared his revelation that, just as David Fellin had seen, each block was created from "cement" being poured into a form.

Here is there story:

On the morning of Aug. 13, a frantic call came in to the newsroom at The Standard-Speaker. There had been a cave-in at a coal mine near Sheppton and three miners were entombed.
The loss of three miners was initially of little interest elsewhere in the world but five days later, on Aug. 18, 1963, contact was made with two of the miners underground, and it became a sensational human-interest story.

Louis Bova, 54, of Pattersonville, near Shenandoah, the third miner entombed that morning, had been separated from the other two and his body was never found.
But for those first six days, Fellin, then 58, of Sheppton, and Throne, then 28, of Hazleton, courageously faced what appeared to be certain death.

Fellin, a miner for more than four decades, knew there was nothing the rescue party of volunteers could do to reach them.
There was only one entrance or exit - known as a slope - at the Oneida No. 2 mine, which was actually located outside the geographical limits of the Village of Sheppton midway between Hazleton and Shenandoah.
However, rescuers couldn't enter the slope because of additional rumblings deep inside, as well as the presence of hazardous gas.  So, for several days, officials of the state Department of Mines and Mineral Industries as well as members of the rescue party could do very little but watch and wait.
Meanwhile, Fellin and Throne were simply trying to stay alive.

Fellin, co-owner of the mine with Gene Gibbons, was semi-retired and no longer a full-time miner. But that morning, he descended underground with Throne and Bova to show them what he wanted them to do and also help load a metal mine car that ran on railroad tracks and hauled the coal to the surface.  When the first buggy was loaded, Bova pulled a cord that signaled the hoisting engineer in a small building topside to activate the mechanical hoist and pull the car out of the mine.

That first buggy made it about halfway to the surface when, suddenly, it stopped and the earth began quaking about 100 feet above the three miners.  Within seconds, Fellin, Throne and Bova heard louder rumbling above them just as a long electrical cord inside the gangway snapped and began dancing wildly, sparking electrical current.  Fellin knew the miners would be electrocuted if they came in contact with the live wire, so he led Bova and Throne to a small chamber off the main gangway. When they entered the small enclosure - only about 2 feet wide and 9 to 10 feet long - the rumbling intensified and it appeared that tons of dirt, rock and coal were about to cascade down on them.  Just then, Bova noticed a different chamber a short distance away and began running toward it. It was a fatal mistake because, almost immediately, the worst of the cave-in occurred, filling the area where they had been working.

That was the last Fellin or Throne saw Bova, whose body was never recovered and who is remembered today by a tombstone at the site of the rescue.  While the initial rescue team was totally frustrated above ground, Fellin and Throne were doing what they could to survive below.
For almost an hour they sat side by side in the enclosure, which was hardly wide enough for one of them to squeeze past the other.

All the time - while waiting for the aftershocks of the first cave-in to subside - each pulled up his shirt and placed it over his nose and mouth because there was little letup in dust.  Finally, when the tremors had ended and the dust finally settled, they realized they had to find water.  Fellin was familiar with the mine and knew there was a reservoir of stagnant, sewer-smelling water beneath their feet. So he used a broken tool to dig a small hole and, after it seemed to have hit a void, he grabbed an empty oil can, tied a rope to it and lowered it deep below him.  Soon, he was hauling up a can of putrid water.  Sipping it the first time, both Fellin and Throne spit it out. But after a few more sips, they began swallowing.

Next, the two miners had to combat the cold.  The temperature inside the mine hovered around 55 degrees but their clothes were wet and Fellin and Throne were shivering.  That's when Throne, sitting next Fellin with their backs to a wall, told his companion that he knew how he could make them warm. He told Fellin to sit between his legs and start rocking, which he did.  Each time they rocked, Throne had Fellin's shirt lifted and was blowing air down his back. Soon, both men were warm.
Fellin was amazed but Throne told him it was something he had been taught in the armed forces while stationed at a base in the far north.

They didn't have to face the other necessity - food - until the next day. That's when Fellin and Throne, who hadn't eaten for more than 24 hours, experienced serious hunger pain.  They were so hungry, in fact, that they attempted to eat the bark off timber that was holding up the roof of their chamber. But they spit it out when they realized they couldn't swallow it.  Then, suddenly, Fellin told Throne that he believed he had a way to "feed" them. He then got the can of water, held a finger to his Adam's apple and took a sip. Fellin then told Throne to do likewise.

After doing it a few times, both realized they were no longer hungry.  Fellin explained that, for some reason, he remembered seeing movie newsreels in which Mahatma Gandhi would be shown in the midst of his many long hunger strikes, subsisting only on water. Fellin said he remembered that anytime Gandhi was shown taking a drink, he was pressing onto his Adam's apple.  Years later, Fellin said he had learned that the maneuver triggers a mechanism in the body that allows a person to live off body fats. He did that until food was sent down through a borehole after the rescue crew made contact.  'They're alive'!

On the surface, rescuers began to fear there was nothing they could do to save the miners, if they were even still alive.  When virtually all hope was lost, a million-in-one gamble was taken.
It was decided, as a last-ditch effort to satisfy the families of the miners, to drill a 6-inch-wide borehole in an attempt to reach the men buried more than 300 feet underground.

Drilling the hole took much of Aug. 17 and all of Aug. 18, but about 11 p.m. Aug. 18, a Sunday, a hole had been drilled to the proper depth. Just before midnight, a light and a microphone were lowered in an effort to establish contact with the miners.  A member of the rescue crew cupped his mouth over the borehole, got as close as he could to the ground and yelled: "Look for the light!"
He thought he had heard something, so he stood up and waved both arms, demanding total silence.
Once again he got on all fours and hollered, "Look for the light!" then cupped an ear to the borehole and excitedly jumped to his feet and screamed: "They're alive! I hear them! They're alive!"
Within minutes, the astounding news spread like wildfire around the world.

"MINE MIRACLE" was the giant headline across the top of the Los Angeles Times the next morning.  What followed was the patient drilling of larger boreholes, then the drilling of a 17 1/2-inch borehole with a drill loaned by one of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes' companies.
People worldwide waited for a happy ending - and it finally came in the wee hours of Aug. 27, 1963.
First Throne, then Fellin were pulled to the surface wearing parachute harnesses and football helmets.
It was a scene that would be almost duplicated at the Quecreek bituminous mine in Somerset County in 2002.

There was a great difference in the two rescues, however.  At Somerset, high-tech scientific equipment was used to determine where the men might be underground.  In the cave-in and rescue near Sheppton, it was sheer guesswork - and a good deal of luck.  The original drill had traveled many miles to arrive at the site where the cave-in occurred. It was destined to drill the borehole near a wooden stake that indicated where the miners might be found, at the recommendation of state Bureau of Mining and United Mine Workers officials and veteran miners who had worked inside that mine years before.

But it didn't quite work out that way.  The truck carrying the drill broke down quite a distance from the stake. With little recourse and less time to waste, rescuers decided to sink the borehole there, and the rest is history.

And here is a News report on the disaster.

http://wnep.com/2013/08/13/remembering-a-dad-lost-in-the-sheppton-mine-disaster/

 

IS THERE MORE PARANORMAL ACTIVITY AFTER A NATURAL DISASTER?

The simple answer is "yes".  It has long been reported that after a natural disaster has occurred  that people almost immediately start to report sightings of ghosts.  Think about all the reasons someone "stays behind"....... unfinished business, can't leave their loved ones, confused-don't know they are dead and many more ......who really knows but wouldn't you agree that in a natural disaster ALL of those reasons would be running through the minds of the victims?  Where there were a lot of "emotional attachments" or "feelings" at a location.....usually the paranormal activity is pretty high.

So, if you think about it.....in a natural disaster such as a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, fire, explosions, etc. what do all these things have?  EMOTION.  Can you imagine the FEAR and the CONFUSION during a natural disaster as a earthquake or hurricane?  Where are my loved ones? What is happening? Am I going to die? What will my loved ones do without me? What about my beloved pets....who will take care of them?  I can't die, I won't get to see my kids grow up?  My husband or wife can't make it without me!  ALL of these things running through YOUR mind......now take that and times it by hundreds and thousands of people thinking the same thing!  The energy in a location like this must be crazy!!!!Confusion, helplessness and chaos running through the minds of the living..........but also of the DEAD!!!
 
So many times spirits don't even KNOW what happened to them.  Things happened so fast that they don't even realize that they have died and so they try live the same way they always did.   But now maybe with a bit more confusion as to what happened and why their loved ones don't see them or respond to them.  And for us the living, sometimes this can be very hard.  Because keep in mind, helping them into the light, going to heaven, crossing over whatever you want to call it, is what we need to do..... being STUCK is not where you want your loves.  So as hard as it may be, we must let them know what happened and that they have died and need to move on.  I know if I lost my grandparents in a natural disaster and didn't get to say "Bye" or tell them "I loved them" it would be hard for me.....but here's the thing......keeping them HERE with US is a little on the selfish side.  Sorry, but that's they way I feel.  Keeping them HERE is for US to feel better, NOT what is best for THEM.

You know me, I am going to put it in "Becky Terms".  It's like having a beautiful butterfly in a jar.  Man...it is soooo pretty to look at and it makes you smile every time you look at it......BUT is being in that jar REALLY what is best for the butterfly??? Or would it be better to let it go.....so that it could fly up into the sky roaming around where ever it likes? Anyway, you get the picture. :)

It is VERY sad when something like this happens, and make NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT.....my heart goes out to anyone who has ever had to deal with this, but it does cause a location to become more haunted or active.  So, if you are ghost hunting, a site where a natural disaster occurred is probably a good location to investigate.  And again, be respectful of the place you are investigating.