If You Smell Something Fishy, Maybe it’s Nessie

by Kevin Candela

There’s a ghost in the Lemp Mansion in St. Louis that can produce a terrible sewer-like smell. It’s been depicted clearly on the popular TV show Ghost Hunters. Too bad they couldn’t have bottled the air and had it tested. Maybe next time, GH folks? Or anyone else who wants to check out that locale, where I’ve had dinner but (as usual) picked up on nothing at all. The Ghost Hunters were there in a storm too, meaning that they couldn’t even trust their own senses that night because of the heightened emotional effects of the strobing lightning and cracking thunder. So if they go back, and they DON’T make a plan to monitor that air, I’ll be a bit disappointed.

I Heard That: Audio Perception and the Paranormal Universe

by Kevin Candela

Sound Reasoning. I thought about calling this one that too, since it’s how we hear things that seems to matter at least as much as why or any of the other interrogative Ws. Yesterday my wife and I were sitting downstairs together when we heard voices coming in through the back window of the basement kitchen, which opens out onto the backyard. To me, I heard them coming from the left. I immediately said they were probably coming from the neighbor on the right because—at least for me—I seem to guess the actual origin point for such sounds in the exact wrong direction.