Good evening. I've spent much of my afternoon reading this site with interest and could not resist writing to you all (on this dark and rainy post-holiday evening). I've spent years noting to myself dozens of incidents that seem paranormal, but have only recently been curious enough to look around on the internet, and your site seems really legit -- caring and intelligent.
I'm an educated, grounded and stable individual, a Christian and former newspaper columnist, currently teaching and a mom of four great kids. I've lost many loved ones in my almost 60 years, but have always loved my life, felt quite strong and consider myself to be a happy warrior for my "causes." Guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm a busy, suburban mom, living near a large southern city but every now and then some compelling things happen and the mysteries of life compel me to seek out those who might know more than I do, on a topic I know little about (except for tv shows and a real appreciation for Dean Koontz novels).
A couple months ago I was finishing a basement cleanup that's dragged on for months. We live in a great suburban home, very bright and cheery, incuding the basement, which is more of a terrace level with windows everywhere and not creepy at all. I ran across a small box of VCR tapes that had not been transferred onto DVD and decided to take a look at them.
As background, I'll share that my first husband, a Marine aviator, passed away 26 years ago after a lengthy and serious illness, leaving behind two daughters, ages 2 and 3, and me. Over the years, I feel like he's found small ways to let me know he's still with us... Some of them are really fun, but I'll stick with this one thing. So I'm in the basement about 3 in the afternoon.
Middle schoolers (with my second husband) won't be home for a couple hours and I'm dying to see these videos from almost 30 years ago, one of which is titled, "Best Tape for Dad." I locate my 90s-era small tv with a built in VCR player and set it up on a chair. Sitting on the floor I put in the first tape and it's some great snow day footage of my daughters as toddlers with their Daddy, just charming (they're both grown and married career women now). I pull out my i-phone to take some snips to send to them at work (and to just have on my phone). I start noticing as I'm holding up my phone, taking video of the video, that in the phone camera there is a black line that pops up, not horizontal or vertical, but crossways like a slash through the screen. It's not on the TV or the video tape, just on my phone screen. I didn't think too much of it and kept taking videos of this tape in short segments.
Then I started to notice that the black slash only happened at certain moments in the video. Mostly it popped when the camera panned to my late husband, but also during closeups of a precious little face or another tender moment. I notice the black slashes on my phone seem to be appearing at moments of significance, and sometimes more dark black than others a moment later. I know so little about the technology, but I wondered if a spirit was trying to watch with me, whether they could take energy from the pixels or something, which would make the black area. As I watch the tapes, I start talking out loud a little bit, something I've done before at certain moments, and the black lines seemed to almost happen more as I narrate the tape just a bit, sort of remembering. (i.e. "Oh, here comes the snowball" as in the video he throws one in my direction).
Next thing I know, my middle schoolers were home off the bus, and I was upstairs telling my 8th grade son, a really smart kid about electronics and other things, about this black slash going through my i-phone video. I joked that I thought it might be some "ghost guy stuff" which is what we call it (based on my recent interest in Ghost Adventures-type programs, for which I get teased relentlessly by all my kids). So my son was intrigued and wanted to see this black line, and I wanted to show it to him, maybe for validation...
Or maybe hoping it would not be there when we went back down. So we did and I turned on the tape (sorry if this is getting boring) and there's the black slash on my i-phone again. How is it not on the tv or VCR tape? We discuss it, how it seems like there's a pattern to the line... Then as the tape is playing I suspect the line is actually popping up in response to my comments. I go way out on a limb and say, "OK, can you do an SOS?" (a military thing, haha) After which the black line flashes out _ _ _ __ __ __ _ _ _. (I might actually have that backwards). But we both were a bit amazed to say the least and reacted with big, "OH WOWs." The slash DID respond with an SOS! This is when you just blink and think, "Holy cow, is this SOMEthing? Or am I wishing/imagining/pushing it?"
Well, that's about it. I've not wanted to try it again since, something about not wanting to mess with things I don't understand. But has anyone ever heard about something like this? Also, when I viewed some of the video snips on my computer, which has a large screen, there were some places in the videos that I feel I could see... My late husband's likeness. And all I can say on that is, I think I've gotten pretty good at seeing ghosts in photos (stories for another day perhaps).
Thank you for letting me share this. I know about EVPs, so it seems like if you can catch a ghost in a photo, positive imaging, then what I got was some kind of negative imaging... Or a portion of the picture was just not relayed... Maybe this is easily debunked? I'm wide open to all thoughts. I understand I can upload a photo at some point, which I'll do if possible.
