Happy Hollaween

The other night at the Lincoln Home we had a string of Halloween lights hanging on the fence in front of the home. Nobody noticed until later in the evening, but instead of "Halloween," the lights said "Hollaween." :-) But anyway, we hope everyone had a Happy Halloween. We had a fun Halloween here in Illinois. Our friends David and Teal came up to Athens, then we all went on a ghost hunting adventure! David and Teal have a cool infrared camera specifically designed for taking photos of paranormal things. David also has a metal detector, so we wanted to find a place to go where we could use both instruments. I did some research and found out about the Old Union Cemetery located in The Middle of Nowhere, Illinois. It is a really remote cemetery which is supposedly very haunted. And, supposedly an old church foundation was located near the cemetery--a good spot for metal detecting. I was afraid that we wouldn't be able to find the cemetery, but we did! The headstone pictured above sits next to where Amos Ferris is buried. I found an old article about him that said he killed himself because his girlfriend didn't want to marry him. Nobody found his body for four months--yikes. So we thought that this would be a likely-haunted spot, but we didn't pick up anything abnormal with the cameras.

And this headstone belongs to the founder of the church that once stood near the cemetery. His name was Hughes BOWLES! The cemetery was full of Bowles, but we don't know if we're related to any of them. There wer a lot of old, broken headstones in the cemetery. I read that the last burial in the cemetery was in 1924, but we found a headstone from 1947, so that was kind of weird.

It was a very spooky cemetery--especially with the Halloween moon. We searched and searched around the outskirts of the cemetery but couldn't find the rumored church foundation. We still had fun using the metal detector outside the cemetery and found a number of vintage beer cans and shotgun shells.

We also didn't find anything really noticeable in the pictures. In fact, all I captured with my camera was this one orb (which you can see a little better in the negative version of the photo). We haven't seen David and Teal's photos yet, but they said they didn't capture anything on the infrared camera either. It was still a very fun and Halloweenish evening though. We all had a yummy dinner at the Boar's Nest before going to Greg's funeral home to try once again at some ghostly photos. David and Teal did get one interesting photo there, but we decided that the anomaly in the photo might have been caused by light reflecting off of the lens. It was a very fun ghost hunting evening!