Author: Jon Bolton

Ladies and gentleman step right and I’ll tell you the tale of a man. A man who created the wizard of Menlo Park, a man who create the light bulb, a man who held over 1,093 patents…a man who could give Dr. Ray Stanz and Egon Spengler a run for their money. That’s right folks I am talking about the one and only ghost hunter/buster himself…Mr. Thomas Edison (and the crowd goes wild).

That’s right, the man who gave us the electric light bulb and motion picture camera, the man who was one of the top inventors of the world was actually dabbling in the world of ghost hunting. Now it wasn’t like the ghost hunting we know of today with the fancy equipment such as EMF detectors, Ovilus, electric voice recorders or FLIR cameras but he was working on a device that would be able to let us, the living, communicate to the dead.

Not many people are aware of this because of their distaste for ghost hunting in the aspect of overly dramatized supposedly real tv shows or they just think is creepy. However Edison was a man always looking to the next thing and that happened to be the Ghost Machine. Now the evidence of such a machine created by Edison to have actually existed is a bit of a mystery as there were no plans or actually machine ever found. Just the faint words of a man, a great man, spoken in an interview to the October 1920 issue of  The American Magazine, “I have been at work for some time building an apparatus to see if it is possible for personalities which have left this earth to communicate with us.”

Many people speculate that this machine did in fact exist, but has somehow been lost over time. Could this machine been created by such a great inventor and lost over time…anything is possible I would suppose.

However in my opinion, as much as I would love to stumble across the only ghost machine to have been made by Edison I would bet it never made it from his mind into the real world. He was always thinking and creating things in his mind and while some may have been made, some were only written down and sadly to say only some were just thoughts.

Some people think that Edison would never think of creating such a machine yet I present two things to you for your consideration. The first being is that at this time of the world the Spiritualist movement was beginning to hit the Western world so why wouldn’t someone begin to think about communicating with the no longer living. And lets look at the next theory, the fact that when he made this statement he was ten years away from his death, he was a brilliant man who knew his time on earth was limited and maybe he wanted to have a way to still keep inventing even after he had past one into the afterlife.

Be safe and remember it was only a matter of time till he invented cable TV,

Jon Bolton

You walk coolly into the Barnes and Nobles looking for that certain attention grabbing good read that you want to devote your time to. As you make your way past the small tables with books of the month and pass the bargain aisles you make your way back farther and farther. As you pass the True Crime and Science Fiction you happen to discover the New Age section. How fitting is it that this should be in the same area of True Crime and Science Fiction? I will admit this to you all before I get started, that I visit this section each and every time I go into a book store. I have been buying books from this section for years and been researching/studying everything I could, that was dedicated to this particular book section. I am absolutely fascinated by New Age Phenomena and books that are written about it.

While I was examining the spines of the books and what they were about, I found one called White Light Healing. Now I am not new to this concept, but I am however more of a skeptic now than I had previously been in the past. I talked to a number of “white light” healers and some have been intriguing and some have been down right scam artists. You see the topic of “white light healing” is very easily faked and easy to cover up just as well. Am I going to make some people angry with this little blog of mine, you’re damn right I am, but am I going to make some people put their skills to the test and prove I am wrong…I would hope so.

I thumbed through the book on “white light healing” and it was very confusing, read like stereo instructions in my honest opinion. So I decided to do some more research to get a better grasp on what they were trying to convince me. Now they talk about envisioning white light pouring over you or out of something and flowing freely like water in fact one quote is this, “…breathing in the pure white light, seeing it streaming down into your chest, and breathing out the grey…in with the white and pure…out with the grey, the old, and the worn…” This is some crazy tree hugging stuff right here my friend, in with the good air out with the bad, isn’t this from a CPR class or something?

Now if this is a form of meditation, which I think it is from what I have gathered, then why not just say it as that. Don’t say it’s “white light healing” when there is literally no white light involved or healing for that matter. If light was involved then we would be hanging Christmas lights or light bulbs over our heads, heck you could pull the ol’ eating a light bulb carney trick and replace that whole apple a day thing.

There doesn’t need to be some overly complicated series of instructions to teach people how to meditate and then call it some sort of “healing”. I could easily go up to someone who is full of anxiety and angst, say to them take a couple deep breaths and relax. Oh wait we all pretty much do that now, so why connect it with some sort of healing?

I can easily open up a store front, hang some awesome new age decorations and charge tons of cash for people to come to me and tell them to breath deep and relax thus resulting in them being healed. Of course if they go away and aren’t healed then I can easily say, “well you didn’t believe in mother earth and her Keebler elves of light healing so its your fault,” Yeah I can totally do that however I never would because I have way too much of a conscience, despite what people say, to do that. Yet there are people who are doing this, and I’m not talking about the people who do it because they believe in it, I’m talking about the people who are doing it because they are scams and cheats…and there are a lot of them.

In my travels around the world I have met many, many people who claim to have “white light healing” powers…superman had powers…you have a belief. Now I will admit I have met some people I would give a second though to in their abilities with stuff, but that’s like one out of a thousand people I meet in this realm. If people want to believe that this heals them then I am completely down with that, the placebo effect is a tried and true method to help many people overcome things. If you don’t know what that is then it is simply this, if you tell someone this red crystal like candy will heal them and if they believe it will work then it will work for them even though all it was is a simple watermelon jolly rancher.

Let’s call this “white light healing” what it really is…meditational deep breathing in order to help you relax and feel better. If you can prove to me rationally and scientifically that “white light healing” does in fact have some merit behind it then I am all ears and willing to retract what I have stated, but every time I make the challenge no one steps up to the plate, so I doubt anyone will at this point in time. As for taking classes to “perform”, and I say “perform” because it is a performance and not actually real, this ability for “white light healing” then I would love to see your course syllabus and explain to me how that scam works.

Be safe and we’ll leave the light on for ya,

Jon Bolton

In the land of the rising sun, China for those of you who have no clue what I was talking about for a minute, there is a festival that has taken place for hundreds of years. In a society/culture/belief of China there stands to be quite a number of supernatural and spiritual festivals that take place. One such festival is called the Hungry Ghost Festival which is celebrated on the 15^th month of the 7^th lunar month…yeah I tried finding that one on the calendar too, if you find it let me know.

Actually on the the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar is called Ghost Day and the seventh month in general is regarded as the Ghost Month in Chineese tradition. This is the time when the ghosts of the deceased come out from the lower realm and walk amongst the living. The people would make altars filled with food or fake money in order to appease those who have past on and to appease the Gods of those past on who may not have been good people. Sometimes they make small boats filled with lanterns and then are floated on the river which helps to give the dead direction as where to go. There are many ways to celebrate this holiday so long as it appeases the deceased.

Can you imagnie a scheduled day when the gates of Heaven and Hell would both open and converse amongst the living. I don’t know about you, but the imagery of Ghostbusters after the containment grid was shut down comes to mind when the ghost are running all over the place. To hold a concert and the first five rows are empty becayuse they are reserved for the dead? This may seem pretty “backwoodsish” yet this is what they believe, this is mainly based within the Budhist Taoists religion of the far east.

Now this isnt just a Chinese celebration, this festival or ones like it are also celebrated in places such as Japan, Singapore, Vietnam and Taiwan. The middle eastern culture tend to be more aware of the dead and while they mourn just as we do in the western world they however seem to hold onto their loved ones and pay much more respect for them not only in the living form but in the spiritual form as well.

The Hungry Ghost Festival is just one of many wasy the Asian culture embraces the after life and which leads me to wonder why there aren’t more Asian ghost hunting groups within the country. I guess one may never know.

Be safe and have an eggroll,

Jon Bolton

In time chivalrous times of long ago when kings and queens ruled the land and their court of lords and ladies where the epitome of elegance and class. They were times where knights would be the saviors and champions of the kingdoms as they led battle after battle and romantically swept the women away on their feet. An era when wizards, dragons and other monsters would attack or defend the castle as part of the struggles that were known as the dark ages. These romantic notions are conjured up based upon Hollywood and the legends and lore of so long ago. No matter the danger at hand or the battle to be fought one thing was clear; the medical practices at the time might have been their worst enemy.

We obviously know that out medical practices in this day an age of technology and scientific advances are much more reliable and successful than back then. The belief of how disease was spread and started could be considered laughable at best, because the last time I checked when I get a stomach pain it isn’t a small troll inside me trying to get out, I have been known to be wrong in the past however.

I, for some odd reason, started to thinking about these medical practices while I was at the hospital about to get surgery on my sinuses and figured what the heck; let’s see what I can find out. To my shock, horror and humor I have found the following.

Hemorrhoids: There was a 7^th century monk who was actually the patron saint for hemorrhoid pain, that saint definitely got the wrong end of the deal on that one. Now get this one, he apparently developed hemorrhoids in his garden and sat on a stone which gave him the magical cure. The stone apparently exists to this day and can me visited by any sufferer looking to sit upon its magical surface for relief and cure. Of course if that did not work then you could always take the other approach which would be to use a red hot poker to burn them away.

Zodiac signs: Another practice was that depending on what astrological sign you were born under the doctor needed to be aware of certain things. If you were a Taurus the doctor should not make incisions in the neck and throat and avoid cutting any veins in this area. Now if you were a Virgo the doctor should avoid cutting open a wound in the belly and internal parts, looks like virgos didn’t last to long in life. Now being a Pisces I had to see what I was forbade from doing, and it looks like my doctor should not cut my feet, look like I make out in this deal of dos and don’ts of this surgical guideline.

Dwale: Dwale is a crude anesthetic used the same way that anesthetic is used today in the operating rooms by relaxing the individual to sleep and pain relief so as not to feel discomfort during surgery. Now that’s great if it weren’t for that fact that Dwale could kill you very easily. It was made up of a combination of lettuce juice, opium, vinegar and gall from a castrated boar, which doesn’t sound all that bad until you add the last ingredient which was hemlock juice. All you wiccas and Shakespeare followers will know hemlock juice from many plays and potions. Hemlock juice is some very serious stuff and attacks the nervous system and is a very affective poison, once symptoms start its usually over as it moves rather fast through the body.

Bloodletting: Bloodletting is the one cure that everyone has pretty much heard about so I won’t spend too much time on this one. It was the practice of cutting veins and letting the toxins within the body to flow out via the blood stream. This in practicality sounds like a viable solution if it were not for the fact that usually you bled to death. They would slice a vein open and let the blood flow, not everyone died, but it was a barbaric treatment to say the least. Now if they were trying to release the toxins after watching the movie Twilight I could completely understand that.

Trepanation: Now some people who know about or heard about this procedure sometimes confuse it with lobotomy. Keep in mind that this is not about removing sections of the front lobe of the brain, this is about drilling holes into your head/skull. These procedures of drilling or cutting a small square into your skull is believed to treat cranial disease or for mystical purposes, depending on what you want to believe. They felt that the evil spirits or demon trapped in the cranial area would be able to escape through the hole that was created, because demons and evil spirits are stupid and couldn’t possibly leave through the ear, nose or mouth…that would be just plain silly. Oh and if you thought this practice had long since gone the way of the Do-Do then you would be wrong, there are some people who still believe in this and some quack un-insured doctors willing to do it too.

Toothache: Some people have had toothaches and some have not, I have been fortunate enough to not have one, but I do know some people who have and they say it’s very painful. So here is a remedy I think should work for everyone that I found in my research plus it will save on dental bills. If you take a candle and burn it close to the tooth that is hurting then the worms, yes I said worms, that are gnawing at the tooth will fall out into a cup of water held close to the mouth and candle. See dentists are such con artists, they tell us we need to floss and brush everyday; how does that keep worms away? No wonder my dentists never told me about the candle trick, he would lose all his business, such a con.

Pimples: I’m not going to spend all that long on this one that I found, mainly because its so bizarre and inhumane, but I’ll touch base on it. A cure for pimples was to take two white puppies, had to be white, and before they could see, you would chop off their heads and then let it drain out by hanging them from their back paws. Once the blood was all out your would mix it with some white wine and then apply it to your face to reduce you pimples. Now 2 things come to my mind about this, first off I guess PETA didn’t exists back then and secondly I am beginning to wonder what Clearasil uses in there formula now.

Now there are a vast amount of other weird medical therapies used such as leeches & maggots, which by the way are actually used in modern hospitals today to help heal cuts and wounds, but for the majority the ancient practices are long gone away. One thing I found interesting was the fact that even though it was the dark ages, they did rely heavily on sterilization by washing wounds and washing and burning medical tools. The diagnoses might have been off and some of the remedies not so well planned out, but at least they knew that dirt was bad.

Be safe and remember that candles are better than brushing,
Jon Bolton