Ray Couch of Southern Ghosts has been gracious enough to lend his over 10 years of paranormal experience and knowledge to our site and what we are going to call “Couch’s Corner”.
We are working with Ray to offer some paranormal events throughout the year to help people learn about the paranormal as well as show how we do our investigations.
What are Orbs?
Orbs are the blessing and the curse of most paranormal groups. We get asked about them daily and orb photos do get people interested in the paranormal. Here is the bad news. Almost every orb photo you have is nothing but dust. Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you go into a room that has been closed off for awhile or are taking photos in the rain, you WILL get an orb photo. Now, with digital cameras, ANY environmental contaminants in the air will show up as orbs as the flash captures them in mid air. You can prove this yourself by walking into a room and kicking up the dust and snapping a photo. Now the good news is that I said ALMOST every orb photo is nothing.
My good friend, Julie Pelligrino, has introduced me to black and white photos taken many years ago that contain orbs in them. This is fascinating to me. Our European ancestors told tales of fairy lights and will o’ wisps and ghost lights from hundreds of years ago. These were balls of light that would dance or “haunt” a location. Usually an outside area like a country road. As a matter of fact, the first crop circles were from hundreds of years ago and were known as fairy circles.
The Native Americans told of ghost lights and considered them warnings. They would pass these tales on to the settlers and warn them away from farming or hunting in these areas. Every culture has its own tales of ghost lights and what they mean to them. Swamp gas can’t explain them all away. We can’t use every orb photo as proof of the paranormal. I will sometimes use them only when they are tied to areas with a history of hauntings or the photographer felt “something” when they took the picture.
We also can’t just make a blanket statement that all orb photos are nothing but camera defects or user error. Sometimes the answer lies hundreds of years in the past.
Ray Couch
Southern Ghosts
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