Ghost Hunting

MORNING OF MAY 31, 2009
The second of two dreams from this night, the first is posted below this post:

I was with a fictional girl I seemed to like a lot. It was daytime, but we were "ghost hunting" near a fictional old school (I'm not one who actually does ever "ghost hunt", as some do seem to enjoy). We had a special guide to help us find ghosts in the dream: Beetlejuice (specifically the version from the 90's cartoon, not the movie version)!

Why one would need to ghost hunt if you were already in cahoots with Beetlejuice--a ghost--is beyond me. But it's what we were doing. Beetlejuice disappeared into one of the abandoned buildings on the campus, saying he felt a ghost was likely hiding there. He said he would call back to us if he found anything. He never called back, so we began calling for him, looking around the building.

We never could find him, so we decided he might have meant the ghost was in the "other abandoned school building", and began walking to where we apparently knew it was. This took us down a path through the woods.

At one point we saw another girl on the trail, coming toward us in the opposite direction. My friend and I hushed our talking, afraid that this girl might hear about the ghosts, which would have apparently been a negative thing. At the moment the girl actually passed us, I could see there were really two girls, and they were so deep in conversation they seemed to not even notice us. I did wonder how I could possibly have only seen one of the two girls until the very moment they passed us. Somehow I never wondered, as I do now, if this might be one of the ghosts we were hunting.

By now we were coming off the path in the woods onto a wide gravel road. There were huge "trenches" on either side of the road, and they contained neat little rows of identical garden homes. The only other scenery was more trees. My female companion and I were getting closer and more flirtateous as we walked. At one point I picked her up and began to carry her for a short distance.

Around this time she began to express concern as to how we'd know where Beetlejuice was trying to lead us. At this moment a sufficiently creepy creaking noise drew our attention to the fact that the door to one of the garden homes was swinging open of its own accord.

Without question we came down off the gravel road and entered the house with the open door. As we did so, I noticed over my shoulder that those two girls from before were now walking down the gravel road, and had apparently been right beind us. But I thought they had passed us going the other way some minutes before...?

Once inside the house it was apparent that no one currently lived there. It wasn't abandoned, however, as everything was in pristine condition, just waiting for new tenants. An overweight young man with glasses, a beard, and a ponytail enthusiastically greeted us. He took us into a back room with large windows, where two or three other people--obviously part of a "ghost hunting" team--were seated around a table.

One of these other people was my dad, which, you just have to know, would so NOT ever be doing anything like this. But I accepted it easily in the dream. My dad, seeming to be the leader of this group, explained to my friend and I that they had recorded what they felt was conclusive evidence of a ghost on the premises in the form of a diembodied voice.

As he cued up the tape recorder he tried to prepare us for what we were about to hear. He also lamented the fact that their "seismograph" was broken, so he couldn't take readings while the recording played. He gave me a pen and paper and asked if I could do it. I confirmed that what he wanted was for me to just draw the wavy "up-and-down" lines as the voice fluctuated, and then asked how in the world I was supposed to do that with any sort of accurancy or meaning?

Nontheless, I drew wavy lines on paper as the recording of the ghost voice began. At first it only sounded like so much white noise, as these things tend to do. But then there was a noise that seemed like some kind of whisper. The whisper gradually grew louder and more clear...

Once it got loud enough, it sounded less like a whisper and more like someone speaking through one of those monotone electronic voice boxes...and the previously mumbly words seemed to become more clear. "Joel Osteen, Joel Osteen, Joel Osteen..." it chanted. I exchanged perplexed looks with the others. The voice continued, "Joel Osteen, Joel Osteen, Adam and Eve, Jesus Christ..." and right on with a littany of mostly religious-themed words. It gave me goosebumps and was freaking me out more than a little.

One of the ghost hunter girls at the table suddenly got a call on her cell phone. She rolled her eyes and announced it was some guy who was persuing her but who she didn't like. She picked up the phone and began talking to him anyway. Meanwhile, the creepy monotone ghost voice continued in it's neverending list of random words and names. I finally became so creeped out that I woke up.