The Reluctant Medium

By Chris McGill
DimensionsRadio.com

In the fall of 2001, my wife and I made a trip to see her Sister in Southern Illinois. She lives there with her husband and two kids on a farm in a town not far from Murphysboro. Ava is a small town of a little over 500 residents. Not far from my sister-in-law's place, there’s a cemetery that lies off of the road between a cornfield and forest. Some of the tombstones in this cemetery date back to the mid to late 1800’s and many are from the same family. I will not say what the name of the cemetery is in order to protect the privacy of the family’s of those buried there.

We were in town for my wife’s family’s ‘cousin’s weekend’. This was an annual event at the time and this year we were roughing it, camping out all weekend on the farm. After a long day of horseback riding and dinner, we decided to take a little trip up the road and check out the old cemetery. After all, it was late October and Halloween was coming! This would be a perfect pre-Halloween treat. And a treat it was!

Not long after we arrived I started taking video with my brand new Sony Handycam (equipped with night vision). My wife and I had recently gotten into the hobby of ‘ghost hunting’ and I thought this would be a great spot to try out the new gear. Almost immediately I began to see a light in the forest on the outside of the cemetery. The only thing that didn’t make sense was the light wasn’t visible to the naked eye. You could only see it through the viewfinder of the video camera. I brought this to the attention of one of my wife’s cousins that was nearby. Here’s a clip of what we saw.



There was nothing in the woods that should have reflected the infrared from my camera. Not to mention, fade on and off like this ‘Ghost Light’ did! Later that same night I was shooting more video and caught an ‘orb’ of light that kept following me around. At first I thought it may be part of a spider web I had walked through, since that had happened a bit earlier. After a few seconds I realized it wasn’t a web nor was it a bug of any type. It was late in October and already getting down into the low 40’s. Most bugs are long gone in temps like that. This was the first time I had ever experienced an ‘orb’ that appeared to respond to my questions.





Needless to say, this one freaked me out a bit and I wanted to leave right then and there! Another weird thing happened that same night. For several weeks prior to this, I had been experiencing some really bad pain in my right foot. It hurt so bad at times that I could hardly walk. The next day when I woke up, I no longer had any pain in my foot at all! And haven’t since that night almost eight years ago. What was it that we saw that night in the woods outside the cemetery? Was it a ghost light? And the ‘orb’ of light that seemed to follow me inside the cemetery. Was that a spirit of someone buried there, or maybe a guardian spirit that was watching over the place? We’ll never know for sure. We did find out the next day, after talking with residents that lived near the cemetery, that there was a barn that used to be in the area where we spotted the first unknown light. It had burned down decades ago, and the rumors are that at least one person if not more were killed in the fire.

I’ve been back to this cemetery several times since this incident occurred, and have yet to experience anything like we did on that October night in 2001. I’m very skeptical when it comes to ‘orbs’ because there can be so many logical explanations like dust, moisture or lens flare. I’ve pretty much ruled out all three of these particular options in this case. Still, there’s no way to say for sure that what we experienced was paranormal. But it was definitely unexplained.