June 5th, 2009 by CVPI

Source: http://www.tampabay.com/

Maureen Hancock says she’s a pretty typical mom. She gets her two sons off to school each morning, plays kickball in the afternoons and puts dinner on the table at night.

Oh, and she also gets messages from dead people.

Hancock hears voices and sees things from spirits and passes it to loved ones here on Earth. It’s specific stuff, she says, with names and dates.

“It’s not just, ‘Does anyone know of someone who died in a traffic wreck?’ ” she said.

The self-described “Medium Mom” hosts shows to bring the living and departed together using her psychic powers. Called Postcards from Heaven, the next one is set for June 13 at the Don CeSar Beach Resort and Spa.

During the shows, Hancock, 41, scans the audience listening for voices trying to send a message to a particular person. “I’ll hear something like, ‘I’m her mother. I’m her mother. Ask her about Betty,”’ Hancock said.

The messages are comforting, uplifting and never bad. (Only God is privy to that information, she says.) When the mood gets too tense, as it often does, Hancock, a former stand-up comic, throws in some humor.

Hancock hopes people leave with a better understanding of death and a new outlook about living life to the fullest. A practicing Catholic, she wants the living to know death is not the end.

“I have a lot of faith,” she said recently from her home in Massachusetts. “I’m coming from a different place than a lot of psychics. I don’t even like to associate myself with psychics. I’m very upbeat. I help plant the seed of hope that there is something else.”

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June 5th, 2009 by CVPI

Source: http://abclocal.go.com/

The iconic tourist attraction will be the setting of a horror movie of the same name.

The movie will be produced by Saratoga native Andrew Trapani, best known for the hit “The Haunting in Connecticut.”

Most of the 160 room Victorian mansion was built by eccentric rifle heiress Sarah L. Winchester. It was under construction for 32 years, starting in the late 1800s, and it is considered by some to be haunted.

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June 5th, 2009 by CVPI

Source: http://www.nvdaily.com/

They arrived at the restaurant at dusk, carefully unloading equipment from half a dozen black satchels.

Night-vision and infrared video cameras came out. A beat-up laptop was switched on. Voice recorders and electromagnetic field readers got batteries.

“I don’t want to work here anymore if anything else happens,” said Brittany Whetstone, 18, a new hostess, as part of the crew prepared to go into the basement. “I’m not going down there.”

She thought for a minute.

“I’m allowed out if I want to leave, right?”

John Allen, 38, leader of the Virginia Investigators of Paranormal Studies, looked up from the laptop. The monitor’s light masked his glasses, hiding his eyes.

“You’ll be all right,” he said.

Allen and five of his colleagues were at the Cork Street Tavern in Winchester for the second time to investigate otherworldly activity at the fabled city pub. Allen was eager to get started.

The first time the group provoked spirits here, he said, he was physically grabbed on the shoulder by an apparition. And of all the places he’s brought his team to, “nothing holds a candle to Cork Street.”

There’s no shortage of legends explaining how lost souls got trapped during the building’s hardscrabble past. Many tales trip over the plots of others or involve the same characters.

The tavern, at 8 W. Cork St., was built in the 1830s and took fire during the Civil War. Equally agreed upon is that it once was a brothel, or at least a speakeasy. Waitresses, cooks and barflies have heard rumors that bodies are buried in the basement.

Some of the stories “almost were a part of employee training,” said Joel Smith, a longtime co-owner who left the restaurant in 2008. Extinguished candles would frequently relight. An enormous crash in a vacant kitchen would reveal nothing out of place. Lights inexplicably would turn on. Others, too, have said they’ve been touched.

They say only the “old side” of the restaurant, which opened in 1932, is haunted. An adjoining building built about 1960 became part of the eatery in 1995.

Sightings come and go.

“If something happened to me, it might make me not so skeptical,” said Tara Rutherford, 23, a waitress. “I feel like I haven’t personally seen something, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.”

Allen, of Millwood, is just the most recent ghost hunter to poke around. Cork Street allowed him and his team to explore the restaurant after he approached them. A tool and die maker by trade, he is friendly and quick with words.

His method is simple: Cut off the lights. Ask the spirits questions, and expect answers. But most importantly, record everything. Most EVPs — electronic voice phenomena — only can be seen or heard on the recordings, he said.

“You get a lot of good responses to questions. You do get answers,” he said. “Everybody says, ‘No, I don’t believe any of that.’ But you get them one on one, everybody’s got a story to tell.”

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Popularity: 8% [?]