In Silicon Valley, one of the main tourist attractions is the beautiful and bizarre “Winchester Mystery House”.  This Victorian home has some crazy twists and turns right alongside some exquisite workmanship and fine materials.  Though part of it was destroyed in the 1904 earthquake, the majority of it remains as it was a century ago - an engima which fascinates and confounds visitors.

Naturally I have been through the house which Sarah Winchester built many times. It’s the kind of thing San Jose area locals visit when out of town relatives come to call.  My own experiences have been mixed.  I’m mildly to moderately intuitive.  There have been times when I definitely felt that something else was there … some sort of presence.  At other times, I got nothing.  Interestingly for me, I usually come with a camera, and the times when I felt something have corresponded to the times when “stuff” showed up on my digital pics.  Likewise, when I didn’t sense anything, I had images without orbs or other anomolies.

Tonight I was poking around on the website for the property and found a section called “sightings”.  Now it used to be that employees were disallowed from telling anything about their paranormal experiences on the premisis, so I was more than a little surprised to find a record of the bizarre experiences they’ve had here.  I guess it’s fair for them to have a 180 on this.

So have a look and I hope you enjoy the brief tales as much as I did.

http://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/sightings.cfm

Gil Gross, who hosts the afternoon radio program from 2 - 4 on San Francisco’s KGO Radio, had a change of conversational direction today.  While discussing and listening to stories about the multiple, devastating tragedies on Sept. 11th 2001, one of Gil’s callers (a widow from that day) relayed having an experience after the death of her husband that convinced her that he was sending her a message of hope. It was a very moving call, and Gil invited others to share any similar experiences.

And they did.

It’s really not often that mainstream radio or other media will be open to this type of conversation, unless it’s at Halloween (and then there are a lot of giggles). Instead, this was a very serious sharing by all kinds of listeners, many of them skeptics themselves until they’d had some sort of experience of a loved one after death.

Although my radio track record is pretty much limited to having been a college DJ at a small school in Spokane (Gonzaga U “KZAG, the voice of Gonzaga”), I do know that radio personalities and their producers do not want to risk offending people (and their advertising dollars) and they don’t want to cause eye-rolling and dial switching. So it’s a bit gutsy for Gil and his producer to just go with the flow today and encourage & take those calls.

Not only that, but it was handled very well, in a very supportive way that was neither sappy nor skeptical, but open and intelligent.  I don’t think that Gil could have done a better job with this highly sensitive topic on an emotion-charged day.

The synopsis of today’s program really does not do it (or Gil) justice as it not only sidesteps this very interesting segment of today’s show, but actually fails to mention it at all. I wouldn’t say that this element was so important that it overshadowed weighty interviews or the more “meaty” element of talk radio, but it was a dimension seldom broached and it should have been noted in the synopsis.

That’s OK, we’re mentioning it here. Kudos to Gil and to his producer too (my apologies, but I didn’t see the name of that producer online).  Want to hear the pocast? It’s online - enjoy!

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