I've always been fascinated with ghosts. I've never seen one personally, but whenever there's a ghost show on Discovery Channel or A&E I'm watching it. I'm not sure why I believe, but I definitely believe.

I've always been fascinated with ghosts. I've never seen one personally, but whenever there's a ghost show on Discovery Channel or A&E I'm watching it. I'm not sure why, but I definitely believe.

I still remember the first ghost show I saw as a kid. It was a special Halloween edition of Unsolved Mysteries. It really scared me, but I think that's part of the reason I like to believe. You know that feeling you get after you've watched a scary movie and you drive home in the dark thinking about it. All your senses are on full alert. Especially when you get home and have to walk from the car to your house. You make your way through the dark to your front door, looking closely at all the shadows. You get to the door, quickly unlock and open it, the house is pitch black inside and you have to make your way to the nearest light switch. You eyes are wide open and your heart is racing. Your adrenal glands have released every drop of adrenaline available in your body. That feeling right there is why I believe in ghosts. That feeling makes you feel alive.

The sad thing for me is I don't think I'll ever see a ghost. I believe a person really has to be tuned-in to the ghost frequency so to speak. My mind is always off in space somewhere. If I ever experience a ghost it will have to be one loud and obnoxious ghost for me to notice and I'm not sure that's the kind of ghost I want to be around.

When I was in college I lived in a house with 2 other guys and both of them would swear up and down there was a ghost in the house. I never saw or heard anything but both of them did. One of them had two experiences both while he was in the bathroom in the middle of the day. The first time he was in the shower and he heard someone walking around in the house. He knew that myself and the other roommate were in class but he called out our names anyway. At that point he heard what sounded like a person running down the hall. He jumped out of the shower grabbed a towel and walked around the house checking all the doors. They were all locked. For his next encounter he was in the bathroom popping zits or something like that. He was doing something quiet. Then he heard the sound of a child giggling or laughing quietly. He looked all over the place inside and out. No signs of a child anywhere, and all the kids in the neighborhood were at school. My other roommate only had one weird experience, but he claims he always felt something weird about the house. This roommate liked to party so it wasn't odd for him to sleep until 3:00 or 4:00 in the afternoon sometimes. One afternoon he was woken up be the sounds of cabinet doors opening and closing in the kitchen. He thought it was me trying to be an asshole because I always gave him shit about sleeping so late. He called out my name angrily several times. He finally got up to "whoop my ass" he says. When he did the noise stopped. When he got to the kitchen he says about half of the cabinets in the kitchen were wide open. He asked us when we got home if we had been fucking with him. We said no so he told us what had happened. The two of them were convinced there was a ghost, I believed too.

This brings me to the story behind the picture for this story. This is an old mental hospital in my hometown called Sunny Land. It was in operation between the 1940's and 60's. It was shutdown because it's full of asbestos and because of de-institutionalization. This is one of those scary old school sanitariums where they put everything from kid's who wet the bed and mildly retarded people, to full on schizophrenics. Many claim that it's haunted because of all the horrible things that happened there. I've been in it 3 times and have never seen or heard anything. Let me tell you though, it's as scary as those places you see on MTV's Fear. The first time I went I was only 11. Three friends and I rode our bikes to Sunny Land, stashed them in the bushes and went in. At this time it was still in relatively good shape. It hadn't been vandalized much, it still had 95% of it's windows intact, and there was no fence around it. There were stills desks and file cabinets in the administrative wing as well as beds and wheelchairs in the two patient wings. I was scared. We up to the third floor and discovered the old children's floor. There were full-sized cartoons painted all over the walls. Back then patients didn't get there own rooms, they were packed into big rooms like sardines. The basement had to be the scariest though. It was dark. Sounds of water dripping. Extremely freaky. The last two times I've been in old Sunny Land I discovered the vandalism really took away from the effect. Now about 95% of the windows are broken and there's spray paint all over the cartoons on the wall. It's damn shame, but It's still pretty scary.

I really don't want to go through my whole life without experiencing a ghost. I guess that's why I continue to go back to Sunny Land. I always go hoping I'll hear or see something, but it never happens. I figure it's my best chance at seeing a ghost. I do know of couple of other possible haunts. I think I'll look into those.