The Curse of Cursed Objects
Or, My Left-Handed Ghost Detector and Ghost Hunting Through Intuition
I’ve never considered myself psychic before. I’ve had moments where I may have seen someone out of the corner of my eye. I’ve been to places where I may have heard cannon fire. But that doesn’t mean I have anything conclusive. I believe, but these kinds of things never come to me.
That was until I visited the Gettysburg Haunted Object Museum a few years back.
I love curiosity shops, occult museums, and things of that nature. I had business out in central Pennsylvania one particular October. I found myself outside Jennie Wade’s birthplace, the only civilian casualty of the Battle of Gettysburg out of 160,000 dead. This museum boasts several haunted objects, dolls, creepy photos, scary stories, and, of course, merchandise.
All for the low but curious price of eleven dollars.
I purchased a ticket and went on the last tour of the night, along with a young couple who just happened to be on a self-guided sightseeing tour of Gettysburg. They set up a ghost tour in the town right after the museum tour.
There’s a couple of rooms in the upstairs of this house, three to be specific. That night, I learned the origin of haunted dolls. It turns out that dolls used to be made of real human hair and teeth, and the theory is that these genuine human body parts saved spiritual attachments to their long-dead counterparts. It being Gettysburg, they also had a few relics from the Civil War.
One such relic was an amputation board.
An amputation board is precisely what it sounds like. It’s a long wooden board similar to a 19th-century hospital gurney, with the sole purpose of providing a backstop for the bone saw that cut off the now useless appendage. According to our guide, whose name escapes me, this particular human cutting board had seen over 170 amputations.
And all of the blood from those amputations had soaked into the wood.
That was my challenge for this tour. I paid 11 American dollars to press my hand against the blood of over 170 amputations.
So, I did just that. I consider myself a brave man, Traveler. I’m not an intelligent man, but I am a brave man.
She told me to touch the board with my left hand. Eagerly and somewhat skeptically, I placed my hand on the board.
It felt cold and damp on my fingers at first. To the best of my recollection, my left hand started to heat up.
And then it went numb.
Our tour guide told us that’s what 170 amputations felt like. I pulled my hand from the board, and we continued to the next room.
In this room, I experienced another new sense.
I won’t give too much away. These are actual events, and they are a business. But both I and the husband of the couple had to leave and walk outside at two different times. Anytime in my life that I may have seen an apparition, it was usually in glass, either behind a window or maybe a glance in a mirror. I’m not sure what the otherworldly connection is with glass, but they had an allegedly possessed mirror that they kept under a sheet.
And as I stepped in front of this mirror, I felt a sensation. It felt like someone grabbed me at the ankles and held my legs together. At the same time, it felt like someone, or something else, was pulling me upwards from my underarms, trying to rip me in half like a torture rack.
It’s here where I went outside. I returned, finished the tour, and went about my merry way.
However, these new sensations are still with me. This won’t be the last time I experience this kind of phenomenon.
When my pet turtle died and I went to bury him, I said my last goodbye, and funny enough, I felt a tingling in my left hand.
At least that one was a positive anomaly.
I visited another haunted museum, The Zak Bagans’ Haunted Museum in Las Vegas. It was fun and a two-hour trek through a series of rooms with themes in a supposedly possessed house. There were two rooms of note that affected me.
There’s a Wild West Room with a bunch of paraphernalia that Zak had purchased that all fit the westward expansion period; a series of old, non-working revolvers, saloon stools, pianos, and playing cards all greeted us inside. Looking at a revolver, I felt a painful throbbing in my left hand. It didn’t feel like it fell asleep; it felt like it was being stepped on or like a car was running over it.
I’m on camera shaking my hand around, trying to get the pain to subside.
In another room moments later, which contained the death bed of the guy who owned The Bunny Ranch, they made the case that the bed had been possessed by an evil spirit. They offered photographic evidence as well as speculation. As I walked by the bed, I felt overwhelming dizziness. It wasn’t like I was being pulled apart this time, but the vertigo had returned.
Everything cleared up, and I finished the rest of the tour.
Later, while exploring Dudleytown, Connecticut, supposedly one of the most haunted places in the United States, I had that vertigo again as I ventured deeper into the woods. I had to stop myself and make my way down the hill, lest I fainted there.
Finally, weeks ago, I took a daytime history tour at an old 18th-century mansion in Philadelphia. The home belonged to the purported father of American surgery, who had died in the house. In addition, the house’s first owner had died in the bedroom upstairs.
The surgeon had performed amputations, autopsies, and other kinds of surgery.
That’s important to know because even on a daytime tour, the parlor where he would perform these surgeries for people when he couldn’t make it to Pennsylvania Hospital caused my hand to spaz out again.
So now it’s like I have a reverse phantom limb, in a way. Instead of feeling like a limb that is no longer there, still is, from time to time, it now feels like I’m losing my hand even though I’m not.
So I have to ask,
Am I now cursed? Do I now have a superpower?
I think that maybe, Traveler, it’s both.
Until again,
Safe Travels
