The Ghost Trap - part 1

A few years ago, I wanted to right a book about ghosts and ghost hunters, so I went to a local convention called ScareFest. It was a horror and paranormal convention, run by local ghost hunter Patti Starr.

She was a bit of a kook, but she got me in the door for free so I figured I owed her a story out of it.

This was the first time I had been to any sort of convention of any sort (not counting a small comic book convention I had my parents drop me off at as a teenager) and I wasn't sure what to expect. It was a lot of D-list celebrities for B-horror movies of which I had never heard.

And way to many small children dressed like Michael Myers from the Halloween movies. Nothing is quite as creepy as miniature Michael Myers, especially when they have a plastic butcher's knife and there seems to be one around every corner.

My brother came down to the Lexington Civic Center to see a Bigfoot expert who's blog he followed give a lecture. Basically the media had been in an uproar about a Bigfoot hoax that had occurred earlier in the year. As I remember it, a group of hunters claimed they had a Sasquatch body in their freezer but it turned out to be a rubber store-bought Bigfoot costume stuffed full of frozen meat.

He claimed that it was the people on his website who caught the hoax, who recognized the Bigfoot costume, but when someone from the audience asked him why he hadn't spoken up louder and sooner, he sort of stared off into space and mumbled an excuse.

I felt sorry for the man. He admitted that the hoax had meant record traffic to his site and he had been quoted as a Sasquatch expert in several national news articles and now he was cornered about why he hadn't done enough to debunk it.

My brother bought a signed copy of his book and I chatted with him for a little bit. I wore my wife's MP3 player around my neck for the entire weekend. When it was set to "record" and the switch was locked it looked like it was turned off.

I wasn't concerned about the duplicitness of it - I had a reporters notebook and made constant notes. I just couldn't write fast enough to capture the natural flow of conversation. They should have known I was quoting them.