Thornewood Castle, an elegant bed and breakfast at Lakewood, near Tacoma, Washington, has attracted curiosity seekers ever since it served as the set for the Stephen King miniseries, Rose Red, in 2002. The castle boasts its own long history of ghosts, but a murdering house a la King it is not. Nonetheless, overnight guests often get plenty of frights.

Thornewood is a bona fide castle because of its parapet, but it looks more like an English-style manor house. That's no accident, for its original owner, Chester Thorne, was enamored with England and imported actual pieces of English castles and manor homes for its construction from 1911-14. Thorne, a rags-to-riches entrepreneur, set his majestic home on 100 acres on the shores of American Lake. A Quaker, he was renowned for his generosity.

But his family had a troubled history that left ghostly fingerprints in the castle, long after the original occupants were gone. After several changes of ownership, and a period in which the house was subdivided into apartments, its original glory has been restored. The current owners, Wayne and Deanna Robinson, operate it as a bed-and-breakfast, and are proud of its haunted heritage and its role in Rose Red and the sequel, The Diary of Emily Rimbauer.

He is the father of Fortean phenomenon — all of those events that defy the natural order as it is currently understood. Rains of frogs, invasions of previously undocumented insects, chunks of wood or other matter that mysteriously fall from the sky... he documented everything, asking hard questions about what these events told us about the world in which he lived. He was Charles Fort, and his story is as intriguing as many of the events which he chronicled in his books.

Fort worked as a newspaper reporter in New York around the turn of the 20th century. Through this work, he became intrigued by stories of events that simply did not fit into the rational view that science applied to the world. Fort himself took a view of extreme skepticism toward the world. He didn't believe in anything, least of all what he perceived to be the flimsy attempts made by science to present a neat and rational view of the world. He had a particular dislike for science, and he seemed to take perverse pleasure in knocking modern scientists down a few pegs by unearthing stories that threw a monkey wrench into their theories on physics, biology and reality in general. For 27 years, he poured over newspapers and journal articles, compiling stories of things that did not fit. He had little structure to his collections of these articles and his overall purpose seems to have been merely to present visions of the impossible and, through these visions, call into question the methods by which modern individuals tried to order the world.

Throughout its eight hundred year history, Bisham Abbey in the UK has housed English nobles and even royalty. Queen Elizabeth I spent time here when in exile. Bisham Abbey is ranked as the third most haunted building in the country. A secret passage located on the grounds is reportedly haunted and strange lights have been seen on many occasions that appear to "dance" above the lawn.

The building also has its very own ghost, known as Lady Elizabeth Hoby, who once lived at the Abbey. Many believe that she still remains because she never recovered from the death of her son. Apparently she's made a habit of threatening guests by ripping blankets off of beds and throwing objects. Guests recognize her from her portrait that still hangs in the building. Strangely, while most witnesses have been able to make the connection to the portrait, there is one detail that doesn't go along with her portrait — Lady Hoby's hands and face appear black when her apparition manifests.

To honor the Abbey's rich English history and its ghosts, the UK'sFright Nights will hold a festival on Saturday, May 10th from 7 p.m. to 12 p.m. Guests will get the chance to investigate with leading paranormal investigators of the UK and work with psychics in the buildings most haunted rooms. The event will include paranormal-themed lectures, psychic fair and costumed actors will tell tales of the Abbey's history and stories of its resident ghosts. Tickets can be purchased online.

Our latest reader submission comes from LB.

When I was 8 years old I had a friend named "Julie." The house we lived in was never previously owned and my bedroom had a 6-foot mirror on a wall near my closet that was built in years before. "Julie" would ALWAYS show herself to me through the mirror when I would play near it.

I honestly do not remember the conversations we had except for one. About a year into the "relationship" with my new friend, She decided to "come out" of the mirror. She stood by my bed as I was playing with my dolls and said, as clear as a bell, "Tell my mom I said Goodbye." I was never scared of Julie, although I brought her up on many occasions to my parents. My mom started asking me to explain what she looked like in every detail, down to the clothes she was wearing, and My mom just stared at me. She knew something, and I always knew it. I never saw Julie after this, But she did come into my life again about four years later.

I was doing a project for history class on my family, so I was digging up old pictures and things to use. I came across a photo that looked all too familiar... It was Julie, I knew that instantly, I could never forget her face. I brought the photo to my mom and demanded she tell me who and what this was. She broke down. Julie was her daughter, my SISTER! My mother had been keeping a secret from me. Julie was born before me, she was the twin of the sister I have now... she died in a tragic Freak accident when she was 5 years old. My mother and older sister never brought it up, because they thought It would be too hard on me and since I was so young when I started seeing her, my mother did not want to "feed" my curiosity.

Believe it or not, there are classes you can take to become a paranormal investigator. While many are free, others do charge. However, there are so many other resources available that you shouldn't have to pay to take a class. In addition, there are countless theories regarding the realm of the paranormal, so it's probably best to avoid paying for a class. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions.

It's important to understand that a fascination with the paranormal doesn't always equate to an ability to investigate. To see if the investigative environment is a comfortable setting for you, do a test run. Take another person and go somewhere local. Go there during the daytime and go there at night. Don't take anything elaborate. Take a notepad, a pencil, a digital camera, a simple voice recorder and lots of batteries. Go to your location more than once. Research the location's history. Write down everything that happens. If you feel comfortable doing all this, then you know you can take more steps to become an investigator. If you were totally scared, however, maybe it's best that you don't go any further. You don't want to put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable. You need to be able to think, interact and react to all events, paranormal or not, rationally.

Andrew Calder appeared in an episode of "Paranormal State" titled "Devil in Syracuse." He and I recently spoke about his involvement with exorcisms.
Emily: How long have you been an Episcopal priest?

Andrew: I have been an Episcopal Priest for the past five years, before that I was a deacon within our order. I have been involved in paranormal cases for about the past 10 or so years.

Emily: What got you interested in demonology and the paranormal?

Andrew: I got involved in the paranormal like most people, wanting to know more about ghosts, hauntings and the like. While investigating cases, I came across a higher than average amount of people suffering from negative cases. And due to such, tried to find people to help them, but found there was not many folks, groups, people out there to provide any kind of legitimate help at that time. So began my journey with the negative and with God — which unfolded over the years.

They say that lightning never strikes in the same place twice, but that is not the case with UFOs. The Royal Air Force base located at Lakenheath-Bentwaters in England was the site of two significant UFO encounters spaced almost exactly 25 years apart. Witnesses at the NATO-affiliated air base reported the first incident in 1956. On the night of August 12th of that year, unidentified objects were spotted in the base's air space. The next night, things got really interesting. A transport pilot flying near the base reported seeing a number of lights in the sky. Controllers in the air tower at the Bentwaters base also observed these unidentified lights as they passed near their location. Base radar confirmed that something was in the skies that night, and it clocked the unidentified objects as flying at an astounding 2,500 miles per hour.

This would have been extraordinary enough, but then a stationary object was sighted hovering just outside of the base. There was enough concern over this object that a Venom night-fighter jet was deployed to investigate. As the fighter jet approached it, the stationary object leapt into motion, rapidly accelerating to supersonic speeds. The UFO seemed to be taking evasive action, zipping here and there in the sky with the fighter jet struggling to keep up. The chase lasted for over 30 minutes, and before it was over, the UFO had turned the tables on the jet, whose pilot had to initiate some evasive maneuvers of his own to get the object off his tail. Running low on fuel, he landed, and a second jet was sent into the skies after the thing. This Venom fighter quickly developed instrument problems, however, and was rapidly grounded. The UFO left shortly afterward, as mysteriously as it had arrived.

She's not a mournful dark specter, but she once brooded over a cemetery and inspired strange tales of weird events. Black Aggie is a legend in ghost lore, and tied to one of the early presidents of the United States.

The story of Black Aggie originated with the suicide death of Marian Adams, the wife of Henry Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams. Depressed over the death of her father, Marian drank a fatal dose of potassium in 1885. She was buried in Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Her grieving husband commissioned the famous sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to create a piece for her gravesite.

It's said in folklore that the dead will come back to take care of unfinished business. Sometimes that business is very strange. Take the case of a drowned man who would not rest until he got his thigh bone back.

The case, documented in scientific literature, took place between 1937 and 1940 in Iceland. Hafsteinn Bjornsson, one of Iceland's most famous trance mediums, was conducting a series of seances. Suddenly an uninvited ghostly visitor appeared and in a grouchy manner said, "I am looking for my leg. I want to have my leg." The leg, he said, was "in the sea."

There's a very strange place in Connecticut. If you attempt to go there, the State Police will fine you $75 or more. Dudleytown, as it's called, no longer exists as a "town." Instead, you'll find only the foundations of old buildings grown over with foliage and dominated by trees. According to legend, the area inherited a curse from three brothers who brought it with them from England.

A curse was allegedly born in 1510 when Edmund Dudley was beheaded for an attempted overthrow of King Henry VIII. During the beheading, a curse was spoken against the Dudley family and stated that every Dudley in Edmund's lineage would find themselves "surrounded by horrors." Two more generations of Dudleys lost their heads. In 1748 Gideon Dudley, a descendent of Edmund Dudley, settled in the area of Connecticut that would later bear his name. Several years later his two brothers Barzillai and Abiel joined him. In fact, Dudleys came from all over to live in this dark forested land — and the town's name eventually followed. There were about a hundred residents at most. Dudleytown was not an official town, however, but part of the township of Cornwall. The name mostly played on the fact that the area had attracted a lot of Dudleys.

Do children remember their past lives? This question occupied the life's work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, an insightful psychiatrist and founder of the University of Virginia's Department of Perceptual Studies (formerly the Department of Personality Studies).

Stevenson did not believe that only children can remember their past lives, but he felt that the most convincing proof could be found among children, particularly when they manifested knowledge that they could have no previous exposure to. Although there have been several very convincing cases of adults remembering their past lives (for example, the Bridey Murphy case), one of the problems with adult past-life memories is that skeptics can always argue that the memories are more related to a process called cryptoamnesia. In cryptoamnesia, a person learns something, such as details about a typical peasant's life in Ireland, and then forgets about learning the information. When they find that they know specific details about daily life in Medieval Ireland, they then mistakenly assume that this information is tied to a past life, rather than some documentary they happened to watch as a child.

In 2003, security staff at Hampton Court in London, a 16th century palace once home to King Henry VIII, reviewed closed-circuit security footage after fire alarms went off near an exhibition hall with no apparent cause. Upon viewing the tape, guards witnessed two heavy doors open by themselves and then moments later a cloaked figure appeared in the doorway to slam them shut. The camera caught the doors opening on their own at the same time the day before and at the same time the day after but the alleged apparition was only caught once. Security guard James Faukes said that "It was incredibly spooky because the face just didn't look human." Australian tourists claimed to have seen a similar figure in that same area. Palace staff affirmed that tour guides of the Hampton Palace do not enter that area nor do they wear costumes that resemble the clothing worn by the figure. Ever since this footage was released, the content has been a source of extreme debate between skeptics and paranormal enthusiasts. While some paranormal experts dismiss the footage as a hoax, others call it a major paranormal discovery. Common arguments from skeptics of the footage note that the camera seems to move as if someone is holding it and that the person would have been able to push the doors open to give the allusion that they opened on their own. Defenders of the video cite that the fire alarms went off on three separate occasions due to these doors opening and the figure was not seen in the doorway two of the three times.

The Hampton Court, built in 1525, has long been subject to claims of paranormal activity. Some people have even asserted that the figure seen in 2003 resembles King Henry VIII, who married six times and was the father of Queen Elizabeth I. Other stories of haunts in Hampton Palace include the ghost of Catherine Howard, the fifth wife of Henry, who was charged for adultery and placed under house arrest. After escaping the guards and begging Henry for her life, she was executed. There is also the ghost of Jane Seymour, Henry's third wife who died in childbirth, who has been seen walking through the courtyard holding a lit candle. Then there is the ghost of a woman in grey who some people connect with Sibell Penn, the nurse of Edward, Henry's only son. Finally, the apparition of a dog has been spotted several times in and around a closet known as the Wolsey closet.

We recently followed up with Cheryl Byrne, the owner of the home featured on the Paranormal State episode "Man of the House."

Cheryl has remained in touch with the PRS since the investigation, and told us that there has been quite a bit of activity since the team came to visit. One of the more memorable events involved her grandson, Andy.

Cheryl saw that Chip Coffey was in the area for a conference and gave him a call to discuss some of what had been happening. Chip listened to her and asked about a child named Joey. Cheryl told him there was no Joey living there, and he said that he was getting strong feelings about the name. Soon after, Cheryl's husband Bill told her that he'd found a bunch of kids' names written in the cement in the back of the garage — and one was Joey. Around the same time, Adam told her he heard a little boy screaming really loud for his mommy.

The Dalai Lama is the governmental and spiritual leader of Tibet, now an occupied territory of China. Tibetan Buddhists believe that each Dalai Lama is a reincarnation of the last, running all the way back to the first, Gendun Drup, born in 1391. Each Dalai Lama's life is believed to constitute a portion of the unbroken chain of incarnations of the bodhisattva of compassion, Chenresig. Chenresig is thought to embody the compassion of all the Buddhas. There have been 14 Dalai Lamas. Each Dalai Lama is referred to as the number of his incarnation followed by "Dalai Lama." For instance, the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is addressed as "His Holiness, The Fourteenth Dalai Lama." After the death of each Dalai Lama, Buddhist monks search for his reincarnation. They know where to look based on various signs and visions. Each child who has been identified as the true reincarnation has exhibited extreme familiarity with the former Lama's possessions. Sometimes it has taken several years to find the child. Since the fifth reincarnation, the child has left his or her family to go to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to be trained by the other Lamas. Between the seventeenth century and 1959, the Dalai Lama led the Tibetan government. However, when China invaded and occupied Tibet in 1959, His Holiness fled to India where he currently remains in exile. Gyatso is still considered the spiritual leader of Tibet.

In the 1880s, a politician from Minnesota ensured that the world would always remember the tale of the lost continent of Atlantis. Ignatius Donnelly, who served variously as a senator, congressman and lieutenant governor of Minnesota authored several books on the topic, including Atlantis: The Antediluvian World. Donnelly's work, and his reputation as a statesman, helped to bring the story of Atlantis out of the shadows of fringe myth, inspiring serious research into the question of whether Atlantis really existed.

More than a hundred years later, people are still wrestling with that question. Although it is attributed to an Egyptian source, the story of the lost continent of Atlantis first appeared in the works of the Greek philosopher Plato. In his works, Timaeus and Critias, Atlantis is described as an island nation that sunk beneath the seas in a terrible catastrophe that took place in the course of a night and a day. As compelling as the story of the sunken nation may seem, Plato recounted the story primarily as a cautionary tale for the city-state of Athens. Athens is the real focus of Plato's work, and Atlantis is, at most, an interesting aside. There is nothing to indicate whether or not Plato himself took the tale of the lost civilization as fact.

Well, not officially. It is pretty odd, however, that a book written in 1898 by Morgan Robertson entitled "Futility, closely mirrors the real-life tragedy that occurred 14 years later involving the R.M.S. Titanic. In Robertson's book, the Titan, a transatlantic liner crosses the Atlantic Ocean on her maiden voyage, strikes an iceberg on her starboard side and sinks. If the obvious similarities aren't creepy enough for you, read on.

Both the fictional ship and the real ship sunk during the month of April — the Titan on the 15th and the Titanic on the 14th. The Titan carried 24 lifeboats and 3,000 passengers while the Titanic carried 20 lifeboats and 2,207 passengers. The Titan measured at 800 feet long and weighed 75,000 tons and the Titanic measured at 882.5 feet and weighed 66,000 tons. Both ships had three propellers. Both ships were going between 23 to 25 knots upon striking an iceberg. Oh, and it gets even weirder. Both ships sunk in similar areas of the Atlantic and the Titan left from New York to sail to England while the Titanic left England to sail to New York. In the fictional tale, the ship was called the largest ship of the time, unsinkable and "one of the greatest works of man." The Titanic was also the largest ship at the time, it was said to be unsinkable, and "a wonder of the age."

Imagine what life would be like if you always saw double: this world and the spirit world. Everywhere you went, you saw ghosts of the dead walking among the living, and phantom scenes from the past superimposed upon the present.

That's what "reality" looks like to Karl Petry, a psychic whose fame is on the rise. Petry makes the "I see dead people" kid in Sixth Sense look like an amateur.

Seeing double can be a bit disorienting at times, but Petry long ago learned how to accommodate his unusual ability. His own sixth sense opened in childhood, when he began seeing phantom scenes from the past. Like many young psychics, he soon learned that adults did not appreciate his uncanny knowledge, and so he kept quiet about his visions of the spirit world until well into adulthood.

Jamie Hernandez is a counselor for the Paranormal Research Society and we recently spoke about how her work comes into play during paranormal investigations.

Emily: What is involved in determining whether or not a person is experiencing psychological, emotional problems or a haunting?

Jamie: This is a difficult question to answer, because so often on cases I've worked on, the paranormal goes hand in hand with emotional and psychological issues — it is rarely one or the other. As a paranormal investigator, there have been cases I've worked on where just by doing a phone interview, the client seemed to be disoriented and confused, and so I would recommend that they receive a medical and psychological evaluation before pursuing help from a paranormal investigator. I think you always have to try to find natural explanations first. Additionally, if a client self-reports a history of a psychiatric disorder, or abuse of certain drugs, you'll want to get more information about that before looking at the paranormal.

The Mayan people, who flourished between 200 AD and 900 AD, had an advanced calendrical system that calculated time in Short Counts and Long Counts. They looked at time as a series of cycles, and, according to their Long Count, our current age will end on the Winter Solstice in 2012. A lot has been made in recent years of the Mayan Calendar and this ominous date. There is a strong New Age current that looks upon this quickly advancing time as a promise of change. In their view of things, 2012 will be a great time of spiritual evolution when the collective vibration of humanity will ascend to something better, brighter, and more advanced. Some believers in this point of view go so far as to assert that our very DNA will undergo an evolutionary change as part of this planetary ascension.

According to another school of thought, however, 2012 is a dark date that could bring about world-wide upheaval and destruction. Much of this is based upon the belief in a mysterious Planet X, sometimes called planet Nibiru, that is supposedly orbiting our solar system on an oblique angle in a cycle that brings it catastrophically near to earth every 3600 years. The name for planet Nibiru, and the belief that is has ties with extra-terrestrial beings once worshipped as ancient gods owes much to the writings of Zecharia Sitchin, a proponent of the Ancient Astronaut theory, who further asserts that the gods and goddesses of ancient Sumer were extraterrestrials.