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too.
    On the flip side, I also need an element of adventure, in case I get a little bored. The murders, suicides, abductions, scandals, and mysteries that built these towns are spellbinding to me. I’ve always found the dead more interesting than the living because they have more secrets to discover. I can talk to a living person today and learn their secrets pretty quickly, but the dead are tough nuts to crack. They lived in a different time with different lifestyles and even different speech. We sometimes think of them as rudimentary or simple people, but really they weren’t. They had the same problems we do, but different ways of dealing with them. That’s intriguing to me.
    When I travel to these towns, there are always mysteries to unravel. I can go back in time and pick up a cold case murder and try to ask the victim what happened. Communicating with spirits from the past is a true adventure. I get to meet the people of that era and area and see how different they were. Some say that the people create the environment, but after all my travels, I think it’s the other way around—the environment shapes the people. Those who live in a dirty place tend to be meaner, less trustworthy, and more violent. People who are brought up in a nicer place are likely to have better manners and care more about helping others. This is a generalization, of course, but I’ve observed a lot of people and find it to be true a lot of the time.
    Many people are stuck in a bad environment or situation that they can’t get away from. I was stuck in Detroit for years and kept telling myself that if I just made a little more money, I could leave. It was a miserable time because I never found my place there. There was no purpose to any of the jobs I held. I would go home and then go through the same meaningless stuff again the next day. I had no impact on people. There was no adventure. I wasn’t dissecting life to uncover its mysteries. That’s how I wanted to live, but I wasn’t sure how to accomplish it.

    As a kid, I used to fear that my life would be wasted. I would agonize over how I was going to live this finite life. We have only so much time, after all, and I didn’t want my only experiences with different cultures to be on TV or in the pages of
National Geographic.
I wanted to visit the Kansas plains, the Virginia battlefields, and the California coast. I wanted to see the world instead of being stuck in just one part of it. I wanted to feel the energies of new places and different people, and I wanted to experience the glories of history. But as I get older, I can see the benefits of settling down in a small town where you know everyone and become part of the lore. I absorb energy like a sponge everywhere I go. It allows me to see the world and my purpose in it. I wish everyone could do that. I wish everyone could see more than where they are today, and see how vast and wonderful the wide world is while also appreciating the beauty of the little corners.
    The guy in Pioche who escaped Vegas said that he was running from something. I don’t remember what it was (or maybe I just don’t want to give his secret away), but he was seeking peace in this small town.
    MAYBE I’M THE SAME.

5
D EEPER C ONNECTION
    Sometimes I zone out like Walter Mitty, and that’s not always a good thing.
    You know that old saying, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it”? Some days that’s me. I walk through the paranormal door to discover all I can about the spirit world, and I develop a deep connection to the other side that sometimes overtakes me completely, whether I want it to or not. After a paranormal investigation, I seem to have a residual connection with the spirits that I don’t know about until days, weeks, or even months later…when
they
want to make contact, not the other way around. It’s almost like being kidnapped, or at least forced to go somewhere and listen to something regardless of how you feel about