THTSL Manual - "Hobbies"

Hobbies

"Hobbies: a way to enrich your life, or at the very least, to annoy the heck out of others."

   ~ M. Shanahan

Long ago, my older brother once told me that the real measure of a person lies in their interests and hobbies. For whatever reason, that made perfect sense to me then – and still does.

I’ve always been interested in a number of things, hobby-wise, and have managed to immerse myself in one pastime or another as my life trundled along. Among many other hobbies and interests, I turned music into a career, have sewed most of my clothes since the age of 15, baked my own bread and made home-made pasta like nobody’s business, and have painted life-sized murals on people’s buildings, the trusting souls! And, at the mid-life point I took up two pastimes that became passions for me: horses and photography. Lucky for me, those two things really go together. Not so lucky for my family and friends, however, I managed to amass approximately 2,000 pictures over the past 8 years alone – and the number continues to grow.

Believe it or not, there used to be an actual horse stable just behind our house. It was all torn down about 5 years ago to make room for a new housing development.  Built upon an old farm dating back to the early 1800’s, the stable became a place of refuge, fun, and excitement for folks, as well as for the horses that once lived there. That’s how and why I got super-interested in horses and what led to my getting Roxy, a Welsh Cob pony who thinks she’s a full-sized horse. More about that in another story; but for now, I want to focus on one special picture that I took one day…..

I was a lovely spring day and the sun was shining in all her glory. It was one of those “all is right with the world” days, and I headed on down to the stable. I had just bought my very first SONY digital camera and was busy taking pictures of everything in sight. It was only fitting I should take some great shots of Roxy and her companions, and the barn, the grounds, and so on.

That day, Cowboy, the stable manager, and his 4 year old son, Boot, were working with Dakota, a Shetland pony, in the barn. They were only too eager to have me take some pictures of them; and very proudly, little Boot got up on Dakota and began to trot down the aisle of the barn, with Cowboy at his side, “jes’ in case.”

I grabbed my camera, fiddled with some setting or other (I sometimes don’t believe in reading manuals and sometimes regretfully feel experience is the best teacher), and snapped three or four shots. I also photographed many of the horses as well as my own Roxy, and couldn’t wait to get home and see the results of my first photo shoot at the barn!

Slowly and carefully, I uploaded my pictures to my computer. “Wow! It’s working!” I giggled to myself. "I actually did it!"

One by one, the pictures appeared on my screen…until…..I stopped dead in my tracks. There, on the screen, was a picture of not two people and one pony - Cowboy, Boot, and Dakota- but one pony and four people!  The only thing is, two of the people were not there in the barn that day. In fact, when I showed Cowboy that photo, I found out they were never there and were no one Cowboy had ever seen or met. They simply did not exist. I also discovered that by accident, I had set the camera to night-time mode, which changed the shutter speed. Cowboy and Boot both look a little blurry; but the couple, while transparent, was as clear as glass.

This all led me to do some research on the old stable and what I discovered was a bit chilling. At one time, back during the mid to late 1800’s, it was an old farm. The entire Philadelphia area was a well-known part of the old Underground Railroad, where former slaves found refuge on their way to complete freedom. Many of the farms had hidden rooms in or around their barns and silos which were used to hide former slaves from those that were pursuing them.

When the old barn and homestead were demolished, some sort of hidden room was discovered, I was told by a real old-timer. The new stable was erected back in the 1950’s and no one ever gave the old farm very much thought after that – until I happened to capture two people in a picture who appeared to be from a different time and age. The man is barefoot;  the woman seems to be holding a baby in some type of swaddling. The man appears to be black, and the woman seemed to be either black or of Native American descent. What is odd is that there are two faces for the woman: one is looking dead-ahead, and the other seems to be a profile. You just have to sort of focus on it, as for one of those curious 3-D illusion images.

I went on to take many more pictures of the old stable and never again did this couple appear. However, over the next 2 years,  I took dozens and dozens of shots of orbs -- perfect, bright little circles floating in the air -- that filled the barn! One photo was so filled with orbs that I really thought my camera was defective. I had it checked out, but it turned out that there was nothing wrong with it at all. The orbs showed up just one more time, out front of my own house during a terrible storm, during which an electrical wire came down and fell in front of our car! We could not see the downed wire in the darkness, but when I showed my husband the picture, he went outside and very cautiously looked around. That’s when he spotted the wire!

The really sad part is that once the stable was torn down, I never captured any more orbs  in any pictures that I took and feel that this might never happen again. It’s just that for whatever reason, I was ‘favored’ that day and invited to see a very small and mysterious part of the world that many never get to see.

I thought right now, at Halloween time, it would be a great time to show you all my amazing photo! See below..

                 Look at the left hand side of the picture, next to the black trunk. 

                                               Here is a close-up:

The couple that wasn't there

Barn filled with orbs

Mysterious orbs appear even in broad daylight!

This is "Cowboy", literally covered with those mysterious orbs in the barn!

Orb in motion

Our car, surrounded by huge orbs

Roxy surrounded by orbs -- even outside!

"Dakota"