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How Ghost Hunting is Like Living with Lyme Disease
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Memoir

How Ghost Hunting is Like Living with Lyme Disease

After years of searching for a diagnosis and wondering if it was all in my head, tracking paranormal activity felt eerily familiar.

Christina Diane Campbell
Dec 17, 2018
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How Ghost Hunting is Like Living with Lyme Disease
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Illustrations by Julia Vohl

“Is anybody here?” Silence. “We’d love to talk with you.” Silence. “We mean you no harm.” Silence. “Can you make a sound for us?” Diane’s voice creeps upward through the blackness with a tinge of desperation. In the daytime, she’s a nurse. Tonight, she’s a ghost hunter.

“How do you feel?” Her wind-chime words are meant for the many men who died in this bedroom almost 150 years ago, in pain.

Dion, deeper-pitched, speaks with authority. “If you want to talk to us, go to that light.” The pinprick-sized glow, red like fresh blood, comes from a plastic box on the 19th-century oak floor. It’s a combination motion sensor and electromagnetic field (EMF) detector.

We sit in a circle around the machine and wait for it to screech, which would indicate motion, possibly of the paranormal sort. Or perhaps a surge in the surrounding electromagnetic field will make the needle thwap across the screen like a smack in the face. This may represent a ghost (or, I remind myself, a m…

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