I write articles about cryptids and strange activity, but you may wonder what my personal experience with that stuff is. I have had experiences. Rarely have I spoken about them publicly. This will be the first time I am putting everything together in one place for anyone who may read this to see.
The first experience I remember is when I was in fifth grade. At that time, I did believe in Cryptids like Bigfoot. But I did not really believe in the “paranormal.” That includes ghosts. In fifth grade, I took a trip to the historic part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with my entire grade. As you can imagine (as long as you the history of America’s independence), historic Philly is home to some haunted locations and areas. We split into small groups and visited many sites such as Liberty Hall, the US Mint, and the Liberty Bell. My group also visited the Betsy Ross House. I remember feeling odd in one of the rooms, which may have been the basement. Or it may be more accurately described as uneasy. At the time I didn’t understand the feeling, nor did I really think anything of it. Years later, I am thinking of another experience I had with the same feeling (which I will describe later) and realized that I experienced it in the Betsy Ross House. So I jumped onto Google and did some research. It turns out that, like other areas in Philly, that location is haunted. It is actually one of the most active paranormal hotspots there. People have been grabbed, heard disembodied voices, and even seen the spirit of Betsy. Her ghost has been reported to be seen down in the basement, crying at the foot of a bed. An investigation featured on the show Ghost Hunters recorded moaning coming from the basement, which was also the location of the murder of a security guard which took place in 1980. Was I feeling the presence of the spirits that haunt the Betsy Ross House? Was I feeling the presence of Betsy Ross herself? While I will probably never know for sure, that is definitely what I believe. You can read more about the activity there here.
The second experience that I can remember with the paranormal was three years later. I took a trip with my STEM class to the Naval Air Station in Lakehurst, New Jersey. It is part of the state’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst. The base is home to much paranormal activity due to an incident that happened there. In 1937, the German Zeppelin known as the Hindenberg exploded as it descended to land at the base and crashed to the ground fully engulfed in flames within about 16 seconds. There were 36 passengers and 61 crew members on board. 13 passengers and 21 crew members died, as well as one person on the ground. Most of the survivors suffered major injuries. When first responders sifted through the rubble, bodies they found were brought into Hangar 1, which was the hangar the Hindenburg was actually going to land in. Today, the hangar is home to a scale version of an aircraft carrier, which is used for training exercises, as well as a historical museum. Those who work in the hanger claim to have experienced paranormal activity as a result of the tragedy, such as seeing ghosts in the rafters. I got to tour Hangar 1 and the aircraft carrier training set up within. I was told before we entered about the spirit activity, and the entire time I was on the lookout for anything. But I felt the same feeling I did in the Betsy Ross House. I didn’t realize until just last year that I had the same feeling in both situations. At the time I felt that my feeling in the hangar may have been a result of knowing about the activity, but having experienced the same feeling three years earlier I am not so sure anymore. So I have started to count this as my second paranormal experience. While some of this information I received directly from the base personnel that escorted us, you can learn more about the disaster here.
My third strange experience occurred two to three years later. I was in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania with my family. More than 50,000 Americans were killed in the battles that took place throughout Gettysburg, and it has become known as one of the biggest paranormal hotspots in the United States. Virtually the entire town experiences activity. We were walking through the Gettysburg National Cemetary, one of the most haunted locations in Gettysburg. We had gone in through the entrance by the Gettsyburg Address Memorial and headed along the path in the direction away from the road. 90-95% of the walk was uneventful, just a normal walk through the cemetery. But as we were walking on the path that parallels a road, we made our way to a portion of the path that had a slight hill to it. It was not a hill that required any effort to get up. It wasn’t any different than just walking on an even surface. Partway up the hill, I began to feel as if something was holding me back. Like some invisible force was grabbing me and adding extra weight. Or as if the wind was blowing strongly and I was fighting against it. But there was no wind. No one was touching me. Shortly after crossing over to the downgrade portion of the hill, the feeling stopped. That is when I really noticed it had been on me. I looked around and no one was by me, so I didn’t really think anything of it. But as time went on, what I experienced continued to weigh on my mind. As we were sitting outside of our hotel waiting for one of our family members to come back out, I asked those who were with me if they had been touching me at all during that time. Even if my sister were doing something as simple as grabbing the hood of my sweatshirt just to bother me I wanted to know. No one was. My father asked why I was asking, so I explained what I had felt and that I thought I may have encountered a ghost. He believes in ghosts and wants to have his own encounter with one (I believe in ghosts but prefer to stay away from them and have had no desire to encounter them), so he was jealous of that. But he said there is a good chance it was a ghost. Thinking of that experience years after it happened (late 2021) is actually what catalyzed me to think of my feeling in Hangar 1 and then in the Betsy Ross House, making me realize that over the years I may have had more experiences with the paranormal than I realized.
My final experience as of the time of this writing happened in August of 2021. I was outside taking photos of the full moon with my DSLR camera. It was a cloudy night, and I had a very brief window to get photos before the wall of clouds that was moving in quickly blocked my view of the moon. It had been broken clouds before then, and in the final break before the wall of clouds, I managed to snap a handful of photos. Upon reviewing them later on, they were all blurry due to my rush to get any photos at all. As I went through and deleted them, something told me to more closely examine the very last photo in the set. So I zoomed in and noticed that, in the very center of the moon, there was some anomaly that I hadn’t seen present in the others photographs. It does not fit into the category of being an airplane. The angle at which it was flying was unlike what a plane would be doing. I also checked the radar data available through flightradar24.com, and there weren’t any flights in that direction that would have been seen in the photograph. It wasn’t a part of the tree that shows up in the photo. It doesn’t look like a bug or a bat to me. But there is no way to tell for sure, so as of now it is simply classified as an unidentified flying object. Below are the two photographs. The first is the raw and unedited photo, and the second is a zoomed and edited version that I edited to make the object clearer and easier to see. I am open to the object being identified, so if you have an idea or would like the photo for analysis please let me know.
This is the last of my experiences. While none of them are as compelling as the experiences some others have had, or as compelling as the phenomenon being documented on Skinwalker Ranch, they were for me. They have continued to fuel my interest in the strange activity of our planet, and the desire to prove to the world that these things happen and decipher what causes them. If I have any experiences in the future, I will post them either in an update to this article or in a new article. If you have any questions or ideas about my experiences, I would love to hear them and if you have any experiences of your own I would love to hear about them.
Matthew Barberio
Global Strange Phenomenon
Global Strange Phenomenon 