• AP Magazine

    An alternative way to explore and explain the mysteries of our world. "Published since 1985, online since 2001."

  • 1
An Interview with Bret and Gina Oldham of Halo Paranormal:Experiences with the Paranormal

By Brent Raynes




Bret and Gina Oldham of Lebanon, Tennessee, are a very friendly and outgoing and otherwise quite ordinary seemingly couple. She’s a legal assistant and he’s a musician, writer, designer, and entrepreneur. You would not otherwise guess that they’re also very passionate and serious about paranormal research and investigations.

In this exclusive interview, we’ll talk at length with Bret and Gina about their ongoing investigations and research into paranormal phenomena, with a great deal of emphasis on the mind-blowing results that they’re achieving with the so called “Ghost Box”!

Bret wrote and produced an audio book entitled "Ghost Stories of Las Vegas". More information about this can be obtained at: HaloParanormal.com.

For more information about the both of them, go to their Fackbook Page.

Their Fackbook site also has a review of some of their most outstanding spirit box audio files.

**********


Brent Raynes: Now sometimes your work takes you into situations where you have to help do things like house cleansings. Can you share some details on those kinds of episodes?

Bret Oldham: Yes, we don’t do it a lot, but we have run into such cases. We did a recent case like that with a young 14-year-old girl.

Gina Oldham: She was being visited by a tall, dark male presence at night while in bed. She said that he would just stare at her, but in the meantime this young lady’s attitude about herself started getting worse. Her mom at first really just brushed it off as like just being a teenager, but as she was telling me this story, because she knows what we do, I was telling her, “I don’t know. That almost sounds like whatever that is it is attaching itself to your daughter,” and we really felt like that was what was going on and it was having a negative effect on this child.

Bret Oldham: Well, you know that a negative spirit will go for the weakest link, even on an investigation sometimes, but especially children or young people at that puberty level, where they’re really vulnerable. Sick, weak, and all that kind of stuff, whatever makes them an easy target, and when Gina was doing the preliminary questions, where we were interviewing this young lady, we found out that she had just returned from Hawaii.

Gina Oldham: She was working with her brother over there and some of the work that she had done took her to hospitals and schools and places like that, and she noticed that when she returned home from Hawaii that’s when stuff started happening.

Bret Oldham: We thought that she might have picked it up over there.

Brent Raynes: I’ll tell you, there are some pretty spooky things that have been reported over in Hawaii.

Bret Oldham: During this investigation, we found him and we knew that he was there. We’re big proponents of the use of sage, and we have a few affirmations and prayers that we use, and we also have the people who own and live in the house participate. We always tell people that we have the domain in our dimension. A lot of people don’t realize that and they’re a little afraid, but the spirits do have to obey our wishes because it is our domain.

Gina Oldham: And we also feel that it is important that the home owner also affirm that they want, whatever this presence, to leave. I mean, it helps if we do, but there’s nothing stronger than having the home owner affirm it also.

Bret Oldham: So we’ll do a thorough cleansing like that, and in this particular case it was amazing. There were some people outside having a little bonfire while we were doing the cleansing, and we actually had the mother and the daughter participate in it and listen, and like Gina just said, command it to leave and do the affirmations and all of that.

Gina Oldham: When we got finished and the girl went outside to join the others at the bonfire the adults were amazed because they said that her personality had already changed.

Bret Oldham: Yeah, just like some weight had come up off of her. She had started smiling and her whole mood had changed. The house had felt lighter. We have run into that several times. I’ve actually picked up EVPs. This happened up here in Lebanon one time. It turned out to be an older couple who had both died in the house, and they had owned the house for years and years, and they were still there, and a young family had moved in and they had a bunch of kids and essentially it was mostly the lady who was appearing to the kids and scaring them, and it got to the point where this young family were all living in the livingroom of this house.

Gina Oldham: Then they eventually left.

Bret Oldham: Yeah, but we got EVPs where I told Gina, “Okay, go get the sage,” and we got an EVP from the woman saying “don’t do it”, then she said, “you’re making me mad,” then she tells the guy “he’s going to do it.” I mean, they knew exactly what we were getting ready to do and they did not like it.

Gina Oldham: During a cleansing, we use sage and different prayers and then we also go around to all of the doors and windows and anoint them with oil, or making the sign of the cross with the oil. Basically we use olive oil.



Brent Raynes: What are your personal thoughts on so-called “ghosts”? Are they spirits of the deceased, or are there negative, demonic type beings or angelic forms of intelligence?

Gina Oldham: I’d have to say all of the above. I think sometimes we have dealt with entities who have not exactly crossed over and are where they need to be, and then sometimes I think they have completely crossed over and they’re fine, but they’ve come back of their own will to help or to visit relatives. Then I think, from time to time, we’ve run into entities who may not have been human before.

Bret Oldham: Yeah, we’re definitely dealing with multi-dimensional elements in these things. There’s no doubt about it. It’s not as simple as people thinking you died and you go to heaven, or hell, whatever your belief system is. It’s just not that simple.
We’ve even asked the spirit box how many dimensions there are. It’s always been 11 or 12. It’s always been one of those two numbers. I don’t know why it’s always been one of those two.

Brent Raynes: As long as it doesn’t stop on the number 13. (laughs)

Bret Oldham: I do think that Hollywood and all of these ghost shows really play up on the demonic aspect of things and I think that that is really overblown. I think that the devil gets way too much credit.

Gina Oldham: I think that those things might possibly happen but I think they’re rare.

Bret Oldham: Very rare.

Brent Raynes: So what do you think about a lot of these shows like Paranormal State, Ghost Hunters, Destination Truth, Most Haunted and others that have become so popular in recent years? I know that they’ve certainly made it easier for us to talk with the general public about these things too.

Bret Oldham: Yeah, they’ve brought the awareness to the public. They’re good for that.

Gina Oldham: I think that it’s a double edged sword. It can be good and bad, all at the same time.

Bret Oldham: It gets a lot of people thinking that all they’ve got to do is buy a K2 meter and go out on a couple investigations.

Gina Oldham: And everybody is out looking for a demon.

Bret Oldham: Yes, everything is demons and all of that kind of a deal. Of course, now it has gotten to the point where one particular show (well, more than one) is accused of faking stuff and I think that a lot of the claims are pretty legit and so now it’s starting to kind of discredit the whole field and harm it more than it helps it.

Brent Raynes: I know that from my own experience, the place I’ve been working at in state government since 1985, I’ve never been able to be so open about the paranormal as I have in very recent years. X Files got people talking about a lot of these things, but it has been more the reality TV I think.

Bret Oldham: You’re right. I think X Files really opened things up.

Gina Oldham: You know, at least with a show like the X Files, you know what you’re watching. It may be loosely based on some case, but you knew it was a fictional show. It wasn’t people prancing around claiming what they’re doing is real, but then behind the scenes they’re faking things.

Bret Oldham: We don’t even watch the ghost shows anymore. I mean, our own investigations are a whole lot more exciting and we get a whole lot more evidence. It just cracks us up because they’ll go out there for eight or nine hours and they pull away two or three EVPs. They get two or three EVPs and they just go on like they found the Holy Grail. If we end up with less than 15 or 17 on an investigation, we think it’s almost a disappointment.
Of course, they’re going around with big TV crews. We talked with one guy who had been on Ghost Hunters International and they had gone to five reputed haunted locations around the world in a row where they hadn’t come up with a shred of evidence. I asked him how big a crew do you have, that you go around with, and he said generally about 17 people.
As you know, we like to do small groups. We’ve always found the most activity in smaller groups. If you’re going to bring a spirit out, and you’re walking around with a crew of 17 people and then you’ve got 5 or 6 people on your show, that’s quite an audience.

Gina Oldham: And let me add to that and say that while group size is a factor, I think it also goes back again to someone’s energy and intent and I feel like if you’re too skeptical that you close your energy down, and you close yourself down to paranormal activity.

Bret Oldham: We’ve gotten some absolutely phenomenal photographs and then you show it to somebody and they go like, “Oh, that’s Photo Shop.” The two apparitions that we got down at Printers Alley in Nashville (TN) that time and we sent it off to a guy who was a former consultant for Paranormal State, he’s a police officer, and he analyzed it and he said, “Yeah, I just checked out your photo and I have to say I think it’s real.”

But a lot of the stuff with the spirit box is irrefutable when you’re coming up with future predictions, personal information about people, and you have other people recognizing it and you get more and more verification and stuff. I think there is a lot still to be learned about it but it’s definitely opening into the other side, and when you go back to, in my opinion, one of the top two or three greatest minds of modern mankind, Nikola Tesla, the guy who pretty much started it all, and then someone like Thomas Edison, who was working on a machine (as he was quoted in Scientific American magazine) to communicate with the dead – well, I mean if you’ve got great minds like that, and in Tesla’s case he was actually doing it, I think somewhere along the way science kind of dropped out and now there has been a recent resurgence in it and once again kind of thanks to the You Tube and television and all of the media, but people have to use it the right way and not just for kicks, like “Oh hey, I’m talking to a dead person.” You’ve got to ask credible questions and try and further what this is all about. This is about the greatest mystery of mankind and what happens to us when we die.

Brent Raynes: You know, I was reading again through Dr. Berthold Schwarz’s book Psychic Dynamics, and years ago he wrote that EVP studies and psychic photography were the two most important areas of psychic phenomena to be investigated by modern science.

Bret Oldham: I agree.

Brent Raynes: This is why I really wanted to bring him in on our investigative work when he was still alive and maybe do some long-distance experiments with him because he loved this kind of stuff. I thought that this would be so great.

Bret Oldham: It’s kind of ironic that Dr. Schwarz passed on but then again it seems like he may end up being of more use in furthering our research on the other side.

Brent Raynes: The Dr. Schwarz we’re getting on the spirit box sounds very kind and gentle, as he did in real life in talking with him and in many, many letters that he wrote me over the years.

Bret Oldham: As you know, we have to use Bishop and we’ve asked Bishop before to tell the people what they’re supposed to do or how they’re supposed to do it, to communicate with us, but I think Dr. Schwarz seems like he already has it figured out, and for somebody who has recently passed he seems like a really strong energy.


**********


Editor’s Note: Interestingly, at this point in our recorded phone conversation a whispering female sounding voice can be heard saying what sounds like “and you.” Bret had just concluded his statement and I was about to bring up another point.

Perhaps a spirit had interjected a final remark for this interview. Bret, Gina, and I have talked about how in past conversations, Bret seems to have a high level of psychic energy. Maybe this was confirmation of that.


Sunday, October 13, 2024