Ghosts, Poltergeists & Apparitions > Ghost hunters

Victoria Dingler

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Victoria Dingler was just a teenager in 1976 when she heard the neighbor boys shooting a few hoops in the driveway outside her bedroom window. Idly she peered through the curtains, watching them leap and pirouette. They were light on their feet, as well they might be. They were dead.

When she got around to it, Dingler mentioned to her mom that she'd seen the kids, who'd been killed a few days earlier in an auto crash. Her mother responded that she'd seen them around, too.

Such nonchalance -- rooted in belief of life after death and a certainty that the dead can return -- has served Dingler well. The 43-year-old League City computer support worker said she has rubbed shoulders with all manner of "residual energies." She's seen things and been touched by things, heard voices in her head while visiting graveyards.

For Dingler, it's all in a day's work.

She's a ghost buster.

Dingler began investigating possible ghostly episodes for the public seven years ago, and, since then, at least 100 distressed area residents have turned to her for help.

Half of the cases, she said recently, were busts -- the ghosts proved to be nothing more than creaking floorboards or rumbling plumbing. But in the others, the ones Dingler sensed were legitimate, she engaged the wayward departed in earnest conversation.

"I just asked them to go somewhere else," she said. "I didn't want the people worried by a spirit, and I didn't want any spirit to be unwanted. If I felt they were lost, I'd tell them to go to the light. But if they were just visiting spirits, I'd just tell them to leave. I've had at least two people call later and say they missed their ghosts. They asked me to bring them back."

Dingler never charges for her services.

"Victoria always was an unusual child," said her mother, Ruth Burgess. "She always had such sympathy and feeling for people."

"Victoria has a heart of gold," added her sister, Melissa Eaton of McAllen. "She's one of the most exceptional people I've ever met."

Many might say all three women are exceptional -- each claims that she's had firsthand experience with the lingering departed.

Burgess said she plays host to a ghost dog at her League City home, and Eaton claimed that, while on a visit, she once inadvertently petted it.

Their first collective ghostly experience occurred about three decades ago when -- living in Corpus Christi -- they visited the kids' paternal grandmother in Houston. Grandma Frances Morgan lived in a spooky, old, barn-shaped house with a tin roof and a jungle of plants grown up around it. It was on Tautenhahn Road, just off Little York Road.

"My grandmother's house was haunted," Dingler said. "My cousins were all from Houston, and when we visited, we'd all stay on the second floor. At night, when we had to go upstairs to bed, we hated it. You could hear someone walking up the steps. You could feel things brush past you. Being youngsters, our imagination just flew away."

One night Eaton, who was sharing an upstairs bed with Dingler, saw the ghost.

"I woke up and saw a person kind of by the door with his back to me," Eaton said. "What I saw was white, all white, clad in white jeans and a white shirt. I could distinctly see features. He vaguely resembled my brother. I said, `Dennis, what are you doing?' Then I realized, `Oh my God! It's a ghost!' I was the biggest scaredy-cat in the world."

Burgess, sleeping downstairs, said she saw the ghost meander through the living room, pausing to turn off a living room lamp atop the TV. When the panicked sisters charged downstairs to share their news, Burgess -- feigning disbelief -- told them they were mistaken and ordered them back to bed.

Over the years, Dingler's paranormal experiences mounted. She saw the dead basketballers in Corpus Christi. Living in Albuquerque, N.M., her house was filled with mysterious frigid spots, she recalled, and in Charleston, S.C., she shared a house with a shadowy female form who hid diaper bags and driver's licenses.

Back in Texas in the mid-1980s, she said, she heard the voice of her dead grandmother in her head.

"I started going to different cemeteries," Dingler said. "I really could feel different types of energy. I could feel angry energy like someone had passed on without finishing all they wanted to do. Angry, upset, like someone yelling at you.

"There would be some very happy and peaceful, like sitting down next to your favorite aunt and not saying a word. You could feel it going grave to grave. Some had no feeling whatever -- they weren't there."

One of the strangest cases involved a League City office building.

Workers reported seeing heavy doors open of their own accord and radios that mysteriously changed stations. Dingler said when she opened one of the office doors, she came face to face with a Confederate soldier, who quickly faded away.

One of the Houston area's most psychically active spots, Dingler said, is the old Jefferson Davis Hospital near downtown. Built near an old cemetery, Dingler said, "it's the most you can see in a place that's not occupied."

Once Dingler watched a man walk near the old hospital, then fade away. She said she's heard ghostly music and the squeak of spectral gurneys.

A ghostly nurse has been seen in a former nurses' dormitory, now a government office building. Dingler cautioned that the hospital is county property and open to visitors only by permission.

Investigators of the paranormal often use high-tech devices -- meters to detect electric energy fields, infrared cameras to capture ghostly "orbs" and tape machines to record nocturnal laughter and groans. Dingler occasionally uses such devices, but most often she relies on her senses.

"I don't use my equipment because when I use my own hands, I can feel better," she said. "Well, I'll take a compass. If you have magnetic energy, it will move a lot. But using your hands, you can feel the difference in energy, detect cold spots. You need a clear mind and to be in a quiet state so that you can concentrate and feel."

Reared a Catholic, Dingler occasionally has discussed her experience with Catholic clergy.

"They're just as varied as everyone else," she said. "Some say it's the devil, some say it's angels sent down to talk. Everybody is at a conflict about what is real and what is not."

Dingler's husband, Michael, a space program engineer, is a genial skeptic.

"I support her endeavors," he said, "but I don't go on ghost hunts. ... I've not had any paranormal experiences. We really don't talk that much about it. Possibly there's something to it -- maybe ghosts or maybe electrical fields and magnetics."

Carl Scott, a St. Thomas University psychology professor who uses paranormal cases as "a hook in teaching" was a bit more pointed in his criticism.

"It's the standard line," he said, "there are no haunted houses, only haunted people."

Scott suggested ghostly experiences can be explained as unusual but essentially normal sights and sounds.

"Often, they can be chalked up to sleeping conditions, a sleepy state," he said. "Other people have hallucinations as a result of drugs or alcohol."

At this point, he said, there is no scientific evidence that ghosts exist.

"I know how fallible people's memories are," he said. "I know how easily people misperceive and misconstrue."

Dingler acknowledged that some are eager to accept a paranormal explanation to normal events.

"People want to believe," she said. "I think everyone wants to know there's more after life, that death isn't the end."

Skeptics have their place, she said, but she defended her beliefs.

"I believe," she said, "that sometimes God gives people a day pass."

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