Blog Review: Haunt Jaunts

I would like to give a shout out to one of my new favorite blogs, Haunt Jaunts.  Courtney is a avid traveler, gifted writer, and most importantly, a Ghost enthusiast, who brings us regular updates on the world of spooky travels.

Interested in sleeping with a spirit?  Vacationing with a ghost?  Check out Courtney’s blog and find the perfect location.  Here’s her brief summary:

I decided to combine my interests and start Haunt Jaunts, a travel blog for restless spirits, because (a) I’d had the idea for a while and (b) I got the scare of my life.

Starting with (a): my earliest recollection of having a paranormal experience was when I was five. Then, during my elementary school years, I attended a private school called Cheeseman Academy, which sat on the edge of Cheeseman Park in Denver, Colorado. (Cheeseman Park would play a part in Steven Spielberg’s inspiration for his movie, Poltergeist.) I had many paranormal experiences while attending Cheeseman, but back then it wasn’t cool to discuss such stuff.

But it was a work trip to Salt Lake City in 1998, and then an encounter in a restaurant in Florida in 1999, that made me realize I’m a sensitive. (See Introduction – Here There Be Ghosts and Spooky Nights at the Shilo Inn for specifics on these experiences.) After that I became enthralled with traveling to places with haunted histories to see if I could experience other activity. My husband (who doesn’t believe in ghosts, but loves to travel) termed these excursions I’d plan for us Haunt Jaunts.

I always thought it’d make a good book. (I had envisioned Haunt Jaunts: A Travel Guide for Restless Spirits.) But then I realized it would work better on the Internet. However, in 2008, when I had made up my mind to start doing it, everything went haywire in my personal life. (Getting in Touch with My Giving Side explains all that best.) Which leads me to (b) and the reason Haunt Jaunts the blog was finally born…

On December 28, 2008 my husband took me to the ER after the excruciating pain I’d been suffering the last couple of weeks in my left arm pretty much incapacitated me. A CT scan revealed I had a grapefruit-sized tumor in my chest. I was immediately admitted to the hospital. After enduring four days of testing, I was finally told on December 31, 2008 that I had Stage 2 B-cell non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Happy New Year, right?

Luckily, my kind of cancer turned out to be not only treatable but curable. When I was in the hospital I had asked my oncologist what I could do to up my chances of survival. He said, “The people I see who do the best are the ones who get off the couch and try to keep living as normal a life as possible during treatments.”

I was determined to be a survivor, and if that meant not being a couch person, so be it! However, that bad pain and adverse reactions to the chemo sidelined me to the couch for the first couple of months of treatment. But then in March something amazing happened. I started feeling better. Not just better, but GREAT!

Realizing I had a second shot at life, and not wanting to repeat mistakes from my past life (namely, being  a stellar procrastinator), I decided to finally make my long-imagined idea of Haunt Jaunts a reality. I started with a blog on Blogger, but then figured out how to work WordPress and decided I liked it better.

So actually getting cancer has been one of the best things that’s ever happened to me. It prompted me to be, well…me.

If you’re a ghost enthusiast and traveler at heart, too (even if it’s just armchair style), I hope my blog proves to be your passport to paranormal tourism. Thanks for stopping by. Happy Haunt Jaunting!

So, visit often, and be sure and tell Courtney that Nate from Para-Blog sent you!