Investigating The Thompson Park Vortex – CNY Paranormal

For paranormal investigators, flexibility is a critical personality trait. Many investigators go into the field expecting to only investigate reports of hauntings. They purchase equipment to help them track that activity, and do as much research as they feel necessary on ghosts.

Then they encounter ‘That Case’. The case that takes everything they thought they knew, and throws it out the window. The case that makes them confront an aspect of the paranormal they had never thought of before, and makes them scratch their head in puzzlement. Without fail, every paranormal team encounters one of these cases. Some choose to stick to their ghost cases, and some choose to jump in to the unknown.

For the Shadow Chasers, that case for us was Thompson Park, in Watertown, NY. We had always been familiar with the park. Once it becomes known that you are a paranormal investigator, everyone you encounter with a similar interest tells you about interesting stories they have heard. So we knew vaguely about Thompson Park, but nothing concrete.

Thompson Park is best known for the ‘Thompson Park Vortex’. Over the last 100 or so years, since the park opened, there have been at least yearly reports of disappearances at the park. People would only go missing for a matter of minutes, but when they were found, they were confused, disoriented, and claimed that they had been transported to the past, for a longer duration of time than they had been missing. We found this interesting, but ultimately outside of the scope of our investigative comfort zone.

In 2007, the Shadow Chasers were approached by Fox News out of Watertown. They wanted to interview us for a news segment, and they wanted to hold the interview at Thompson Park. They were hoping we could bring our equipment, and see what we thought about the infamous Thompson Park Vortex.

As we began an electromagnetic sweep of the park, it became clear that there was something off about the park, although it might not have been as paranormally caused as we had initially thought. As we scanned the park, we discovered that there was a very unusual energy pattern throughout the park. We were able to track individual bands of EMF, which ran parallel to each other, and at various intervals intersected with another set of EMF bands, forming a grid of EMF throughout the park.

Exposure to high EMF can cause all sorts of side effects, from headaches, nausea, feeling watched, hallucinations, and intense illness. We weren't sure what the effects of EMF in a grid pattern would be. Our tentative hypothesis, developed after this visit, was that there was no actual vortex to the past in the park, it was these high EMF fields causing confusion and hallucinations, leading people to believe that they had traveled to the past.

Questions still remain about the park. What was the cause of that odd EMF pattern? We couldn't find a source, or an area where the fields were higher. We've never encountered anything like that pattern since that investigation.

When investigating the paranormal, it’s important to keep your eyes open, your mind unbiased, and not be afraid to investigate the unfamiliar. Isn't that why we’re all here?