A hearse is a funeral vehicle, a conveyance for the casket from e.g. a church to a cemetery, a similar burial site, or a crematorium. In the funeral trade, they are often called funeral coaches.

Hearses were originally horse-drawn, but silent electric motorised examples that were used in Paris were reported in the pages of Scientific American May 1907 and petrol-driven hearses began to be produced from 1909 in the United States. Motorised hearses became more widely accepted in the 1920s. The vast majority of hearses since then have been based on larger, more powerful car chassis, generally retaining the front end up to and possibly including the front doors but with custom bodywork to the rear to contain the coffin. Some early hearses also served as ambulances. A few cities experimented with funeral trolley cars and/or subway cars to carry both the casket and mourners to cemeteries, but these were not popular.

Hearses in North America and Europe
Normally more luxurious brands of car are used as a base; the vast majority of hearses in the United States are Cadillacs and Lincolns. In Europe, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Opel, Ford and Volvo are common contemporary bases, and in the past, Daimler and even Rolls-Royce limousines were converted, though their cost is generally considered prohibitive.

Cadillac produced what it termed a “commercial chassis”. This was a strengthened version of the long-wheelbase Fleetwood limousine frame to carry the extra weight of bodywork, rear deck and cargo. Designed for professional car use, the rear of the Cadillac commercial chassis was considerably lower than the passenger car frame, thereby lowering the rear deck height as well for ease of loading and unloading. They were shipped as incomplete cars to coachbuilders for final assembly. A commercial chassis Cadillac was little more than a complete rolling chassis, front end sheet metal with lighting and trim, dashboard and controls. Rear quarter panels and sometimes the front door shells were shipped with the chassis for use in the finished coachwork. Today, most hearses are made from converted sedans on stretched wheelbases. The fleet division of Ford Motor Company sells a Lincoln Town Car with a special “hearse package” strictly to coachbuilders. Shipped without rear seat, rear interior trim, rear window or decklid, the hearse package also features a heavy-duty suspension, brakes, charging system and tires and was once offered on a modified Ford Expedition SUV chassis with the Triton V10 truck engine. Hearses and other funeral service vehicles are often equipped with light bars and other flashing lights similar to those found in emergency vehicles in order to increase the visibility of the vehicle while in processions.

Since the working life of a hearse is generally one of light duty and short, sedate drives, hearses remain serviceable for a long time; hearses 30 years old or more may still be in service, although some funeral homes replace them at least once a decade. As of 2004[update], a new hearse in the USA usually costs in the range of $40,000 to $65,000.

Two styles of hearse bodywork are common. The older style is the limousine style; these have narrow pillars and lots of glass. These are more popular in the United Kingdom, among others. More popular in the United States is the landau style, with a heavily-padded leather or (later) vinyl roof, and long blind rear quarters, similarly covered, and decorated with large metal S-shaped bars designed to resemble those used to lower the tops on some horse-drawn coaches. It is common practice in the USA for the windows to be curtained, while in the UK the windows are normally left unobscured. Hearses resemble station wagons strictly because of the shape of the rear ends of conventional ones.

Until the late 1970s, it was common for hearses in the USA to be combination coaches which also could serve in the ambulance role; these were common in rural areas. Car-based ambulances and combination coaches were unable to meet stricter Federal specifications for such vehicles and were discontinued after 1979.

Due to the costs of owning an expense custom vehicle that sits idle “80 to 90 percent of the week”, individual funeral homes reduce costs by renting or utilizing a shared motor pool.

Info taken from Wikipedia, Historic Haunts, and other sources.

Hi!  My name is Ty.  I’m the “new kid” in the GhoSt Augustine haunted pub tour crew.

I’m a self-proclaimed beer aficionado and have home-brewed for ten years.  On evenings I am not conducting haunted pub tours, I’m singing and playing guitar at local restaurants.

My state of origin is Pennsylvania.  I have earned degrees from Penn State and have taught elementary school for 36 years.

My wife and I fell in love with St. Augustine on our first visit, intending to stay for one day.  We stretched this to six days and returned to Pennsylvania with a Florida mortgage.  Now it’s four years later.  I’ve retired from teaching and we live in the city of our dreams.

As a pub tour guide, my goal is to pass along our love for this beautiful, historic, exciting, haunted city.

Great photo submitted from a guest on our Haunted Pub Tour with our newest guide, Ty Cowell!
The reason the couple look so excited in the photo is because we believe one of the spirits at McLean’s is trying to communicate through the K2 meter.

Ever wonder what headstones mean? Here are a few of the most used designs on headstones:

Anchor – Steadfast hope
Arch – Rejoined with partner in Heaven
Birds – The soul
Cherub – Divine wisdom or justice
Column – Noble life
Broken column – Early death
Conch shell – Wisdom
Cross, anchor and Bible – Trials, victory and reward
Crown – Reward and glory
Dolphin – Salvation, bearer of souls to Heaven
Dove – Purity, love and Holy Spirit
Evergreen – Eternal life
Garland – Victory over death
Gourds – Deliverance from grief
Hands – A relation or partnership
Heart – Devotion
Horseshoe – Protection against evil
Hourglass – Time and its swift flight
Ivy – Faithfulness, memory, and undying friendship
Lamb – Innocence
Laurel – Victory
Lily – Purity and resurrection
Mermaid – Dualism of Christ – fully God, fully man
Oak – Strength
Olive branch – Forgiveness, and peace
Palms – Martyrdom, or victory over death
Peacock – Eternal life
Poppy – Eternal sleep
Rooster – Awakening, courage and vigilance
Shell – Birth and resurrection
Star of David – The God
Skeleton – Life’s brevity
Snake in a circle – Everlasting life in Heaven
Swallow – Motherhood
Broken sword – Life cut short
Crossed swords – Life lost in battle
Torch – Eternal life if upturned, death if extinguished
Tree trunk – The beauty of life
Triangle – Truth, equality and the trinity
Shattered urn – Old age, mourning if draped
Weeping willow – Mourning, grief

Reincarnation, literally “to be made flesh again”, is a doctrine or mystical belief that some essential part of a living being (in some variations only human beings) survives death to be reborn in a new body. This essential part is often referred to as the Spirit or Soul, the ‘Higher or True Self’, ‘Divine Spark’, ‘I’ or the ‘Ego’ (not to be confused with the ego as defined by psychology). According to such beliefs, a new personality is developed during each life in the physical world, but some part of the being remains constantly present throughout these successive lives as well.

Belief in reincarnation is an ancient phenomenon. This doctrine is a central tenet within the majority of Indian religious traditions, such as Hinduism (including Yoga, Vaishnavism, and Shaivism), Jainism, and Sikhism. The idea was also entertained by some Ancient Greek philosophers. Many modern Pagans also believe in reincarnation as do some New Age movements, along with followers of Spiritism, practitioners of certain African traditions, and students of esoteric philosophies such as Kabbalah, Sufism and Gnostic and Esoteric Christianity.

The Buddhist concept of Rebirth although often referred to as reincarnation differs significantly from the Hindu-based traditions and New Age movements in that there is no “self” (or eternal soul) to reincarnate.

During recent decades, the concept of reincarnation has captured the imagination of a significant minority of people in the West with films such as Kundun and Birth appearing in popular culture, alongside a great number of books exploring the subject – based largely on the research of Ian Stevenson

Christianity

Some Christian denominations reject reincarnation mainly because they consider the theory to challenge a basic tenet of their interpretation of Christianity. Many churches do not directly address the issue and leave the matter open to individual interpretation due to the few biblical references which survived the purging of texts considered to be heretical in the founding years of Christianity as a church. Most of the philosophies associated with the theory of reincarnation focus on “working” or “learning” through various lifetimes to achieve some sort of higher understanding or state of “goodness” before salvation is granted or acquired. Basic to Roman Catholicism is the doctrine that humans can never achieve the perfection God requires and the only “way out” is total and complete forgiveness accomplished through the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross wherein He took the sins of mankind. There seems to be evidence however that some of the earliest Christian sects such as the Sethians and followers of the Gnostic Church of Valentinus believed in reincarnation, and they were persecuted by the Romans for this.

A number of Evangelical and (in the USA) Fundamentalist Christian groups have denounced any belief in reincarnation as heretical, and explained any phenomena suggestive of it as deceptions of the devil. Although the Bible never mentions the word reincarnation, there are several passages through New Testament that Orthodox Christians interpret as openly rejecting reincarnation or the possibility of any return or contact with this world for the souls in Heaven or Hell (see 9:27 and Luke 16:20-31)

The Bible contains passages in the New Testament that seem to refer to reincarnation. In Matthew 11:10-14and 17:10-13, Jesus says that John the Baptist is the prophet Elijah who had lived centuries before, and he does not appear to be speaking metaphorically.

There are various contemporary attempts to entwine Christianity and reincarnation. Geddes Macgregor, wrote a book called Reincarnation in Christianity : A New Vision of Rebirth in Christian Thought. And Rudolf Steiner wrote Christianity as Mystical Fact.

Several Christian denominations which support reincarnation include the Liberal Catholic Church, Unity Church, The Christian Spiritualist Movement, the Rosicrucian Fellowship and the Lectorium Rosicrucianum. The Medieval heretical sect known variously as the Cathars or Albigensians who flourished in the Languedoc believed in Reincarnation, seeing each soul as a fallen angel born again and again into the world of Matter created by Lucibel (Lucifer). Only through a Gnostic ‘Rebirth’ in the Holy Spirit through Christ could the soul escape this process of successive existences and return to God.

**All information was obtained from www.wikipedia.org**

Ghosts are more likely to manifest if the air is dry.

Ion generators charge the air with positive particles that may supply energy for ghosts to manifest.

Many air cleaners/purifiers send out an ionic stream that may contribute to manifestations.

Spirits can draw energy from electrical appliances, the atmosphere and from people.

Fear and anger are two very powerful emotions from which a spirit may draw energy.

If there is a lot of emotional stress in a home that is haunted, the spirit could be drawing from the negative emotional energy.

Our emotions may affect spirits the same way they do people.

Spirits can attach themselves to a person, place or object.

In most cases, ghosts were people too. They are just no longer constrained to physical bodies.

Though spirits may not communicate well with us, they know what we say and do.

There are 4 basic ways in which a spirit or ghost may manifest itself. The one that most people think of but is probably the least common is a visual apparition. For the investigator, catching something like this on film is the holy grail of evidence. In this form of manifestation the ghost or spirit appears in physical form. They may look like a normal, living person, a semitransparent wispy figure, or anywhere in between. Visual apparitions may also be of animals or objects.

The second form of manifestation is through sounds. These may be disembodied footsteps, the sounds of doors opening and closing, music, or speech. Often, in the cases where speech is heard, it is muffled conversations from an empty room and there are many reports of people hearing their name being called. These are of course just a few examples

In the third form, scents or smells are detected. Often times there are reports of smelling flowers or cologne. Pipe, cigarette and cigar smoke scents are very common as well. These scents usually do not last long. Typically, someone will catch a brief smell and about the time they recognize it, it is gone.

The last form is tactile. Like the others this can take several forms as well. A common example is feeling a cold spot in a room. These spots are believed to be caused by a spirit absorbing the energy in a room to assist in further manifestation. Heat is just another form of energy and when used by a spirit can drop the temperature 10 degrees or more. Sometimes it is a small area that is affected and sometimes a whole room. Tactile manifestations can also take the form of being touched, like a hand on the shoulder or a poke in the side. Sometimes hair is pulled or a piece of clothing is tugged on. These are generally very slight but can be forceful in nature.

These different ways a ghost or spirit may manifest may happen individually or together. The combinations are as varied as the hauntings they are associated with.