Date: Saturday, November 20, 2010
Time: 12:30am
Location: La Fonda Hotel, Santa Fe, NM
During our recent weekend vacation, my girlfriend and I were returning to our hotel after a night on the town. Since we are not use to cold weather, we rushed to the fireplace located near the hotel lobby.
A short time had gone by when I began to take several pictures of my girlfriend as she stood over the fireplace. We rested in the lobby for about twenty minutes before heading back to our hotel room. We returned to our hometown of Las Vegas NV the next day.
Monday evening, two nights after taking the fireplace pictures, we settled back into our routine at home. I uploaded the pictures of our trip on to my laptop. As we reviewed the photos, we came across the sequence of pictures I had taken when my girlfriend stood over the fireplace. I noticed that one of the pictures had a significant number of dim bubble-like circles surrounding my girlfriend. Initially, I thought they were from dust or ash from the fireplace. However, the pictures were taken about 10-15 seconds apart in a similar manner and the bubbles only appeared in one of the pictures.
I then remembered watching a show on paranormal activity and learning a little about sources of energy captured in pictures called orbs. I also remember hearing that orbs had some association with ghosts.
Curiously, today, the La Fonda Hotel is said to host not only travelers visiting Santa Fe, but also several ghosts. According to the various internet articles, orbs tend to be found much more consistently in pictures that are taken in locations that are known to be haunted and have high levels of paranormal activity.
We are both very skeptical about stories that seem too fantastic to be true so we began to joke about the bubbles in the picture being orbs.
However, considering the historical and spiritual nature of the town, we began to play with the idea of orbs by looking for information and photos of orbs on the internet.
During our investigative work, we could not help but notice that every entry on orbs gave a similar list of criteria that distinguishes orbs from the elements and digital malfunctions. Our picture looked exactly like the pictures of the orbs we found on the internet:
* Spherical and transparent
* Appearing in no specific sequence with multiple instances where the orbs do not appear
* Appearing to vibrate and moving
Several articles regarding the local lore of Santa Fe refer to how court was held in the original adobe hotel, as well as executions, when guilty offenders were hanged in the lobby. Since we had such a wonderful and spiritual experience in Santa Fe, we decided to share our story and our pictures so that others could share their opinions as to whether we have an orb sighting.