Return to Powhatan

Location: Powhatan Courthouse and Jail; Powhatan, AR

Date: December 18, 2010

Group photo courtesy of Kenneth Heard.

On a cold night in late December, SPI (this crew consisting of Hayley, Don, Beverly, John Z., and myself) returned to Powhatan Courthouse. We had originally planned this return trip for early January, but after that night’s scheduled visitors (another investigation team) canceled their reservation, we got the invitation to move our return trip up, and this time we would be accompanied by Kenneth Heard, a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
We were concerned that this second visit would yield very little excitement, that there wouldn’t be much for Mr. Heard to write about. These concerns turned out to be unfounded.

Upon beginning the investigation, we split into two groups. John and I went down to the jail to set up a voice recorder, take some pictures, and experiment with a K-2 meter. The others remained in the courthouse to set up the rest of the equipment-- including our Jurassic era video camera.

John and I had moderate success with the K-2 meter. The device flashed over to the red level several times, mostly in response to some of John’s questions. During analysis of our compiled materials, we discovered some unexplainable phenomena on the audio recording from this early stage of the hunt: a raspy voice saying “keep going” and an inexplicable, female-sounding murmuring that occurred during an otherwise quiet segment of the audio track.

Haze visible on the cell bars in the upper right corner.

After leaving the jail (in search of a picture on Hayley’s camera that depicts a mist-like substance hovering in front of one of the jail cells),  I stumbled into the middle of one of the most significant pieces of evidence we’ve ever gathered.

I stepped into the courtroom and received word from my mother and sister that a presence in the room had been turning their flashlight on and off. This was hard enough to believe (although I did believe it, and there’s video evidence of the claim to back it up)… but when the presence turned the flashlight on again… and turned it off again on request… I wasn’t sure what to think. And I’m still not. A flashlight blinking on and off isn’t tremendously compelling. But a flashlight blinking on and off several times-- on request-- is another matter altogether.

After coming on without being touched, Beverly is asking for the flashlight to be shut off.

The other significant occurrence in the courtroom involves Mr. Z, some talking mannequins, and an unexplainable voice speaking in an apparently foreign language.

Before the ordeal with the flashlight, Mr. Z was pacing the courtroom with a K-2 meter. He approached a section of the courtroom allotted for a recreation of an old trial-- mannequins are set up here, and at the push of a button, the scene will “come to life” and reenact an old court scene. Without him touching the button, these mannequins began to “talk” to Mr. Z. And to add further mystery to this occurrence, analysis of this event’s audio recordings reveal a soft-spoken voice in the background of the court reenactment. As of this writing, we have not determined what the voice is saying-- it is very soft and doesn’t seem to be speaking English.

Unexplainable red orb in the mannequin's room.

I have outlined here the three major phenomena we were fortunate enough to gather during our second visit to Powhatan. It would be nearly impossible to recall every orb in our pictures or every random blip on our K-2 meters. This was an investigation worth remembering, and we were fortunate enough to be in the presence of a news reporter… and have our evidence secured on video tape and audio files.

Mitch


**Below you will find a video featuring the four separate instances when the entity turned our mini Maglite flashlight on and off upon request.

*This next item contains the three EVPs we caught while at Powhatan.

Chapel Activity

Location: Brown Chapel at Lyon College; Batesville, AR

Date: June 18, 2010

Brown Chapel is located at the heart of Lyon College in Batesville, and among students and workers it has a reputation full of mystery and haunting. When a family friend who works at the college in the summers mentioned this to my parents, of course we leaped at the chance to investigate the rumors.

        

We arrived at the college between 10 and 11 on a Friday night and met with the night watchman who had agreed to give us access to the chapel during his shift. He told us the stories about people seeing and hearing strange things in the auditorium and music room of the chapel before giving us free reign of those two rooms for the investigation.

        

Energy at the piano.

We started in the auditorium, and at first didn’t see any results. John and my parents scoped out the room with EMF meters while Mitch and I took photos. When I began using my divining rods, I started to notice energy that wasn’t registering on the EMFs. In particular, the piano on the stage seemed to be surrounded by powerful energy fields. Anywhere around the piano bench the rods, whether in my hands, my brother’s or my dad’s, would spin around in 180º circles or shake back and forth at random. At one point one of the rods in my hand even felt as though it was being pulled away from me. One photograph I took when my dad was using the rods even shows a bright orb suspended above the piano. To ensure this was really paranormal, we used the EMF meters to check for electrical fields from nearby outlets and breakers and found that there was no detectable energy coming from any source.

        

Orb in the music room.

After checking out the auditorium for a while, my mom, Mitch, John, and I went to the music room with the night watchman and left my dad to investigate the chapel on his own. While most of us didn’t get any significant results here, John was able to communicate with someone. Using an EMF detector that allows an entity to light up a row of lights to respond to basic questions, he received several answers, including how long the spirits had been at the chapel. Using increments of ten to ask “Have you been here at least this many years?” John was able to find out that the entity had been in the chapel for over 50 years.

        

More orbs in the auditorium.

Back in the chapel, my dad was using an audio recorder to try to communicate with the spirits of Brown Chapel. After reviewing the audio later, he found that while he got no direct answers to his questions, someone did come sit in the seats around him. During the questioning my dad was sitting near the back of the auditorium completely by himself. At one point on the audio you can clearly hear the sound of heavy shoes or boots walking up the aisle toward where he was sitting. The footsteps stop, and you immediately hear the squeaking, rustling noises as though someone had folded down one of the nearby seats and sat down.

        

So while we got no tangible photos or direct EVPs on our audio, we did have quite a few personal experiences and John got his first taste of communicating with a spirit. The footsteps, EMF responses, and moving rods paired with the several large orbs we got in our photos left us with the feeling that something paranormal is indeed inhabiting Brown Chapel. Maybe we’ll investigate it again someday.

Hayley.

Spirits at the Lighthouse

Location: St. Augustine Lighthouse; St. Augustine, FL

Date: March 24, 2010

       

Since we were planning to be in St. Augustine for a couple of nights, my dad decided we should try to ghost hunt at the lighthouse as well. After seeing it featured on Ghost Hunters, we had toured it on our first trip to St. Augustine, but not at night. After a few phone calls, my dad booked a private session at the lighthouse for Wednesday night from 9 to 10:30.

        

We arrived a little early, and one of the workers told us some stories of the more recent encounters with the ghosts. These ranged from people being touched and spoken to on ghost tours to full body apparitions of men in old military uniforms. One of the most popular occurrences was people photographing black shadows looking down at them over the stairwell rail in the lighthouse, very similar to what the Ghost Hunters themselves had witnessed.

        

After setting up our video camera pointing directly up into the lighthouse, we began our ascent. Though my mom and I were terrified to climb the spiraling metal stairs in the dark, my dad charged full speed ahead, hoping to encounter the ghosts of the men who had formerly lived and worked in the lighthouse. At two separate occasions on our climb, my mom and dad both witnessed a white form peeking over the rail several landings above us. We stopped at several landings to try to capture EVPs and take photos up and down the lighthouse tower. We caught a couple of orbs in the photos, but our best result from the lighthouse itself was on video.

An orb in the lighthouse.

Once you reach the next-to-the-last level of the tower a security floodlight comes on at the top. This frustrated us at first because it doesn’t go off until you climb back down past that point. At the time, though, we didn’t know this gave us some interesting video footage. Once we reviewed the tape we realized we had caught the shadow man in action. On the left side of the video, you can hear us reaching the platform that triggers the motion light. We stop there and discuss something for a while, and during that time the shadow figure leans over the railing on the right side of the tower stairs. The figure has a large, round head but no other definitive features. He leans over for a second before sliding back out of view. After he disappears you can hear us begin our climb to the top of the tower, and once we reach the top my dad looks over the rail as well. If you compare the two shadows generated by their figures, my dad’s shadow is much darker black and has definite shoulders and arms, where the other man had only had a large head that was a fuzzy gray.

        

After spending a few moments at the top we started back down the lighthouse. A few levels from the bottom we had a very interesting scare. As we were climbing down, we heard a loud booming sound and the stairwell actually shook. We all paused, taken aback by what had happened. The source of the sound and shake had to have been behind us because my mom was at the back of our party and she felt the vibrations the strongest, actually feeling the rail shake in her hands. In the front, several steps further down, my dad had heard the boom but not felt it as prominently. Once we reached the bottom and went outside minutes later, we asked the workers who were sitting only yards away at the innkeeper’s house if they had heard any large sounds. They said everything had been quite and peaceful outside the lighthouse.

        

The only other bit of evidence we captured inside the lighthouse occurred with our audio recorders right before we left. While we were packing up my mom saw a shadowy figure move several levels up the tower. She counted to four to indicate where she had seen it. This counting was caught on camera and on audio, but when we reviewed both, the audio picked up a voice the camera did not. On the audio, after my mom counts to four, a gruff male voice says, “five, six.” Apparently her shadow man had been standing up higher than she thought he was.

        

After leaving the lighthouse tower itself, we used our remaining time to investigate the innkeeper’s house. We didn’t have any personal experiences in the house or capture anything on camera. However, the audio recorder pulled through for us once again. Upstairs in the house is a large, open room with several tables and lots of folding chairs. My dad pulled up a chair and sat down to try to ask the ghosts some questions. What he got was short, but clear. His first question upon sitting down was “Is there anyone here with us tonight?” Instantly a male voice whispered, “We’re okay.” My dad’s voice was loud and a little ways away from the recorder, but the responding voice sounded as though it was directly next to the microphone. Perhaps that was the ghosts’ way of saying, we’re at peace, so you can leave us alone, because they definitely didn’t humor us with any more responses after that.

        

What we captured at the lighthouse that night wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to let us know something is there that might be worth a trip back in the future. Our few seconds of video and audio coupled with the unique experience of the stairwell shaking was proof enough for us that the rumors of ghosts in the St. Augustine Lighthouse are more than just rumors.

Hayley.


*Below you will find the EVPs we got at the lighthouse as well as the video clip showing the shadowy figure peering over the rail as we were climbing to the top of the lighthouse.

Spring Break in Florida

Location: St. Francis Inn; St. Augustine, FL

Date: March 23-24, 2010

       

On our first visit to St. Augustine three years ago, we had gone on a ghost tour of the town with Ripley’s Believe It or Not. One of the stops on that tour was a small park across the street from the St. Francis Inn that had been built in 1791. A servant girl named Lily reportedly haunted the inn. Lily worked at the inn sometime during the 19^th century, and it was there that she fell in love with the owner’s nephew. When their relationship was discovered, Lily was dismissed from her position and the nephew hung himself in the attic out of sorrow. The attic was later remodeled into more rooms for the inn, and the corner room where the nephew had died was named Lily’s Room.

        

Lily's Room

So of course when my parents and I decided to return to St. Augustine over spring break this year we knew we had to stay in Lily’s Room. Because of fire codes we had to book two rooms on the third floor; my mom and I stayed in Lily’s Room, and my dad stayed down the hall in the Graham Room. We booked the rooms for two nights, and luckily we had some interesting things happen.

        

We set up a camera in the corner of the room and recorded the first night of our stay in Lily’s Room. So while we didn’t get any orbs in our pictures or any voices on our audio recorder, we did get a few quirks with the camera. The first night of our stay we went downstairs to play cards in the dining room. Before leaving, my mom and I got our glasses of tea out of the refrigerator and closed the door, and that event was recorded on our camera. When we returned to our room that night our refrigerator door was standing wide open. After some discussion we decided it had to have been the work of Lily. To affirm our belief in that, my dad soon came down the hall to tell us that his keys had been hidden under his bed pillows while we were downstairs as well.

After getting ready for bed, we decided to review some of the footage from while were gone in hopes of catching the refrigerator door open. But because of the refrigerator’s position below the camera, nothing was captured. What we did find on the tape was a series of events involving ourselves that neither my mom nor I recall happening. On the video, my mom walks into the adjoining bathroom (which is very small, hardly big enough for one person to comfortably shower and use the toilet), and I follow her inside. The bathroom door shuts, according to the tape both of us stay inside for over a minute before I exit, the toilet can be heard flushing, and my mom steps outside as well. For the life of us, neither of us recalls ever going in the bathroom together and closing the door, much less staying in there for that long.

Other than that odd, unexplainable occurrence, we had no luck with our equipment.  At some point during both nights of our stay, my mom was awoken to footsteps and tapping. We were both awoken the second night as well to the sound of someone tapping on either the window or the ceiling above the window. While none of that was caught on video or audio recording, it did help affirm our belief that either Lily or her beau was at the St. Francis Inn with us those nights.

Hayley.

Historic Powhatan State Park

Location: Powhatan Courthouse; Black Rock, Arkansas

Date: November 13, 2009

The courthouse

The Powhatan Courthouse, situated in northeastern Arkansas on the line dividing the Ozarks and the Delta, did not have the most alarming reputation of paranormal activity, but its nearby location and history of lynching and suicide made it a logical destination for SPI (which, on this occasion, once again included Samantha). 

The jail.

We investigated two structures on this night: the hilltop courthouse and the small jail that sat in its shadow.  Before the night was over, we investigated the courthouse attic, the upstairs courtroom, and the jail.  All three of these locations yielded solid paranormal evidence.

Orb in the courtroom.

I captured an eerie phenomenon in the courtroom fairly early in the investigation.  I snapped dozens of pictures in the courtroom (along with Samantha, Hayley, and my mom).  Orbs were very prevalent among these, but more interesting than any orb was the irregularly-shaped spot of light that appeared on the room’s back wall and, through a series of photos, made its way down the wall towards a bench, where it disappeared.  Our video camera also picked up several flying “orbs” in this room, although most serious experts would question the credibility of these, as it’s possible they were just insects or dust particles.

Orbs caught above Mitch's crossing divining rods.

Above the courtroom, in the attic, I snapped two consecutive pictures: one, which contained nothing of interest, showed my dad walking down a plywood plank; the other was essentially the same picture, but it was packed with orbs—many of them large and bright.  Dust particles?  Insects?

The only orb in the jail.

K2 meter detecting energy on the table where the EVP was  caught.

The jail provided our last significant evidence.  After asking the suicide victim who had died there if she would say something if we promised to leave, our audio recorder captured a ghostly response: “Uh huh.”  Following this, the lights on the K2 meter began to flash, and they glowed steadily for several minutes.

Considering how much we (human beings) don’t know about the paranormal, I think there is a simple philosophy for determining whether or not a place is haunted: does it offer the unexplainable? 

The Powhatan Courthouse did.  Several times.

Mitch

Another Trip to Jefferson

Location: Excelsior House; Jefferson, Texas

Date: June 22 – 24, 2009

The Excelsior House is a historic hotel located in downtown Jefferson, Texas. In fact, it is located just across the street from the Jefferson Hotel, a location we had visited only a few summers before. Unlike the Jefferson, the owners of the Excelsior House are not fond of people knowing their hotel is home to ghosts. So when trying to research the place online to see if it was suitable for a weekend hunt, it took quite a while to find any background information on the place. What I did find was that a few sites claimed the hotel was so haunted that Steven Spielberg was chased out of it by ghosts and thus inspired to write the script for Poltergeist. Other reviews gave more specific claims of hauntings such as chairs moving and rocking, as well as clouds of perfume in the hallways.

Orb in the first photo taken.

 When I called the hotel to book our stay, I asked specifically for the Jay Gould room upstairs because from what I could find, it was rumored to be the heart of the activity. Though the hotel owners don’t claim to have paranormal activity, the guest book in our suite was full of lively stories of the rocking chair moving in the night and even women having their shopping bags rifled through while they slept. Sadly, we didn’t get any activity that exciting during our two-day stay. Within minutes of being in the room, I began getting interesting orb photos, many of which were quite convincing because the orbs would be there one second and gone the next. Orbs are not very substantiating evidence of a haunting to many people, though, so we set up a video camera and recorded many hours of audio as well. To our dismay, no full-body apparitions appeared to us and no disembodied voices talked to us in the night.

One of the brighter orbs caught on this trip.

Our K2 meter getting string readings in the chair.

The entire trip wasn’t a bust though; we had quite a lot of fun with our K2 meter in the rocking chair that others had reported moving. The K2 meter has a toggle switch that allows for hands-free use, and after a sweep of the room we found that there was a very low base reading all over the entire suite, even around the outlets and television. Both days, however, when my mom would use the meter to try to communicate with the resident spirit, the meter would go absolutely crazy when held near the rocking chair. No clear responses to questions could be determined, but the lights on the meter would flash back and forth from green to red in intermittent spurts when placed near or on the chair. We all tried sitting in the chair, but the meter wouldn’t light up when you did that, and after a while the activity would die altogether. We could find no source for the random bursts of energy, and we couldn’t get Mr. Gould to talk to us personally. All we could figure out was that maybe he was entertained by the flashing colors. But since he wouldn’t talk to us, I guess we’ll never know for sure what he was trying to accomplish.

Hayley.

Our Favorite Local Haunt

Location: Crescent Hotel; Eureka Springs, AR

Dates: August 2-3, 2008

The Crescent Hotel has become a favorite haunted location for my family over the past few years. We decided to go back this summer because we were bored and my boyfriend, John, had never been “ghost hunting” before. Nor had he ever experienced the quaint little town of Eureka Springs.

Our first night there we stayed in room 428. It’s one of the Crescent’s regular rooms, and as far as we know, nothing too paranormal has been reported there. The second day, however, we moved over to 419, Theodora’s room. On a past visit, we’d had a lot of fun with Theodora, so we were hoping she’d introduce herself to John.

During the day, we went all over Eureka looking in antique stores and enjoying the downtown area. The most memorable experience of the entire trip though, and one of the strangest, happened while we were visiting Turpentine Creek animal sanctuary. Unbeknownst to us, lions and other large cats are able to “spray” things when they get annoyed. My dad became one of those things. The large male lion got rather perturbed at us trying to take a picture with him, so he backed up to the fence and gave my dad a high-powered, smelly, hosing off. After changing clothes, we managed to enjoy the rest of the day and make it back to the hotel in time for the nightly ghost tour. The new guide told us a lot of new stories about the hotel’s past and it’s present haunts, and along the way I got a couple of decent orbs in my pictures.

Orb in the hallway at 8:25 pm

Same hallway only a few seconds later

Orb caught on the ghost tour

The night passed by relatively uneventfully. The one event we couldn’t explain was a feeling my mom got on three different occasions. Around three, she had gotten up to walk around and snap a few pictures just for the fun of it, and after that she had trouble going back to sleep. While lying in bed, she thought she felt my dad get up and get off the bed on three separate occasions. In reality, my dad didn’t even get up once that night.While we were there, we ran a digital voice recorder for a good part of the time. My parents asked questions and tried to get responses on several occasions. The next morning while she was waiting for us to all get ready, my mom decided to go back and listen to the audio we had recorded. The recorder can run for almost 20 hours, and it had new batteries in it for the trip. My mom had left it on the TV stand, running when she went back to bed that night. The next morning, she found that it had shut off during the night. There should have been several files on the recorder labeled with 8-3-08 as the time stamp. When we looked for them, they were all gone. There was no record of our trip to the Crescent this time. The oddest part was that the recorder’s date had been reset and now read 2-4-10. And even stranger, when you hit play, instead of automatically going to the last file recorded like it is programmed to do, it went back several years and began playing the file from the Stone Lion Inn. The batteries never died, and there is no way it could have shut itself off otherwise, much less reset its own date. We’d been told before that Theodora doesn’t like new technology, and I guess she might have taken offense at my voice recorder being on all night. How else could a rather simple piece of equipment manage to do so much work by itself?

Hayley.

Night at the Sanatorium

Location: Waverly Hills Sanatorium; Louisville, Kentucky

Date: June 20, 2008

If reputation alone haunted a building, then the Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky would be the most haunted structure in America…  As it is, it may be in the running for that title anyway.  Recent lore around the Waverly says that it is almost impossible to enter the massive relic without encountering something on one of its five floors. 

The Waverly Hills Tuberculosis Sanatorium, built in 1926, sits alone atop a hill south of downtown Louisville.  This secluded location was chosen intentionally, since it was housing hundreds of patients at a time that were cursed with one of the most contagious illnesses in the world.  And, as suspected, the Waverly’s history is gruesome.  An exact number does not exist, but at least 60,000 people died within its walls while it was in operation.  The numbers of the dead and the dying were so great, and so constant, that exporting all the deceased patients for a proper burial was impossible, and a chute was dug into the hillside to quickly transport some of the bodies to a mass burial site.  Waverly Hills has been abandoned since 1961, and today the ruin is owned by a local couple who saved it from being demolished. 

Samantha and I drove to Louisville and met my parents and sister at the Ramada Inn near the airport.  With plenty of time to kill before our visit to the Waverly, we toured Louisville’s historic district with a man named David Dominè, who knows a thing or two about the city’s haunts.

Our tour at the Waverly was scheduled to take place between midnight and four a.m.  We brought several flashlights, digital cameras, a voice recorder, and a DV camcorder.

We soon discovered that the Waverly is appropriately ominous when viewed in the dark.  Its massiveness and dismal condition seem to dare those waiting outside to come in and see what they can get.  Our tour began with a viewing of the Ghost Hunters episode that was filmed there, and then the rules and procedures were outlined: the large party of tourists/ghost hunters will be broken into two smaller groups, and these two groups will be split between the bottom two floors and the top three.  At two-thirty, the parties will switch, so that everyone is able to explore every floor.  No scaring one another, no obnoxiousness or taunting.

Our group was first granted access to the top three floors, which consisted mostly of patient rooms.  I was slightly in awe as our tour began.  I had known all along that the sanatorium was in a state of ruin, but I hadn’t imagined the building looking like this.  The walls were covered in graffiti, some of them broken with holes, some of them torn away completely.  Many of the doors were either gone or hanging by a single hinge, and similarly, very few of the windows were in one piece, and every level of the building had been exposed to the elements.  On our night, great portions of the floor were covered in water from an earlier thundershower.

The guide, who gave us a brief outline of the top three floors, warned us of a frightening phenomenon that often occurs on the fourth floor.  This phenomenon, simply called Big Black, sucks away all traces of light and leaves its victim in total, disorienting darkness.  We did not encounter Big Black, or anything else so dramatic, but the paranormal occupants of the Waverly did make their presence known in subtle ways.

On the third floor, near the elevator shaft, my mother reached out to open a door and received a complimentary (and unexplainable) slap on the wrist for her efforts.  On the fifth floor (which is largely exposed to the outside), while looking down the bent exterior of the building, she also saw a faint shape—perhaps a face—lean out of one of the windows.  While we were exploring the fifth floor, my dad decided to make a sole trip down to the fourth level (which was, by then, completely empty of hunters) to search for Big Black, or anything else that wished to show itself.  He didn’t find anything that could be captured on film or described in words, but being alone on that floor, he felt that something may have shown itself had he stayed longer.

"Sliding" down the body chute

At two-thirty, we met our guide and he took us down to the first two floors… and out to the body chute.  Like most of the locations at the Waverly, the body chute is best experienced when you stop long enough to be alone… and focus on its past.  I did that.  I didn’t see any ghosts, but I felt much more unsettled.  After descending the entire length of the chute, I posed for the absolutely necessary I’m sliding down the body chute picture, and then climbed back to the top.

The bottom two floors yielded experiences similar to those on the top three.  These first two floors were more employee-and-public oriented than the top three, which were almost exclusively centered on the patients’ living quarters.  Floors one and two contained the main hall, the kitchen, the examination and autopsy rooms, and the shock therapy room, among others.  And a sizeable portion of the first floor was currently decorated for a Halloween haunted house.

We initially focused on the autopsy room, but soon realized that, because of the nature of this room, we would never get to experience it alone and in silence.  My dad did feel a presence on the ground floor, while we stood in a large, empty room, in complete silence and darkness; he felt a cold presence around his ankles, which slowly expanded.

The last encounter we had came at the very end of our hunt.  We were leaving behind the end of a quiet, empty hallway when Samantha, my mother, and myself heard a noise behind us—a footstep, perhaps.  We spun around, and my mother and I began to approach, asking for whoever (or whatever) it was to identify itself.  Moving slowly, we proceeded at least twenty feet… and began to notice a small light on the ceiling.  After numerous calls for this entity to show itself, a young couple emerged from behind the door at the end of the hall.  At first I was disappointed—mystery solved, I thought—, and then we learned that 1) this couple hadn’t been there the whole time, and 2) they were not carrying flashlights.

The Waverly did not come out and pounce on us.  I think this is because we were accompanied by at least forty other people, and because truly haunted places are not obligated to open themselves up for every anxious ghost hunter who passes through the door.  But after experiencing its ruined atmosphere, learning of its past, and experiencing some of the things we experienced, I do not doubt that the Waverly is haunted.  Any location cursed with such a grotesque past has to contain some trace of its former self.

I would like to go back to Waverly Hills.  Most of all, I would like us to have an all-access pass to experience the structure alone.  Then, I think we would encounter Big Black, along with some of the Waverly’s other current residents.

Mitch.

Guests, Not Ghosts, Create Activity at the Lemp Mansion

Location: Lemp Mansion; St. Loius, MO

Dates: June 18-19, 2008

Along with the Gateway Arch and the Budweiser beer factory, St. Louis houses many other unique sites. One of these is the historic (and of course, haunted) Lemp Mansion. It was built by a family of beer barons and has a horrible past including numerous deaths. Now it is home to a fancy restaurant and many rooms where guests are often visited by the spirits of the original family and their slaves.   

We were told about the Lemp Mansion while visiting the Myrtles Plantation down in Louisiana a couple of summers ago. So when we finally made time to stay in St. Louis, we decided to check it out. Sadly, we didn’t find any evidence of the paranormal ourselves. There was a rather loud party going on in the downstairs restaurant that night, and many other guests staying upstairs with us. In my opinion, the creepiest part of the entire stay was the bathroom down the hall that we had to share with three other women. Other than that, it was an uneventful night. The building was beautiful, the complimentary wine was nice, and the owner was a nice lady, but the abundance of noisy guests that night kept the ghosts at bay I believe.

Hayley.

        

Are the Ghosts Bigger in Texas?

Location: The Jefferson Hotel; Jefferson, TX

Date: July 21-22, 2007

The time came for another weekend getaway, but this time our destination wasn’t inspired by Ghost Hunters. We found out about The Jefferson Hotel from a book, and since the town itself was only a few hours away, we decided to give it a try. Jefferson, TX is supposedly the most haunted town in east Texas, and the hotel had some interesting stories told about it. For example, a young blond woman likes to walk up and down the staircase and there is a man in one of the rooms who likes to smoke. His cigar smoke often lingers around upstairs despite it being a nonsmoking hotel. While we never saw the young woman taking a stroll, we did encounter the gentleman and his cigars both nights.

Our first night we stayed in room 5. When we first got in the room my mom did a sweep with the EMF detector. The only odd energy spikes (from a base of around 1 up to 4 and even 5) were coming from the bed I was laying on at the time. Using the divining rods, I got the same results. The energy over the right half of the bed actually made the rods vibrate in my hands; I could literally feel the energy pulsing through them. Later that night we pulled out the EMF detector again and found that the energy spikes over the bed were gone; they had moved into the bathroom. Despite our attempts, we got no voice recordings or strange appearances in our pictures, only some odd readings and the occasional scent of cigar smoke lingering in the air.

That night we went on a “ghost train” tour of the Cypress Bayou. While my dad made some convincing banjo noises to humor the guide, we had no personal experiences on the tour. I got an over abundance of orb photos though, some more intriguing than others. We also heard some interesting stories of the town hauntings, several of which came from our hotel.

Energy readings in the hallway.

Room 1 was our home the second night. Nothing paranormal actually happened in the room itself though… most of it came from the far end of the hallway. My dad reported smelling cigar smoke and getting large EMF spikes centering around a chair at the opposite end of the upstairs hall. When my mom went down there with him, they tried talking to the gentleman who reportedly goes with the cigar odor. My mom suggested that my dad try sitting in the chair where they assumed the man was located. After my dad asked if he could sit in the chair, something interesting happened. The strong smoke presence shifted from the chair and became overwhelmingly strong a few feet away by my mom. On and off throughout the night we tried to communicate with the gentleman, but got no solid proof of his presence. Several times when we searched for him he wasn’t to be found, our EMF meter would hardly register at all when he wasn’t around, and the smoke would disappear. Apparently the guy likes to sit and smoke in peace.

Hayley.

Haunted St. Augustine...?

Location: St. Augustine, FL

Date: June 8, 2007

       

St. Augustine was a beautiful town in our opinion. It was rich in history and had something for everyone, even ghost hunters. The one night we were there, we decided to take the Ripley’s Believe It or Not Ghost Train around town.

Ripley's Castle

One of the brighter orbs seen at the cemetery.

Our tour started at the Ripley’s castle, and from there we rode through the streets listening to the guide tell us about the town’s history and hauntings. Our only real stops on the tour were at a couple of local cemeteries. While we didn’t have any real hair-raising experiences at either one, I did find some very bright orbs floating around in my pictures. Whether or not they’re proof of the stories we heard, I’m not sure, but they most definitely aren’t “normal.”

Orbs at Ripley's

At the end of our train ride, we went back to the castle and got to look around inside. Our guide told us some very unique stories about what they claim is one of the “most haunted” buildings in Florida. There was one room in particular that is said to house a lot of paranormal energy, and that just happened to be the one place I got orbs in my pictures. The room is one of the stops on your tour of the castle, and apparently a lot of visitors have weird experiences in the front, right hand corner of the room. Nothing actually happened to us there, but my mom got off the chart EMF readings in that one spot. I also found numerous orbs in the one picture I took of it. Not to say that a spirit was standing there or anything, but I think it’s safe to say something was going on in the corner.

Hayley.

Louisiana Offers Gators and Ghosts

Location: Myrtle’s Plantation, St. Francisville, LA

Date: June 1-2, 2007

Summer rolled around once again, and in this family that can only mean one thing: vacation. This summer it would be a little different though, instead of taking Mitch with us, we had my mom’s older sister, Linda with us. We had our sights set on Key West, Florida, but we decided to do a little ghost hunting on our journey south. And so we spent the first night of our trip at the beautiful Myrtle’s Plantation in Louisiana.

The Myrtle’s is reputed to be one of the most haunted locations in the southern US, and having seen it featured on Ghost Hunters, we hoped it might live up to our name, if not for our amusement, for Linda’s. The home had quite a history to go with it’s age and rumored hauntings. According to history, the original owners of the plantation suffered several deaths and murders within not only their own family, but also their slaves. The head slave, also the owner’s mistress, laced one of the kids’ birthday cakes with Oleander leaves, killing several of the children. This incident also resulted in the death of that slave. Later, one of the remaining children fell ill and a voodoo priestess was brought in to cure her. When the priestess’ methods failed, both she and the child ended up dead in the nursery. These stories and many others make up the violent past of what is today a hot spot in the south for vacationers and paranormal enthusiasts alike.

Of course, after finding out about the plantation, we called and asked to stay in two of the most “active” rooms in the bed and breakfast. The entire house is reportedly active, but they gave us the nursery where several of the children had died and it’s adjoining bedroom.  And, although we came back with no hard proof of any spirits having been present, we did have some interesting personal experiences, not the least of which was trying to climb onto the rather lofty beds.

It was while laying on the bed in the adjoining bedroom that I had my one and only paranormal experience in the house. I had laid down to wait on everyone to get ready for dinner, and while I was laying there the bed began to vibrate. It wasn’t violent enough to be visible when I told my mom about it, but from my perspective the mattress was definitely vibrating below me. In an attempt to debunk the movement, my mom walked back and forth across the room, but nothing happened.

That night we went on a “ghost tour” of the main house. I caught several orb pictures outside, but other than that it was uneventful. The guide spent the evening telling stories of the different experiences people had reported and showed us pictures of apparitions that had been caught. I thought it was rather interesting that there were common reports of children being heard and felt playing upstairs, particularly in the nursery area…

After going to bed that night, some very interesting things happened. I shared a room with Linda, and she asked me several times that night if she was crowding my space in the bed. I always said no, because there were in fact at least two feet of space between us all night; it was a large bed after all. The next morning she told me that she had been asking because it often felt like there was something beside or behind her while she slept, she had assumed during the night that it was me.

In the adjoining room where my parents slept, they also seemed to have uninvited company in their bed. According to both of them, they spent all night on opposite sides of the bed. My mom however heard someone breathing right next to her all night long… maybe one of the children decided to sleep between them?

The most prominent experience happened the next morning though. We woke up long before the other upstairs guests that morning. I was still in bed and my dad was out walking around outside. My mom had already showered and was getting ready in the hall bath when she heard what sounded like children playing in the hallway. A quick look outside proved there were no children, and after asking both Linda and me she realized only she had heard it.  A little while later, when I was showering in the hallway bathroom it happened again. Except this time both Linda and my mom experienced it. Linda was in the other bathroom and my mom was packing in the bedroom when they both heard muffled laughter and playing coming from the adjoining bedroom. There were definitely no children playing in our rooms that morning, in fact there were no children on the plantation grounds at all.

While we have no way of proving what we experienced to anyone, it certainly made for an interesting stop on our vacation. Who knows, maybe if we ever go back the playful kids will let us take a picture.

Hayley.