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.