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.