Pensacola Isn't Just For Beach Goers

Location: Pensacola Lighthouse; Pensacola, FL

Date: June 2, 2011

        For vacation this year we decided to return to St. Augustine, FL for a few days of relaxation on the beach. Being the Sebourns, though, we never just take a vacation… So, along the way we decided to stop in Pensacola for a night and investigate the infamous 1858 lighthouse where bloodstains from the murder of a former keeper are said to mysteriously return to the upstairs bedroom floor and the victim of a nearby hanging is said to haunt half of the basement in the keeper’s house.

The one and only orb we caught at the lighthouse.

        We arrived at the lighthouse around 8:30pm and received a brief tour from two paranormal enthusiasts who work there. After hearing the stories of the spirits “Raymond” and “Thomas” haunting their respective halves of the basement, we set up an IR camera in each area. We also set up a camera upstairs to keep an eye on the bloodstain bedroom since the area reportedly has a lot of unexplainable activity such as noises and footsteps. Just for fun we climbed the lighthouse tower itself and ran another camera since some visitors have claimed to see shadows or white figures in the tower.

        After setup we shut off the lights and began our investigation, with my parents choosing to visit Raymond’s basement first and John and I heading off to visit Thomas. Although Raymond is said to be the angrier and more active spirit at times, Thomas actually provided us with an evening of entertainment and mystery. Believed to be a runaway slave, Thomas now resides in a storage room behind a large metal door covered with a black drape down in the basement. Less than a minute after being down there, I asked Thomas if he was in the basement with us. In what seems to be a sarcastic or grudging tone, there is a quick response of “grand” and then some unintelligible murmuring.  This turned out to be the only EVP we got at the lighthouse, and thankfully Thomas warmed up to us a little bit after that.

This shows the grated entrance to Thomas' room as well as one of the
 many occasions when he turned the flashlight on.

        Having had such luck with other spirits turning our flashlight on and off at other locations, John and I soon reverted to this tactic since Thomas seemed opposed to showing up on camera or making out K2 meters spike. It turned out that Thomas was quite fascinated with the Maglite, which we set down on a glass cabinet and left there the entire night… We now have over 2 hours of footage of the light turning on and off in random intermittent patterns and brightness levels throughout our investigation.

        Other activity throughout the night wasn’t as brazen as Thomas seemed to be with the flashlight, but it was certainly interesting. Raymond seemed less interested in interacting with us, never spiking a K2 meter or talking to us. However, while John and I were down in his basement, John did become very creeped out, thinking someone kept walking up behind him while we sat on a bench in the middle of the room. What’s strange about that is that during this incident, our DVR recorded strange patterns of electrical interference that occurred at no other time in any area of the lighthouse or keeper’s quarters.

        Throughout the night we all experienced strange noises in the upstairs hallway and bathroom area. My mom and I even followed scuffling noises from room to room at one point, unable to ever track them down. At another time while my parents were upstairs alone they kept hearing the sounds of a printer or fax machine coming from an office where everything was shut off for the night. Perhaps the strangest occurrences upstairs, though, were caught with our infrared camera. The camera was set up on a table to face towards the bloodstain bedroom, and for the first hour or so it was fine and nothing happened. Then suddenly, not long after 10pm when no one was upstairs, the camera moves on its own to face a closed door on an adjacent wall. Once we discovered this and corrected it (thinking at the time that one of us must have bumped it unknowingly when we walked by), the camera once again sat without moving for the rest of the night. About an hour later, though, a wave of interference came across the camera that we couldn’t explain.  After becoming fuzzy, a white mass moves across the camera, and once it passes the lighting adjusts itself several times before the camera returns to normal.

        The most bizarre experience of the night, though, occurred once again in Thomas’ basement only thirty minutes or so before we packed up to leave. My parents were down in the basement trying to talk to Thomas, when out of nowhere my dad felt chills on his legs and got goose bumps. Only seconds after he commented on that, both of them saw a green light seemingly outlining the grate that covers the entrance to Thomas’ favorite room. What was stranger still, though, was the light did not illuminate the areas where the curtain sagged down to allow you to see into the storage room, instead the green light only occurred around the edges of the grate, and the change was not detectable on the IR camera we had down there. After this occurred, my mom approached the grate with a K2 meter to investigate. On the IR you can watch as the K2 meter does not light up when she looks at it, but whenever she looks away the lights dance with activity. Nothing about this incident makes much sense to us, but it was certainly outside the realm of normal activity. It became even stranger to us when we told our friendly hosts about the green light and they opened up the storage room to show us that it was full of nothing but t-shirts and other overstock for the gift shop. Not a single thing in there except the ceiling light could light up at all, much less outline the door in green.

        Overall it was an intriguing hunt. Sadly, though, some of the most interesting events were just personal experiences. We’ll probably never know what happened with the green light or what made the camera move, but it was definitely worth the visit.

Hayley.


Here are our videos and the one EVP we got that night: