Location: Hill House Manor; Gainesville, Texas
Date: November 5, 2011
Gainesville’s Hill House Manor has been called one of the most haunted locations in Texas, the “Grand Central Station” of haunted houses. Ironically, though, despite these bold descriptions, it does not have a storied past. Those who have lived in the house generally agree that it is haunted, but no one knows why.
SPI made the trip down to Gainesville eager to prove correct the owner’s claim that those looking for the paranormal will indeed find it. We set up in the house at a late hour and remained there until the early hours of the morning.
A hundred years ago, the Manor was a single residence; now, it has been divided into three conjoined residences, though one of them is in an unfinished, ruined state, the result of flooding and abandonment. We were warned that this section of the house could result in a broken ankle (or something worse) if we weren’t careful.
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| Matching poker hands. |
The first odd occurrence came in the sunroom upstairs. Supposedly, some of the entities here enjoy playing cards, and an old deck had been left for their amusement. My dad encouraged me to deal a hand, and so I shuffled the deck a couple of times and, not thinking much about actually playing a real game, dealt a couple of incorrect Texas Hold’em hands (you’re supposed to deal two cards to each player, not three). Both of these three-card hands proved to be mirror images of one another, and both were straights. Coincidence? You can only take that for what it is, I guess.
Later, John and I were sitting in a dark, quiet room in the back of the house. We weren’t taking pictures or talking; we were simply listening and monitoring an EMF meter. We realized after several minutes that Hayley and my mom were in the room above us, and when we heard what sounded like heavy footsteps coming down the staircase just outside our room, we assumed it was them. I stepped out the door to greet them—only to discover that they were still upstairs, and had never stepped foot on that particular staircase.
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| Orb in the kitchen. |
John and I had another unexplainable experience on the Manor’s second floor. We were in a room known as the speakeasy, equipped with a camera, a digital thermometer, and a voice recorder. The room’s temperature began to drop shortly after we stepped through the door. After several minutes, we moved into the adjoining kitchen. The temperature was cooler in here as well. I snapped a picture of this room, and in it is a, bright, baseball-sized orb floating several feet above the floor. Shortly after I took this picture, the upstairs temperature rose several degrees.
Perhaps the night’s most significant experience occurred as we were preparing to leave. I had just passed by the upstairs bathroom into the kitchen; my dad was in the speakeasy. Mom came up the stairs and began talking to someone in the sunroom. She thought this shadowy someone was my dad. Hayley had just come upstairs as well and thought she saw my outline in the bathroom doorway. Neither of these shadowy apparitions can be explained, but they are consistent with many stories from the house’s past, which speak of unexplainable figures that linger just long enough to seem physically real, then disappear.
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| Moving, pink orb in the sun room. |
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| If you look closely, there is a mist rising off the fainting couch. |
Hill House Manor produced two more oddities. A digital voice recorder that had been left in the ruined apartment downstairs captured a noise that sounds like a muted piano key—but there was no piano in the room. We spotted the other phenomenon on our downstairs camcorder. The camera was facing our workstation, where we can watch live feed from our four infrared cameras. At the beginning of the video, there is a cylinder-shaped object lying beside a rug. During a brief time when the room was completely dark, the object apparently moves, because it’s lying on the rug when the lights come back on. John is in the video at this point. He stretches, sits down in front of the computer monitor, and is still. A few seconds later, the object rolls back over to its original location. You can see curled wires lying near the object, and it seems as though the wires move as well, sideways with the object, though, not as if they were pulled straight… But anything moving at this point is unexplainable, because everyone except John was upstairs.
We enjoyed our trip to Gainesville, and concluded that Hill House Manor is almost certainly haunted… It simply did not provide much concrete physical evidence to back up our personal experiences.
Mitch.
Below is the audio of the piano sound and the video of the object moving downstairs.
