Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (12 page)

I like to let the location speak to me, so I frequently sit still and try to feel what the buildings and land are saying when I first arrive on a site. I’m not saying that I’m a psychic, but what I will say is that somehow I have developed a sense and a feeling for a location’s history. Unlike opening a textbook and reading the history, in some other way I can feel it. I think the energies of the past still remain and your body can pick up on them.

Without knowing the history of a place, you’re interviewing someone with earplugs and blinders on. You have to become them and get to know them. It’s cool to think that spirits may be able to add words to the history books. Through paranormal investigation and communication with the souls of the deceased, you can add unwritten pages in history books through the voices that lived it. If you know what they went through emotionally then you’re putting your body and soul on the same historical plane with them. You are calibrating yourself to their time and spiritual energy. By knowing the history you can develop ways to get better evidence. You can think of paranormal investigation as a metal detector and the history is the battery. Without history to power you, finding treasure is nearly impossible.

La Purisima Mission in California is a great example of this. It was a vortex of historical energy and is easily the most spiritual place I’ve ever investigated. Located in the idyllic (and wealthy) central California community of Santa Barbara, the Spanish built La Purisima in 1787 specifically to convert indigenous Indians (mostly Chumash) to Catholicism. Catholic Missions like this were rampant throughout the western half of America during the eighteenth century, the most famous of which is The Alamo in present day San Antonio, Texas. In California, La Purisima is the only fully restored mission from this era still standing.

Walking the dusty grounds of the mission, I drifted off by myself more than any other investigation. While wandering on my own, I spent some time noticing the little things and had flash images of the way it was when the Indians lived there. I could see them laughing, playing, interacting, and doing the things we all envision a happy family doing. Then I see the conflict, the violence, and the epidemics introduced by the Spanish. I could see their battles and feel their suffering. We don’t read about the history of a place like this in a textbook. We come here and communicate with the history. The history is not dead. The history is still alive in another form.

Inside the mission, I really feel that I tapped into the emotional turmoil of the Chumash being persecuted by the Spanish during their religious zeal to convert them. I could feel the Chumash living peacefully and quietly and then suddenly being bullied until they revolted against their oppressors. I find this phenomenon happening to me more and more as my adventures go on, but at La Purisima, it was at its most profound. Probably the one thing that hit me the hardest from that investigation was the flute music.

I had been in the mission all night, trying everything to get a reaction out of the spirits said to haunt the place and gotten good results. Near the end of the night, just hours before the sun came up, I captured on a digital recorder a lengthy EVP of flute music. This wasn’t just any old flute music that someone could play while sitting on a hilltop, but notes and melodies of a long lost time that seemed to come from an instrument of a past era. It also wasn’t the sound of a modern aluminum flute, but more like a hollow wooden flute carved from a tree.

That haunting music plays over and over in my mind and the more I hear it the sadder I get. I’m sure the spirits of the Chumash people are still there playing the music of their day, and it’s now the soundtrack of my experience in La Purisima. It would be easy to categorize this as a residual haunting, but I don’t think it was. I think it was played on purpose for me because of how we got the spirit to play it.

We used a trigger object that evening—a portable boom box that played Chumash flute music on a loop. We thought by broadcasting it, we could get the spirits to play along with us and we were right. When we turned off the boom box, the mysterious flute music continued along with the same melody as our modern music. It seemed like an intelligent response more than a remnant from 300 years ago. Something or someone heard what we were playing and decided to play along with it after we turned off the music. I was ecstatic. Paranormal author Richard Senate, who has experience with haunted locations in that area, agreed that there was a melody that continued after we turned off the music.

That whole investigation was sad and visual, but poignant as well, because there are some things I still can’t put into words from La Purisima. When the sun came up I felt like I was returning to the present from a time travel. Investigations like La Purisima feel more like journeys back into the past rather than paranormal investigations and the evidence we get just enhance the experience. This investigation was one of my first ones, so rather than provide clarity on the paranormal world, it really added a new layer to it that I had yet to understand. It left me somewhat confused, but more motivated than ever to find answers. I’m lucky that I can still seek the closure I need. Not all spirits have that luxury.

Confused Spirits

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is one of the most haunted locations in the world, and with good reason. Eight thousand people died in this town in July of 1863 during a battle that marked one of the three most significant moments in American history. The two greatest Armies ever seen on the continent locked horns in a battle that would change the course of human history.

One of Gettysburg’s casualties was Jennie Wade, a twentyyear- old seamstress who was born and raised in the same town where she fell. On the morning of July 3, 1863, Jennie was kneading dough for bread when a single bullet (called a miniball in those days) crashed through the house and pierced her heart, killing her instantly. It was never determined which side fired the fatal shot, but regardless, Jennie Wade became the only civilian casualty of the battle.

One hundred forty-eight years later, the house where Jennie Wade perished still stands where it was built, and paranormal enthusiasts can take a tour at all hours for a few dollars. The believers, the curious, and the skeptics all converge on this historic structure to see or hear firsthand the spirit of Jennie. Hundreds have reported seeing or hearing her in the house.

This is a dilemma of paranormal investigation—dealing with the confused mental state of the spirit with whom you’re trying to make contact. For almost 150 years, the spirit of Jennie Wade has been roaming her house, unaware that a sniper’s bullet killed her when she was just twenty years old. What was on her mind when she died? She was cooking bread in the kitchen on a quiet morning while there was a lull in the battle. Her lover was away fighting the war somewhere. Her parents and other family members were still asleep when she died very suddenly. So suddenly that she may not even know it. Is her mind still in 1863? Does she still see the battle, or does she see present day? Does she notice the tourists walking through her house every day? It’s a perfect recipe for a confused spirit.

In the afterlife, Jennie’s mind is probably still young and vivacious and has no idea what’s become of her physical body, the war that consumed her, what happened to her boyfriend who went off to fight, or where her relatives are. Like the history of a location, the mental state of the subject is something that has to be taken into consideration when conducting investigations. These are the spirits who need the most help and where the lines between paranormal investigation and parapsychology become fuzzy.

I went to the house in the hopes of contacting Jennie, but knew that even if I were successful, I would have to get past her confusion to make meaningful contact. The Wade House is small and mostly made of wood. Footsteps echo off the hardwood floors and the smell of dust dominates the air.

During the investigation I was dressed as a Union soldier when a disembodied voice asked if I needed something to drink. Was this Jennie? Did she think I was her boyfriend returning from the war and needed water? This EVP told me she still thought the world was the same as the time of her death—1863.

Hours later we unearthed a bombshell. “I’m pregnant,” a female voice said on the recorder. If I thought Jennie was confused before, then I was certain that she was struggling with a lot of emotions after that. If she really was pregnant at the time of her death then she was definitely someone who needed the comfort of a family to support her, which was not there. I think confused spirits like Jennie need help to be at rest. I don’t think they can close a book when so many questions are unanswered. I hope we closed a chapter in her book by listening to her.

Jennie’s case also blurs the lines between intelligent and residual hauntings. I think she is an intelligent spirit living among residual activity. Spirits like her die quickly in their surroundings, but we can’t see it. It’s like being trapped in a video game with its own world that the characters can see, but we can’t. At places like this the residual and intelligent worlds get interlaced and it takes the right combination of people and weather to make looking into their world possible.

The Human Body Is the Best Detector:
Zak’s Challenge to Science

The Stanley Hotel is inviting and honest. A magnificent Georgian revival hotel built in the gilded era of American castles, the whitewashed structure sits among the equally majestic Colorado Rockies, creating a first impression that overwhelms the approaching traveler with opulence and comfort. You expect to be greeted by a tuxedoed butler and a mimosa, even if you’ve seen Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece based on Stephen King’s novel,
The Shining
, and know about the building’s paranormal residents who never checked out.

Rarely can someone step out of life and right into the celluloid frames of a movie, but that’s exactly what the experience is like at The Stanley. It’s somewhat tragic that
The Shining
misrepresented the hotel’s paranormal energy so badly. The spirits in the movie are dark and possessive and force Jack Nicholson to kill, which is the polar opposite of the truth. The permanent residents of The Stanley are harmless and more than likely confused and unaware they’re dead instead of being homicidal maniacs that say things like, “Here’s Johnny!”

I felt a connection to the history of The Stanley Hotel from the moment I stepped foot on its grounds. As I mature as a paranormal investigator, I feel myself becoming more and more aware of my surroundings everywhere I go. And not just the physical world, but the paranormal world as well. My senses have become more acute and I feel like I’m more sensitive to the presence of paranormal energy. Again, I do not claim to be psychic, but I believe that the best tool a paranormal investigator has is his (or her) body, and that it gets more in tune to the paranormal activity the more often it gets immersed in it. It’s like learning a language. You can study Spanish in school, but it’s not the same as being dropped off in the middle of Bogota, where you have to learn the language to survive.

I can’t stress enough the importance of training your senses. What you see on TV is two-dimensional representation of a four-dimensional world that the paranormal investigator experiences. I firmly believe that the human body can detect the presence of spiritual energy better than most electronic devices.

Some would say this is pseudoscience, but I want to challenge that assertion. Why can’t the body be relied upon as a detector? Why is it so easy to dismiss goose bumps and chills as a product of the mind? Why do we discount the feeling that someone is watching us as the mind playing tricks on us? I will admit that fooling the brain is possible, and I have read about the effects of EMF on the mind. I even read a medical report that suggested the doppelganger effect is caused by stimulation of the left temporoparietal junction of the brain (I would not know what temporoparietal was otherwise).

I can buy that in a setting where there are electric currents and EMFs, but what about when I’m alone in an abandoned barn in Ohio and there’s nothing that could cause that stimulation? When I hear someone behind me, smell their musk, and feel their breath on the back of my neck—three senses sending me alarm signals at the same time—how is it that my brain is playing tricks on me?