It was a night of supernatural sleuthing at the Lewis County Historical Museum.
On Saturday night, a team of self-proclaimed ghost hunters and a group of amateur enthusiasts teamed up to investigate a possible haunting at the museum. According to Executive Director Andy Skinner, the museum has a long and storied past of ghostly encounters.
A notorious event involves a former employee from years ago. As the story goes, the employee was working late and turning off all the lights when a woman dressed in Victorian-era clothing came up and asked for a train. The employee told her there was no train to catch and there hadn’t been for years, and the woman politely thanked her, walked off and vanished.
Skinner himself even had a ghostly encounter a few years ago.
“A few years ago we were taking pictures of the museum with a full spectrum camera — you basically can see in the dark — I picked it up and turned around and there was a figure standing between the hallway and doorways. I just froze. It was a little freaky,” he said.
Skinner is also a member of the local ghost hunting group, South Sound Paranormal Research. The group has investigated the museum before, along with a number of other local homes and buildings.
In fact, Skinner says, they’ve captured some strange things during their investigations.
“One of the most famous stories is a video they caught a couple years ago. It comes down like a ‘Beam me up, Scottie’ kind of light in Star Trek. It comes down, you see movement on the left hand side and it disappears,” he said.
Saturday night was the first time South Sound Paranormal Research has invited members of the public to help in an investigation. Initially, they were only going to allow 10 people to join in, but because the demand was so high, they allowed 14. It was all for the greater good, since the money raised went to the museum. Several came from as far as Portland and Puyallup.
“We had calls this evening wanting to know if anyone cancelled,” said Patty Valdez, the leader and founder of South Sound Paranormal.
Elaine Kozanitis, from Pacific, has gone on ghost hunts around the area before, and she was intrigued by what she heard about the museum. She also appreciated that the money was a donation to the facility.
The sleuths broke off into teams and investigated the attic, the loft and the ground floor for clues of paranormal activity. Ghosts, they theorized, might not only be attached to the building itself, but any of the historical objects featured within.
To document any possible subliminal activity, the group set up DVR video cameras, high fidelity voice recorders and electromagnetic frequency detectors around the building. One of the speciality tools on hand was “ghost box,” a piece of equipment that scans through radio stations to create white noise through which ghosts can communicate via electromagnetic imprinting.
Or so the theory goes.
Wearing glowsticks on necklaces, the groups spread into various parts of the darkened building. They spoke little to one another. With equipment running, they called out into the room the occupied with various questions to prod the spirits into action.
“I’m going to sing the ‘ABCs.’ Can you help me?” one asked.
“A lot of people drove here a long way to meet you, can you say something?” asked another.
“Are you here to catch a train? Is someone keeping you here?” asked someone else.
They stood mostly still, but called out to mark when an ill-placed step caused the floor to groan.
Valdez said the group has done multiple investigations at the request of property owners around the region. They don’t charge for their services, and they offer up hours of video and audio footage, notes and an explanation of what they’ve found. Sometimes, like at the museum, they find what they believe is evidence, but other times there’s nothing.
One of the running gags circling around the room were “orbs,” the dots of light that sometimes show up on film or video. People often attribute the orbs to a ghostly presence.
“Orbs, that’s just basically dust,” Valdez said. “You hear about them all the time and on every TV show. It’s just a light anomaly. We can’t tell you what they are. We can’t definitively tell you what ghosts are.”
So what does it take to prove there is a haunting?
The answer is subjective.
Part of the difficulty, and where the electronics come in handy, is tearing apart when the mind is playing tricks and when something strange might actually be happening.
“It’s tough,” said Jay Verburg, one of the researchers and also a former cast member of the Ghost Mine, a paranormal show on the Sci-Fi Channel. “Some people can sense it (a ghost’s presence) on a deeper level than others. Personally I’m very skeptical… Proof to me is an audible voice.”
