what exactly goes on here?” I asked. We were standing in the front parlor off the entrance hall. Melinda was adjusting a monitor she was setting up on a table in the corner. Behind the table stood a beautiful, ornately carved organ.
Melinda turned to me. “For one thing, there was a sighting of a woman dressed in white in the upstairs bedroom window,” she said.
“In a 1937 flood, there was a trapped woman who was rescued from that window,” Greg said. “She was old, though, and died from a heart attack.”
“And that’s the ghost?” I asked.
“It could be,” said Melinda. “We don’t know for sure.”
Cheryl said that she felt shivers and had the strange sense of another presence in the house when she was working there alone. She said that the alarms in the house go off without anyone being there and that lights blink on and off.
Other people have experienced cold spots in the house and have heard disembodied footsteps and loud knocking on the walls. A former occupant renting the upstairs rooms felt someone in a dress brush by her and saw the curtain at the windows moving. Someone saw an apparition of a woman in a white dress standing in the doorway of an upstairs bedroom whispering, I promise.
When the band’s last “oompah” finally sounded and the crowd dispersed, we set about getting the investigation under way—it was almost 10:30. Melinda’s team had placed some cameras in different parts of the house, both upstairs and down, so the monitor on the table now showed four areas inside the house simultaneously. While those cameras filmed throughout the night the rest of us would work in small groups in the various rooms with handheld equipment.
The house was not very large; a small parlor off the hall on the ground floor and a larger dining room with an elegant fireplace mantel at the end of the hall. A tiny kitchen was to one side of the dining room, and a little bedroom with a four-poster bed occupying most of the space was located at the rear of the house. The curved staircase led to two empty rooms on the second floor, one of them taking up the entire front of the house.
Because a ghost had been seen by the window in the front room upstairs, a S.O.A.R. team member spread a plastic garbage bag on the floor beneath the window and sprinkled it with white powder in hopes of recording spectral footprints if a ghost decided to climb out—or in, I suppose—through the window.
Several of us gathered in the upstairs front room. Melinda placed a tray on the floor and upon that placed an antique musical shaker, an old baby shoe, a compass, an antique desk-bell, and a lighted candle. She also sat an EMF meter and a K2 meter on the tray. Throughout the night Melinda, or any of us, would ask the ghosts to make use of the various objects on the tray; ring the bell, blow out the candle, rattle the shaker. The EMF and K2 meters would hopefully capture their responses. I liked the idea of giving the ghosts something to play with, something to do; the afterlife appears to be a boring place.
Ross Gowdy House organ
We had all the windows in the house open since the temperature inside was in the high 80s but, unfortunately, there were still late-night revelers in the park and street outside and the noise they were making was interfering with our recordings. After about an hour of that, we shut the windows. Even so, when we reviewed the data later on, we found that the first hour’s worth of recordings were useless because there was so much outside interference. Such are the pitfalls of ghosthunting.
In the upstairs room we sat on the floor, placing the tray with the various objects in the center of the room. We began to ask the typical questions of the spirits:
Is there anyone here that would like to speak to us?
Can you tell us your name?
Do you know what year it is?
Can you tell us how old you are?
We did not expect to get an audible answer to any of these questions but we did hope that our recorders would pick up a ghostly reply that we would hear on playback. We continued to ask questions, trying to focus on questions that required more than a simple “yes-no” reply.
There is a theory that says ghosts drain whatever energy they can get from the environment in order to “live.” This explains why ghosthunters so often complain about brand-new batteries in cameras, flashlights, recorders, etc., going dead right away; the ghosts have drained that energy. I believe that theory also explains “cold spots” in haunted locations. If ghosts drain energy from the environment, wouldn’t they also drain thermal (heat) energy? If they did draw that energy—literally sucking the heat out of a room—you would experience a cold spot or a drop in room temperature.
Perhaps with that theory in mind, Melinda asked the ghost if it could drop the temperature in the room. Using a remote digital thermometer, we recorded the room temperature at 85 degrees.
“Can you lower the temperature?” Melinda asked the dark.
We sat there quietly, waiting.
“Make it colder if you can,” Melinda said.
We waited.
After a few minutes someone said that they felt a breeze.
“My arms are getting cold,” Melinda said.
That’s when I felt a stream of cool air against my arm. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and could clearly feel the draft. “I’m getting a draft blowing against my arm,” I said.
“Does anyone else feel anything?” Melinda asked.
One of the other team members, Tanya, said she felt a draft as well.
The breeze on my arm was stronger now, actually cold. I was sitting near the doorway to the room, so I leaned over to that area and reached out into the darkness to see if I felt a breeze there. Maybe it was a natural breeze from outside, coming up the stairwell, I thought. Nothing. The air was still and hot. Moving back into my original position, I once again felt the draft, colder than ever.
“It’s still here,” I said. “Colder now.”
“OK” said Melinda. “My arms are freezing.”
I scooted back a few inches to see if I could discover the source of the draft, even though I knew the windows behind me were closed and, without air-conditioning in the house, there was no way to explain that frosty draft.
“My arms are so cold!” Melinda said. “Someone get a temperature reading.”
In the darkness I couldn’t tell who was using the thermometer, but I saw the red laser eye flash on in my direction and then heard someone say, “Seventy-eight degrees.”
Seventy-eight! Great Caesar’s ghost! The room temperature had dropped seven degrees for no apparent reason. The only explanation we had was that Melinda has asked the ghost to lower the temperature, and I guess it did.
It took a few minutes for the temperature to drop and while it was dropping, we also heard strange sounds coming from the room adjacent to the bedroom in which we were gathered. There were shuffling sounds, as though someone were moving around in the dark; popping sounds one might hear on old wooden floorboards; and knocking on walls. Sometimes these sounds would occur immediately after a question was asked, as if in reply.
After several minutes the temperature rose once more and we were not able to get the ghost to lower it again. We concluded our investigation upstairs and moved down to the bedroom at the rear of the house. During a previous S.O.A.R. investigation, a guest investigator asked, Is this the bedroom you stay in? The recording captured a female voice responding, But, I don’t. It seemed that the bedroom would be a good place to conduct another EVP session.
Melinda placed the same objects she had used upstairs on the bed and once again invited the ghost to use any of them. The rest of us gathered around the bed, asking questions, waiting for answers. At one point, it seemed that the compass needle moved a few degrees,