completely restored with a bar, dining room, and guest rooms—and the 1920s addition of locker rooms, card rooms, and meeting rooms.
Steven told me that O.O.P.S. (I love that name!) was formed three years ago and that they conducted paranormal investigations primarily in the Wilmington area. Over the years the group had become Snow Hill’s “house band,” and they routinely conducted investigations there and also sponsored a “Dinner and a Ghost” event each October.
“So, tell me what you’ve experienced,” I said to Steven, as we stood in an empty dining area.
He pointed to the old doors of the room and said that the door latches sometimes move on their own, as if some invisible being was seeking admittance. In that same room, an antique candle maker fastened to the wall came off all by itself.
“We’ve also recorded a lot of EVPs in the building,” Steven said, referring to mysterious voices and sounds picked up on recorders but inaudible to investigators at the time they were recorded. The voices are believed to be those of spirits.
We walked into the lounge, where Steven pointed out rows of glassware on shelves behind the bar. There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about them that I could see, but Steven said that one night the glasses in a back row lifted up and over the glasses in the front row. I went behind the bar to take a closer look at the shelves and I could see no way that such a thing could happen without human intervention.
As we were talking, more O.O.P.S. members drifted in and began setting up the investigation, running cables throughout the building and positioning cameras and recorders in various rooms. Steven had previous obligations and would not be staying for the investigation, but I would be working with the rest of the team: Tom, Scott, Steven’s daughter Jennifer, Chanda, and Andrea.
The O.O.P.S. team was well organized and seemed to have everything under control. Steven had already prepared a map of the building on which the team could mark the placement of the equipment … and they had a ton of electronic gear. For the most part, I just tried to stay out of their way as they set up.
I took a walk up the steep staircase to the second floor where the guest rooms were located. Although the rooms had recently been remodeled, everything was made to look much as it would have looked during the inn’s nineteenth-century heyday. High ceilings with ornate molding, colorful wallpapers, beautiful stone and wood hearths, paintings in elaborate gilt frames, and period-style furniture all helped to turn back the clock in these beautiful rooms.
Snow Hill Country Club and O.O.P.S. founder Steven Powell
I stepped into Room Three, a smaller room with a bed angled in a corner near the door. This room was said to be the most paranormally active of the guest rooms. A guest who was sleeping in the room suddenly awoke because he was getting wet from what he called a “leaking ceiling.” When the staff checked out the room, however, they found no leaks, no water. Also in that room, the team had previously recorded an EVP saying Don’t tell nothing.
Returning back downstairs after a few minutes I found that the team was ready to go. The dining room was the “command center,” with a monitor set up on which we could view four different areas of the clubhouse simultaneously. We would switch off and on during the night, but at all times there would be at least one person watching the monitor. The rest of us would work in small teams, investigating the various rooms of the clubhouse.
Before we started, Scott and ponytailed Tom went into the lounge and turned on some music. Rap music. It sounded something like Yo bee-otch, I’m a bad @!#* and I’m gonna *!ˆ#@ you like you ain’t never been *!ˆ#@ cuz I be *&%@# with my #@*%$ and @#@!%$ with your #!*&#. It seemed funny to me to see these two big, burly, Midwestern white guys hip-hopping to mo-fo music, but they explained it to me by saying that such “energetic” music helped to stir up the environment, to create some energy for the ghosts to make their presence known; the science of ghosthunting is unorthodox, to say the least.
But the commonly held theory about ghosts is that they need to draw energy to “live,” and they will take it from wherever they can get it. This theory helps to explain why rainy and stormy nights, like the night of our investigation, often result in more paranormal activity than other nights, as all the energy generated by such weather is conducive to ghostly manifestations.
I spent most of the evening working with Tom and Scott. We would go into various rooms with cameras and recorders and spend some time there trying to make contact with the spirits. Since O.O.P.S. had recorded EVPs at Snow Hill in the past, we were hopeful we would get some that night but, of course, we wouldn’t know if we were successful until after we reviewed all the data later.
On one of their previous investigations, the O.O.P.S. team video recorded a door swinging open on its own accord in the men’s locker room. That video is on the O.O.P.S. website; it’s pretty impressive. Hoping to recapture such a moment or maybe to experience something even better, we spent a good part of the night in the locker room. The three of us sat scattered in the dark locker room, visible to each other only by the little lights on our cameras and recorders. One of us would speak into the darkness, asking questions of the unseen spirits and then quietly wait for a response we hoped could be picked up on our recorders. Every now and then we would hear a faint sound, perhaps a tap, or maybe a footstep, and our senses would come to full alert, but we could not conclusively say that those sounds were of a paranormal nature.
A card room adjoined the men’s locker room, and after trying our luck in the locker room for awhile we moved to the card room. We sat around the card table and, once again, asked our questions. For the sake of accurate documentation of the data, we would always speak into the recorder the names of the investigators in the room and our location. Tom spoke into his recorder, “This is John, Tom, and Scott in the men’s card room.”
It was about 4 a.m., and it was difficult not to nod off as we sat at the table, asking questions now and then but mostly sitting quietly in the dark, allowing the ghosts their chance to speak. This passive—and to be frank, boring—part of ghosthunting is rarely shown on television, where ghosts seem to pop up at every turn. They don’t.
I’m not sure how long we remained there—I don’t think that I fell asleep—but after some time we decided to end our session in the card room and headed back to the command center. We compared notes with the women, and it seemed that none of us had experienced any tangible evidence of ghosts that night. I stayed there for a little bit, taking a turn at the monitor while some of the others went back out. Keeping in mind my arduous trek out to Snow Hill and the late hour, I decided to leave about half an hour later.
I was not part of the group that reviewed all the video and audio data that we had collected, but about two weeks after my visit to Snow Hill, Steven Powell contacted me to tell me what they had discovered. Maybe it was the weather or the nasty rap music that gave the ghosts what they needed to communicate with us that night, but it seems that they were quite talkative.
Chanda, Andrea, and Jennifer were upstairs in Room 2 off the main hallway when they recorded a male voice saying I’m sorry. This voice was recorded both on a recorder that was placed in the hall and on Andrea’s handheld recorder.
Two other EVPs recorded in that area are again male voices saying work and what sounds like the song of Satan, which may have been a response to a question asked about the rap music. (I know that’s what I would say about it if I were a ghost.)
But the EVP that impressed me the most was the one that Tom picked up on his handheld recorder while we sat at the table in the men’s card room. Just as Tom, Scott, and I were leaving the basement, and barely a minute before Tom switched off his recorder, a male voice said, This is John (pause), Ike (pause), Edward. What is startling about this EVP is that it is almost an exact repetition of what Tom had said when we first settled ourselves in the card room, although, with the exception of John, the names were different. Was the ghost mimicking us, only with a faulty memory? Were there three ghosts in that room named John, Ike, and Edward? Was I the John the ghost was talking about? I heard that EVP and my name is whispered in a ghostly male voice