Ghost Hunting

  * * *

  Our second night in the hotel hit its first nugget of activity while Brian was setting up the mini DVR camera in room 1302. He was halfway through when he heard a man’s voice whispering to him. Looking around, he tried to find the source of it, but there was no one there.

  “Hello?” he called. “Hello?”

  Then he heard it again. But as before, he couldn’t find anyone who might have made the noise.

  A little while later, Grant and I found ourselves in the basement of the Concert Hall, checking out the concierge’s claims that the place was haunted by the spirit of the homeless woman. Listening closely, we heard what sounded like footsteps and running water. Were there people in the building? Icemakers? We hoped to find out.

  Two hours into the investigation, Steve and Brian walked into the MacGregor Room—and got EMF readings that were off the charts. The lowest one was over 9.0, the highest one 53.4! (Compare that to a baseline reading of 1.0!)

  Steve pointed to the floor. There had to be something underneath it if he and Brian were getting a reading that incredibly high. More than likely, an electrical source. Brian went down to the basement to check it out. It didn’t take long for him to find the reason for all the electromagnetic activity—a communications junction. And not a small one. It served the entire hotel.

  By that time, Grant and I were examining room 401, where I had slept—or tried to—the night before. The broken drinking glass was still there, with a fragment popped out of it. Neither of us could figure out how it had happened, much less how the closet door had opened on its own.

  At about 1: 00, some four hours into the investigation, Brian and Steve made their way to the Billiard Room, where Mr. Stanley supposedly made an appearance from time to time. They were taking EMF readings when Brian swore and pointed to a French door—at which point Steve swung his flashlight in that direction.

  By that time, there was no one there. But Brian claimed he had seen someone standing by the door until Steve’s light had chased the figure away. They examined the hallway beyond the door.

  “Can you give us a sign of your presence?” Steve asked. “Can you make a noise?”

  As if on cue, they heard something—the sound of a doorknob jiggling. “Did you hear that?” Brian whispered and began moving toward the noise.

  “Go slow,” Steve cautioned him. “Go slow.”

  It seemed to be an outside door that had made the noise, so they went out into the cold. But there was no one there.

  About that same time, Grant hooked up with Lisa and Dave and told them he wanted to check out the stage in the MacGregor Room. Lisa and Dave followed Grant into the room, intending to scan the place with their instruments—until Grant pulled aside a curtain on the stage. Suddenly, there was a face poking through a hole in a half-shattered door—a face with a maniacal grin, a lot like Nicholson’s in The Shining. As it happened, the face was mine, but that didn’t stop Lisa and Dave from jumping a mile into the air, scared out of their wits.

  The door to room 217—not to mention the hatchet in my hand—were props left over from the TV miniseries. It was a good joke, if I say so myself. After all our hard work, it loosened everybody up.

  When the hooting and jeering were over, I told Brian I wanted him to come with me to get another look at the Concert Hall. He looked surprised. After all, I work with Grant most of the time if I work with anybody, and Brian usually winds up with Steve or somebody else. But this time was different.

  It was cold outside as we left the main building, but as residents of Rhode Island we weren’t exactly strangers to cold. We just put up our hoods and made our way to the Concert Hall, our breath freezing on the air like tiny wraiths.

  When we got inside, we listened for sounds. One of the claims the hotel staff had made was that there was a screeching noise in the hall. We wanted to see if we had the same experience. We waited for a while, but nothing happened.

  Then I broached the real reason I had asked Brian to accompany me to the Concert Hall. The guy was like a little brother to me, and had been since he joined T.A.P.S. in the early days. Yet his presence on the team had always been a source of annoyance to me and others, and his girlfriend had distracted him with her cell phone calls to the point where he had become a burden.

  When he left, it was more of a relief than anything else. Then he had asked to come back and we had accepted him—against our better judgment. But it was clear to everyone, including him, that he was unofficially on probation. After being back for a while, he deserved to know where he stood.

  “So,” he said as we sat in the balcony, listening for anything even vaguely like a screeching noise, “how am I doing?”

  I felt good being able to tell him, “Pretty good. To be honest, I didn’t want to see you come back, but you live for this.”

  We talked about how he had gotten his life together, putting some money in the bank for a change. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He was twenty-nine years old. It was time to grow up, I told him.

  “I know,” said Brian. He went on to tell me how much he appreciated the opportunity to rejoin the team.

  I could have said that he had shown us what we wanted to see, and that he could feel secure in his position with us, but I didn’t. I knew Brian well enough to understand he needed me to be real with him.

  “Don’t shut the door again,” I told him. “Prove me right.” I had taken some heat from Grant and the rest of the team when I’d suggested we return Brian to the fold. Now he had to show us he was a changed man, not just for a moment but for the long haul.

  It was a good conversation. Brian seemed to feel good hearing what I had to say. It had to be a load off his mind to know we were pleased with him.

  Grant, meanwhile, was working with Dave and Lisa. They were going from guest room to guest room, trying to see if they felt anything. As I’ve said before, we depend heavily on our instruments for verification of our experiences, but we all go by our feelings as well.

  None of the guest rooms seemed promising to them until they got to room 1302. Then they all felt something. By then, it was about 3:30 a.m. and we were seven hours into the investigation, so everyone was a little tired. But that wasn’t why Lisa took the opportunity to lie down on the bed. She wanted to relax so she could open herself up to any presences in the room.

  Dave said he had a feeling that they were being watched. They asked if there was anyone else in the room with them, hoping to get a ghostly response. But it was very quiet.

  Grant’s tape was coming to an end in his mini digital video recorder, so he went over to a heavy wooden table to change it. But it was dark in the room so Kendall Whelpton, one of our camera operators, went over to lend Grant the illumination from his camera’s LCD screen.

  Suddenly the whole table lifted up and slammed down—right along with the chair that was standing beside it. The movement and the resulting bang were enough to get Grant’s heart pounding in his chest, and with all he’s been through over the years he doesn’t shock easily.

  In the wake of that bang, he looked around, searching for an explanation. It occurred to him that Kendall could have moved the table with his leg as he brought his camera over, but the table was too heavy to be budged that way.

  Kendall was just standing there with his mouth open, not knowing what to say. Clearly, the table had assumed a new position in the room. That much was evident from the tape Kendall had taken previously.

  It was at that point that Brian and I got there and heard the story. Brian noted that he had heard a man’s voice in that part of the room during his travels earlier in the evening.

  Unfortunately, Dave hadn’t seen the table move. He was looking in another direction at the time, so he had only heard it. Disappointed, he lingered in the room, accompanied by Steve. “It’s all patience,” Steve told him.

  Steve’s first experience was in a cemetery, but after that he didn’t have one for almost five years. He knew how Dave felt. Chances to witness paranorm
al phenomena up close were few and far between. It was frustrating to have something take place a few feet away and not get to see it.

  Trying to console Dave, Steve told him he had come a long way. Dave said that he appreciated the opportunity T.A.P.S. had given him. After all, ghost hunting was his passion in life. Finally, the edge taken off his disappointment, Dave followed Steve out of the guest room.

  As for Kendall, who had seen the table move, his whole view of the paranormal had changed. Prior to that night, he’d been a skeptic. He had wanted proof—and now he had gotten it. “I’m a believer now,” he said, still a little shaken from the experience.

  Though it was too late for us to keep investigating, we left our instruments up and rolling the rest of the night. Lisa would have to go home the next morning, but the rest of the team would stay in the hotel to analyze the data we had collected and conduct some local research.

  The first apparent evidence Steve and Dave came across was the pattern of three lights that Grant and I had discovered in the MacGregor Room. At the time, we had entertained the idea that the lights were a reflection but rejected it. On the tape, however, it was clear that the lights were moving with the camera, so Steve and Dave concluded that they were a reflection after all.

  Next they reviewed the tape of my experience in room 401. Though everything that happened initially was off-camera, you could clearly hear the door open and then the glass shattering. It was a good thing I moved the camera at that point to train it on the closet door, because we got the door moving and latching on tape.

  We weren’t so fortunate when it came to our digital video recorder or the wireless audio we had set up outside Brian’s room. The moving table had eluded us as well. All we could see on the tape was the tabletop.

  But Brian got something when he went to visit the Stanley Museum. The guy who runs it gave him some interesting geological information. Armed with that and the data we had recorded, we went to see hotel management with our findings.

  At the meeting, Grant and I met Nancy Baker, the hotel’s controller, who was interested to hear what we had to say. Billy Ward was there as well, as congenial as ever. We started out by telling them that we had been able to explain a few of the hotel’s claims without resorting to the paranormal.

  First, we talked about the Concert Hall. We found that if the door is open just right and the wind is blowing, it sounds like a woman screeching. Given those circumstances, we didn’t believe there was any ghostly activity in the hall.

  In room 412, the headboard was loose. When the window was open, the headboard could catch the wind and shiver violently enough to make the bed shake. Despite what Brian and Steve had seen, we couldn’t say there was anything out of the ordinary in that room either.

  The same went for the banging on the fourth floor. When we looked into it, we found that the heating pipes made a dink, dink, dink, BANG sound whenever they expanded. As plumbers, we run into that a lot. In any case, the banging wasn’t attributable to any paranormal entities.

  We had also raised questions about the stolen-wedding-ring claim. Though we had left some jewelry on the nightstand beside the bed in 401 for two nights running, nothing had happened to it. (But then, so much else had gone on there, the resident spirit might have been too busy to worry about a few baubles.)

  An interesting footnote was Brian’s discovery that the hotel was built on a mountain full of quartz, a situation that is believed to facilitate residual hauntings. The energy captured by the quartz gets released when the conditions are right, allowing spirits to manifest themselves.

  Then there were our personal experiences. In the hallway by the Billiard Room, Brian and Steve had seen the shadowy figure that slunk back as they approached it. And in room 1302, the table and chair had moved. We didn’t have video evidence of these occurrences, but we did have audio.

  The most convincing proof we had that the hotel was haunted was the video footage from the room I had slept in. After the glass broke and I repositioned the camera, we could see the closet door close and latch. Afterward, I attempted to shut the door without turning its knob. But no matter how hard I tried, it wouldn’t close that way.

  It was unexplainable. Add to that all the other stuff and I couldn’t help pronouncing the place haunted. Grant agreed without reservation.

  All in all, the Stanley Hotel was an awesome place, a once-in-a-lifetime investigation. We were glad we had made the trip. Now we were looking forward to going home to our families in Rhode Island.

  * * *

  GRANT’S TAKE

  I’ve been through a lot of shocks in the course of my ghost-hunting career, but none more unexpected than that table rising up and slamming itself down on the floor. Normally, I take the paranormal in stride. This time I thought my ribs were going to break, my heart was pounding so hard.

  * * *

  Conclusion

  BY GRANT WILSON

  So now what? Where do the Ghost Hunters go from here?

  Our third television season is going to see us exploring a haunted castle in Ireland. You know we’re jazzed about that. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be? Afterward…it’s hard to say. We’re exploring all kinds of possibilities back at our headquarters in quaint little Warwick, Rhode Island.

  It’s hard to believe how far we’ve come since our humble beginnings in the depths of Jason’s basement, when it was pretty much just the two of us going everywhere and doing everything. We never expected it to be any different—and in some ways, I guess it’s not. We’re still staying up late at night, crawling around in dark places full of dust and cobwebs. We’re making sacrifices for the things we believe in. And we’re still dedicated to our mission of putting paranormal investigation on a scientific footing, so it can finally get the respect it deserves.

  Some people look back on their lives and wish they had been different in some ways. Not me, and not my friend Jason. We wouldn’t have left out a thing, because without all those painful, funny, terrifying, gratifying, and occasionally awe-inspiring moments, we wouldn’t be the people we are today. We would be something less, I think.

  I’m not sure I thought that when we were risking our lives soldering a banging pipe in a crawl space under an old house, or when we found out that the ghost in the wall was really a tape recorder, or when we faced that inhuman entity in a supposedly empty barn. I wasn’t so happy when we all got food poisoning in North Carolina, or when we had to part company—if only temporarily—with a long-standing member of our team.

  But when I look back, I see how important everything was, the good times as well as the bad, and how it all fits together. I know that sounds a little touchy-feely, but hey…that’s the kind of guy I am.

  Glossary

  APPARITION

  A disembodied spirit visible to human beings.

  ASTRAL PLANE

  A level of existence separate from, and in some sense higher than, the physical world, according to certain philosophies and religious teachings.

  COLD SPOT

  A place that is cooler than the surrounding area. It is thought by some to be an indication of a supernatural presence drawing energy from its environment in order to manifest.

  DIGITAL INFRARED CAMERA

  A device used to capture images invisible to the human eye at the “hot” end of the light spectrum. It is capable of feeding information to a computer, where its infrared images may be stored on a hard drive.

  DIGITAL THERMOMETER

  A device used to record the presence of cold spots and hot spots, sometimes during an apparent paranormal event. Some digital thermometers record temperatures second-by-second for PC storage and graphical charting.

  ECTOPLASM

  A filmy, quasi-solid substance that supposedly issues from the bodies of mediums while they are in trance states. Ectoplasm may issue from the mouth, the nostrils, the eyes, the ears, the navel, or the nipples. In photographs, ectoplasm resembles muslin fabric soaked in water.

  ELECTROMAGN
ETIC FIELD RECORDER

  A device used to record data on electromagnetic fields

  (EMFs). Its use is controversial among ghost hunters in that EMFs from power lines, television sets, kitchen applicances, etc. surround us constantly, as well as the fact that it has yet to be categorically proven that ghosts emit EM energy. On the other hand, some researchers say ghosts disrupt EMFs.

  EVP

  Electronic voice phenomena. Audio devices may record disembodied voices and other supernatural sounds that are inaudible to the human ear without mechanical intervention.

  EXORCISM

  Ritual expulsion of invading spiritual or demonic entities from a person or dwelling. The term was brought into the common vernacular by the 1973 movie The Exorcist.

  FLOATING ORB

  A spherical image, usually a translucent white though sometimes a reddish or bluish hue, which inexplicably registers on film or videotape. Its presence is thought by some to be an indicator of supernatural activity.

  GHOST

  The soul or spirit of a dead person, reflecting the appearance of his or her living body but less substantial. Ghosts may exist in a state of semi-awareness or be completely cognizant of their living observers.

  GHOST HUNTER/INVESTIGATOR

  A person who attempts to gather evidence of ghosts or other paranormal activity. This may be accomplished by means of still photography, video, audio, EMF recordings, EVP recordings, or other media.

  HAUNTING

  The manifestation of a ghostly presence attached to a specific person or location.

  INHUMAN ENTITY

  A demon or other spirit intent on causing harm to living beings. Also known as a negative entity.

  INTELLIGENT HAUNTING

  A supernatural entity that is aware of its surroundings and/ or observers and is capable of interaction with them.