O 11/13 - public version

I’ve always liked to consider my mind comfortable in its openness. I like there to be things I don’t know about, phenomena I can’t explain, words I’m not familiar with. If not for these curiosities, the desire for knowledge and hunger for development might be stalled. But to identify spectres and wraiths as existing entities is something that I could only do in the event of actual contact. So, with apologies to the unfair setup question posited here, I yet must ask, “Do you believe in ghosts?”

As a thought-provoker, I shall present a brief recollection of an event that took place in my life some eight or nine years ago. With luck, it may tickle your own curiosity and nudge a crevice open your mind.... although, mercifully, not too much.

The building was lifted out of a paranormal investigator show, or a horror movie. In fact, it was actually featured on a famous show, “Ghost Hunters”. The building was a gigantic one made of stone, the last and largest of a series of buildings formerly designated the Peoria State Hospital, and it had been closed since the 1980s. Covering a number of acres in the hilly countryside and including its own broad cemetery, yes, it was an “insane asylum” in the early to mid 20th century.

Its guts long since torn out aside from artifacts associated with individual former patients and the museum on the first floor, the Bowen building was a massive three-story structure divided into hundreds of individual cell rooms, many said to be heavily haunted, in addition to a basement where the most heinous of apparitions was said to reside. Staff of the Bowen stocked the rooms with objects for the ghosts to interact with and occasional devices to record their activity, then took groups on tours on some evenings. Otherwise, the massive structure was entirely derelict.

The night that I went, it was alongside my then-stepdaughter of about 11, two of her friends, another, more responsible adult, and a host of about ten other random paying people. A couple days before Halloween. Never having been on such an experience before, and never having experienced more than menial paranormal phenomena, my emotions were well balanced between the eagerness of an open mind and the faux-courage of parental obligation.

But once inside, the place was dark. And it was huge.

Accompanying us were two staff members - the tour guide and a “ghost hunter” carrying an array of “ghost hunting” equipment. We were to travel from room to room, floor by floor, until the climax of returning downstairs to face the dreaded basement. A few of us wielded flashlights, and I personally brought two: one I gave to the child, and the - ahem - more reliable one I kept for myself. I had also brought along a simple digital voice recorder.

As the tour went along, the ghost hunter absorbed a lot of the attention, as children gasped at the flickering colors of his devices when crossing a doorway or calling out the name of a certain patient who was rumored to be disembodied in the area. Among his gadgets was a box that spat strange noises in response to his called questions, and from time to time the tour would halt, spears of light alone in the middle of a former kitchen or collapsed laundry chamber or holey shower stall, echoes ringing round, as he would roll a ball into the darkness and wait for a response….

There was a taut uncertainty lingering on my skin. We were being infected with tales of terror throughout, storied accounts of abominable living conditions and the sorrowful method by which society - to this day, even - considers and treats the infirm and unwanted. These were real-life vignettes, practices that actually took place upon the very floors where we now stood, as we peered methodically into the cobweb-crusted corners, perking our tingling ears for menacing whispers or the moans of the lost. The agony felt by any remaining phantoms was in fact ours, as we imagined these horrors to be real, abandonment and mistreatment and ignorance of our culture visible to this day. The children’s eyes gaped as widely as their mouths.

But as we progressed, I felt less and less timidity for the unknown. There was instead an increase in strength, a reminder that nothing ghostly had ever happened to me. I began to steel myself for my own experiment: to covertly lag behind the tour and examine rooms we’d already passed, finding dark and empty passages in which to stand motionless and capture the stillness on my digital recorder.

They say that ghosts draw from an as-yet unknown source of “strength” to appear among any of our viable senses, and to even make the effort may only result in a questionable display on a special monitor or graph, but one simple technique (supposedly) is to play back a recording and analyze it in search of staticky sounds or odd variations in otherwise stable recording quality. These are, in effect, pieces of proof that the “ghosts” are attempting to gather the “power” to “manifest”.

Suddenly, screams erupted from the main hall.

I rushed back to the group.

The child, trembling and eyes as wide as birthday balloons, hurried to me and held up the flashlight I had given her. Its light had turned green, and she was already melting into a whirl of terror and exhilaration, a melange of emotions that flooded the youths from end to end. Giggles and fright and memories.

Hm. That’s interesting, I thought, fiddling with the flashlight and coming to the conclusion that its beam had indeed shifted color with permanence, and for no apparent reason, in the hall where there were said to be ghosts of children.

We proceeded.

I continued doing my fall-behind thing, recording random rooms once the excitement of youngsters was distant enough to matter, being careful never to allow the group to get too far ahead of me (for the building can easily become a deathtrap maze for a pilgrim, even without the help of ghosts). To be honest, despite the odd flashlight incident, I began to feel quite disappointed with the lack of supposed spectral activity, and I began to suspect that the whole thing may be a profitable ruse.

After all, there is nothing else of interest in or near Bartonville - unless one is interested in decrepit bars, angry farmers, and endlessly gray skies that perfectly mirror perpetual depression. It’s expected that when your crops die out, you’ll eat the barrel of a shotgun. Ghosts should be everywhere.

We ascended to the upper floors, and there would be gasps from the tots at times, as someone shouted a claim to have seen the ball move across the floor on its own, or that a toy building block had been facing the other way a minute earlier, to which the tour guide and ghost hunter added warnings about the malevolence of a soul that had hanged himself “on this very spot!” and then prod the spirits themselves for more action.

I admit, the building was creepy - it would be so even with the benefit of functioning electricity - but the garbled crackles on the ghost box and the blinking lights on the electromagnetic reader did little to reinforce hopes for interaction with those beyond the veil. I reassured myself that at least the children were getting our money’s worth.

Then, the basement.

I worked at the high school with another paraprofessional named Joan, and Joan was a character. In addition to the job at the school, she also worked part time as a guide at the Bowen building during tour season, and so she would often inform me of the goings-on of the place during our down time. But intense Joan was special. She also claimed to be personally sensitive to all things ghostly.

Whenever I began to wonder about the Bowen tour guides’ motives, or if they in truth were merely puppeteers of fear by way of trickery and pomp, I thought of Joan. She claimed to be able to “see” and “sense” entities wherever they were said to be strongest, and if you knew her, you would know that it wasn’t something she could (or would want to) make up. And she swore with each breath that there was something living in the basement. Something evil.

So the thing about the basement is that it is supposedly inhabited by a sinister being who performed autopsies and the like - all legal, and nothing bizarre, but still deep in the presence of death, and supposedly equally morbid in life. The morgue had been down there as well, along with many chambers made of heavy brick where furnaces and other machinery had once chugged out their lifetimes. Bodies had been dumped down a chute to land here during the flu and yellow fever epidemics. And as soon as we arrived, my doubts about the place faded quickly.

It was obvious there was no staging the flight of pebbles that danced across the room, because we had spread out and covered many corners with our lights at once. I heard footsteps coming from an adjacent hall and followed them to a dead end that I was told later led to tunnels so rife with monsters that they had been cemented over. Finally, with trepidation threatening to overtake the more open of present minds, I decided enough was enough when a chunk of brick, the size of a fist, soared from the empty nothingness and landed at my foot with a massive CLACK.

I may not have been convinced of the reality of “ghosts”, but something was happening in that clammy, musty expanse that wasn’t right with the world.

Joan had instructed me to rub the stairwell’s lower knob before exiting, a totem to prohibit the apparitions from following me home. And with strict demands that the child do the same - since I lived in the same house as she - we eagerly left the hideous black basement and sampled the freshest of all air under a brisk but gloriously starry October sky. And all was again right with the world.

The young ones chattered all the way home, generously spilling the crazed emotions out in blabs and yells, as I looked over at the other adult. “So were you scared?” she asked plainly as we pulled into an ice cream shop to decorate the children’s mouths with the night’s final chilly delight.

I simply laughed.

“….”

It wasn’t until months later, when I took the time (and had the courage) to analyze the recording, that my own eyes widened to the point of balloons.

Donning powerful headphones and spreading the 2-hour audio file across a mixing program, I sat down and proceeded to search the soundscape for oddities and crackles. I sought out the ranges where the tour group had clearly faded to the background and all was silent - the moments when I had lagged behind to stand in rooms capped only with cobwebs and mold.

Curiously, they appeared. Again with obviousness. Little sparks, like little paint chips of white noise, some loud, some subtle, but all clearly different from any of the other hundreds of hours of recordings I had made with the device. They resembled spit, both in sound and in duration. There were quite a few of these crackles, in fact.

I amplified them and filtered them through different frequencies, but no clear “messages” were apparent. It was thought-crafting, but not necessarily frightening.

About an hour and a half into the recording, I heard children laughing - the gaggle of our group, as they squealed down the hallway with the toy blocks that magically turned face at random. They drifted down the hall and fell to a near-mute.

And then, momentarily, there was another sound.

It lasted a mere second, but whatever it was, it clearly followed the piqued 11-year olds. Unsure at first, I replayed it and normalized it, stretching my ears to maximum. The sound was garbled and small, like an ancient turntable. Images of old Victrola records and the frilled white wardrobe of the sickly gave me distinct chills, as the investigation illuminated a single solid answer: the sound was, in fact, that of laughter.

But it was not that of the 11-year olds; a separate set of laughter, and it was following them.

And then, to my horror, there were stabbing screams. Our group’s children.

It was the exact moment when their flashlight had turned green.

At that point, flushed with bristles and shock, I stopped the recording. And to this day I have never listened all the way to the basement section of the tape.

So….

Perhaps there is such a thing as a mind being too open….?