Williams Ordinary
This was my first investigation at Williams Ordinary. This site presented several challenges for us. First, the building had been modified many times to suit the use at the time. So, there were many small spaces due to walls sprouting up all over the main floor. Also, the location was quite large, which taxed our camera cable capabilities. We had a brand new 4 camera system with us with the supplied cabling – which was short. One of the biggest challenges, one we couldn’t overcome with some maneuvering of equipment, was the noise issue. This site sits a mere sidewalk’s breadth from a major road making traffic noise prevalent and light anomalies frequent.
All of that said, set up was mildly chaotic and seemed to take forever. With the new camera system came more equipment to put on our command central table and A LOT more cabling to manage. I think Dawn spent 45 minutes to an hour just taping cables to the floor. Two things we learned during set up: we needed a lot more cable for the new system, and the new cameras have a different, tighter, field of view than the other system we have. They need to be used in areas where we are trying to get more distance. Using the new cams in small rooms is pointless. It’s almost like they are permanently zoomed in.
Once we got the investigation started, things went smoothly. Aside from the noise from the street and the noise of us moving around the building, there wasn’t much going on. During one of my sessions with Kerri in an upstairs empty bedroom we had some odd K2 activity. There seemed to be weird moving “pockets” of EMF that we never could quite pinpoint. The pockets didn’t seem to be caused by any normal causes of EMF (outlets, outside wiring for lights, etc.). While we were in this room, I noticed an IR light was off in the room across the hall. I found that the IR light was unplugged. The plugs in this room were fairly loose and the “wall wart” was heavy enough that it could have fallen out. But, it would have fallen onto a hardwood floor, and someone on that level would’ve heard the thump. It probably could have been heard on the floor below, but after doing some experimenting, we found that no one at command central could hear it. We’ll have to see when the light goes out during review and compare that to our notes on where everyone was at the time.
It’s investigations like this – or, more specifically, equipment set-ups like this – that let me know just how good of a team we have. We were all able to come up with ideas and make the necessary changes to get everything up and running when we were faced with obstacles. Hopefully, we see fewer and fewer obstacles as we get a regular batch of equipment and the kinks of accessories sorted out.
Do I think this location warrants further investigation? We need to do some interviews of former tenants to hear specific claims. We need to sort through all the data and see if we caught anything (the location “felt” very comfortable all night) before I can say if we should try to go back. Once we get all our background work done, we may want to give it another go.
WIL11_110806 INVESTIGATOR JOURNAL
This was my first time investigating Williams Ordinary. When we arrived we were shown around the property and got to hear some of the history of the property. It is a very welcoming property that is currently being used for offices. We had a nice big space to set up command central but had issues with the cables for the cameras since the area for command central was located far away from some of the rooms.
My first rotation was in the hobby horse room with Robert. We sat there for a bit when we started noticing a light that would appear by one of the inner doors. It took us a minute to figure out that the light was from the cars outside, there were 2 southbound lanes and one north bound that was infrequently used and it was from the cars in this lane that we could see their head lights bounce off the floor and walls from the two rooms away to light up a spot in our room. We then noticed what seemed to be a bright flash coming from the window, as if from someone standing outside the window taking a picture (this room is on the 2nd floor). It wasn’t until we moved to the front room adjacent to this room did I see that it was from heat lighting outside.
The next rotation I had was in the basement with Kerri. It had been raining on our way down and there was still water on the road. In the part of the basement we were in there was a door to the outside and through this door we would hear cars passing. Because of the rain and the way the sound was being funneled into the room, the cars passing sounded like a grumble or growl of a monster. Not paranormal, but very amusing to us. Adding to the amusement was a light from our K2 that illuminated some duct work in a way that made it look exactly like a stereotypical alien head. Ah… very amusing indeed.
My rotation at command central left me wondering about a cabinet that did not seem to have a key to it in the key lock box. This particular cabinet kept having a noise coming from inside of it that sounded like a mouse chewing on something. The odd thing is that this cabinet was mounted to the wall so a mouse would have had to chew through dry wall and the cabinet to get inside which not impossible seems unlikely since it was not in the kitchen part of the room but on the other side over the copy machine.
Last rotation was all of us in the ballroom, now a conference room. We played several different tunes we thought might have been applicable to the times the room was used as a ballroom.
I like the property, it had a cozy feeling and I could see the building making a great house for a family. I didn’t not have any experiences there nor feel anything odd, but I would love the opportunity to investigate there again in the future.
BEN10_110730 – Ben Lomond Investigator Journal
It was nice to go back to Ben Lomond after the re-decorating and renovating. They had set up the rooms to be more like what they would have been like during the civil war, with surgical equipment and fake blood. Not to mention the fake flies in the fake blood to give it that special ick factor! This time we were able to set up command central in the basement which gave us more space but made for creative thinking when running lines to the cameras.
My first assignment was in the slave quarters with Sandy and Carolyn. Can we say dark? Like our previous investigations there the noise from the church next door made investigating near impossible but kept us entertained with the giggling and playing of the kids.
Next I was with Carolyn and Sandy again in the surgical room. It is always educational to investigate with those two since they are the Historian/Researchers of the group. They always know so much about the history of the places we go and of the history around civil war events. They were explaining how some of the surgical instruments would have been used and that they would have disposed of any amputated limps just out back. Seems crazy to me to imagine that there would have been so many people getting operated on and how they would have been so inundated with patients that the amputated limps would have just piled up. As we sat there I kept hearing voices, mostly a low male voice. It seemed to “respond” to questions Carolyn was asking. I thought we had either hit the jack-pot or I was losing my mind (really, I was more betting on the second one). Finally after feeling like I was going crazy, I went down to command central to where Kerri and Robert were seated (which was directly below us). This investigation was Roberts’ first investigation with us and I was not use to his voice. I was pretty sure that it had to be Robert talking and I just wasn’t hearing Kerri’s reply to him for whatever reason. After testing the theory by having them be quiet for a certain amount of time then to talk for a certain amount of time I confirmed it was Roberts voice I was hearing, but not being use to the register of his voice sure freaked me out at first! The whole situation was a good reminder to run some tests when a new member joins so you can quickly identify their voice. It was also a good reminder that no matter how quiet you may think you are being, sound really carries through these old properties. Oddly, my recorder shut off after about 8 minutes and 30 seconds into investigating in this room. It was fully charged when I went in.
My next session was back in the surgical room after a stint at command central. This session was with the Paranormal Puck. Personally, I don’t like the Puck. There I said it. And since we are on the subject, I also don’t like the Frank’s Box. I think they are both a bit silly, but when you are spending hours at a place I guess why not give it a shot. Really, what do I know? I haven’t had a theoretically discussion with a ghost about the pros and cons of them using devices to communicate with us, maybe they think it is cool and enjoy using it. Who am I to judge? I think I would be more impressed if at the next session they made it say “I am the ghost of Christmas past.” Can I put in that request? Aside from the Puck that particular session did yield some interesting noises from the other room. We heard a noise that sounded like something dropping… a marble? A piece of tile? I theorized that maybe it was a piece of plaster inside the wall that had fallen or gotten knocked to the floor by a mouse inside the wall. I have an old house that has a mixture of drywall over parts of old plaster where we had to open up the wall for the utilities, so occasionally we have plaster that drops behind the wall and the sound did have that sort of quality about it. Although we isolated the area the sound was coming from and we couldn’t tell if there would have been space for that to happen or if in that area the brick was directly behind the wall.
All in all I enjoyed investigating at Ben Lomond and would love to return in the future.
BEN10_110730 – Ben Lomond Manor House
It was a dark and stormy night – OK, no, it wasn’t. But it WAS hot and steamy. Very.
We arrived nice and early to get everything set-up. There had been many changes to the building since we had been there in the fall, so we needed to get reacquainted with our surroundings. (Read the journal entries from our previous investigation here.) Most of the changes just involved furniture/props for the hands-on museum set up they have. Cots, fake buckets of bloody water, bloody rags and flies are just some of the things they have laying around inside the building now. One of the changes was the re-placement of a wall in one of the upstairs rooms – now two rooms. We wanted to alter our camera set up from the last time some to account for the changes.
During set-up, we lost the power to one of the cameras – so we went with three stationaries for this investigation. Not ideal, but nothing we could do about it at the time. Everything else during set up seemed to go smoothly. Everyone is getting more comfortable being more hands on with the setting up process since Chris has been gone for two investigations. We set up the boom mic (otherwise known as the “cricket fart” mic) for this investigation, we haven’t used it in a while and it was good to be able to use it again – the constant audio it records can be very valuable at a location where the activity is primarily auditory.
My first session was with Robert – our newest member – in the “post-op/recovery room.” This was Robert’s first investigation with us and he definitely is a good fit. Right down to sharing our type of sense of humor. Robert asked me what the claims of paranormal activity are at this location. I told him, and mentioned that Kerri and I experienced the claim (the sound of a door closing) while we were at command central during our first investigation at the location. Not more than 5 minutes after I tell him the story, we heard the sound of a door shutting. We were both off and running to figure out where the noise came from and which door could possibly have made the sound. We found that the door from the main house to the gift shop was slightly ajar and a vacuum from the AC turing on COULD have caused the door to hit the frame sounding like it closed. I closed the door completely, and we went on with our session. Robert seated himself in the doorway of the recovery room in case we heard the “door sound” again we could try to pinpoint it. While he was seated there we heard what sounded like shuffling from the main hallway/front foyer of the house. This was an experience several of our investigators had several times during the night.
My second session was a LONG Paranormal Puck session. We use this piece of equipment completely experimentally. We love the continuos data it records but we’re very hesitant to hold firm to any of the verbal responses we have gotten. This session went, basically, for the next 2 hours. We started with Carolyn, Robert, Sandy and myself in the Surgery room. The Puck seemed to be pretty talkative, including saying Robert’s name several times. Again, during this session, several investigators heard shuffling in the hallway. At one point, Sandy and Robert went across the hall into the recovery room to investigate knocking noises they were hearing – they couldn’t pinpoint where the noise was coming from, but seemed to be emanating from one corner of the room.
As this session continued, we had a shift change. Carolyn, Sandy and Robert returned to command central and Dawn, Kerri and Kim joined me and the Puck in the surgery room. Again, we heard noises in the hallway. The most significant nosies we heard were across the hall in the recovery room. The sound was like someone dropping marbles off a shelf. When we went in to investigate, we were able to pinpoint the noise coming from a window encasement on the far side of the front of the room. One idea we had about what could be making the noises was mice in the walls – although the house has solid stone walls all the way to the foundation. And, it was so hot out that I have a hard time believing a mouse would want to be in the walls of a house anyway. The sound is still a mystery. Was it paranormal? I’m leaning towards no, but it’s still unexplained.
We found the Puck to have quieted down, so we brought Robert back up as it seemed to be very active while he was in the room earlier. We ended up bringing everyone up from command central and placing them strategically around the main level of the house. Two were in the surgery room, two were in the recovery room, two were right at the top of the stairs and one was sitting in the main hallway/foyer area. We were attempting to pinpoint the shuffling/footstep noises that investigators had been hearing all night. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any more unexplainable noises during that session.
We found out later that the mixer that goes with the boom mic was malfunctioning all night and all of that shuffling we were hearing, particularly in the main hallway – where the boom mic was stationed – was not recorded in a clean manner. We had a lot of audio recorders going throughout the night, including the camcorder, so I’m sure we caught SOMETHING. But, it was disappointing to know that the equipment we set up right where all the noise was coming from wasn’t going to yield us any results. We need to win a grant so we can buy new equipment!
This was the most activity we’ve had at Ben Lomond. I think we need to get back in there again and try to recreate some of the noises we where hearing. Hopefully we’ll have the boom mic back up and healthy again for that investigation.
BEN10_110730 – Investigator Journal
This was the first time we’d been back to Ben Lomond as a group since the renovations. There are three reasons we felt it was necessary to get back to this location this date in particular:
1) There are some theories that disturbance of a property can spur paranormal activity;
2) Other theories specifically address the possibility that energy may increase when/if a historical is reverted to an approximate likeness of itself at the height of its importance; and
3) We were there approximately a week after the exact 150th anniversary of the First Battle of Manassas, and some theories regarding both intelligent and residual hauntings note that anniversaries of significant events may prove more active than other times of the year.
So with that in mind, we set up command central in the basement of the property. Despite my own mistake in forgetting a crucial piece of equipment, we were actually up and running in our usual amount of time, which—given that we were working with a new building layout, new obstacles, and even a new team member—reflects really well on our team. Unfortunately, we had two pieces of equipment declare mutiny: One of our cameras decided to give up, and — though I did not discover it until review — the mixer that streams the boom mic audio into the recording software also failed on us, and basically recorded a very, very long session of Giant Angry Mosquito. I’m just grateful everyone on the team is outfitted with their own audio recorders.
The new setup of the manor house is impressive; not only has it been designed to look exactly like an in-use Civil War field hospital (complete with plastic flies; buckets of fake bloody water and half-eaten oatmeal beside the recovery beds), but most everything is also intended to be hands-on and interactive. There’s a lot to be said for immersion learning, rather than just wandering through a maze of velvet ropes in an old building; the same can be said about the kind of investigations we do. The more access we have to everything at the site, the better.
So we’ve already talked in these journals about the poor audio conditions at Ben Lomond — something we just can’t do anything about. When the weather is nice enough for an investigation, it’s also nice enough for everyone else in town to be out and about as well; and when the weather’s bad enough to keep people inside and quiet, chances are it’s bad enough to wreak havoc on our recording devices and investigators, too. So the bulk of our investigation passed as usual, with little or no real-time excitement. That was until Spencer, Robert, Carolyn and Sandy went to the surgical area to do some experimentation with the Paranormal Puck (Obligatory Techincal Director’s Note: ECRIP does not make any claims, supportive or otherwise, about the validity of results from this device; it is used for experimentation only). Sandy and Robert reported hearing what sounded like mice behind the window casements, in addition to some foot-shuffling type sounds in the hallways. We decided to send another team (myself included) up to the same areas to investigate.
It was during this second session in the surgery with the Puck (which we’ve affectionately dubbed Cujo, though I can’t remember why…) that Kerri, Spencer, Robert and I again heard the sounds coming from the first floor recovery room; it definitely sounded like someone or something was dropping small pebbles from a decent height within the window casement located at the front of the house, first floor, furthest from the gift shop area. It’ll be interesting to hear the audio recordings from that session; I think a couple of investigators first react to what sounded like shuffling feet in a different part of the house (the front hallway); after which we very clearly heard the pebble-dropping sounds from the casement. Spencer and I walked into the recovery area to see if we could locate the source, and I happened to be standing directly in front of the casement, staring at it, when the noise happened again. It didn’t seem to occur in response to anything, and it definitely sounded like it could easily be a mouse or bird loosening plaster or other materials within the walls. Given the age of the structure, the sounds as I heard them, and the fact that the window casement is indeed hollow, I think it’s likeliest that the noises were caused by something natural. It was dark, so even the outside inspection of the area surrounding that particular window would have to be considered cursory at best. I’m sure once we talk to the client, we’ll be able to figure out which natural causes are plausible and which are not.
Our final sessions consisted of all team members paired by twos and placed intermittently around the house to just listen. I think these kinds of sessions are very important, as it gives investigators an occasion to observe and collect data without the risk of apophenia. It also allows investigators to experience the property and environment in as natural a state as possible. In other words, the more you understand what a given structure and its environment does naturally (the sounds the structure naturally makes, the sounds common to nearby areas, natural tricks of light and how that light interacts with the structure, etc.), the less likely you are to collect false positives, and the more likely you’ll be able to quickly find explanations for even seemingly bizarre occurrences. Just because something seems weird or unexpected does not mean it’s paranormal!
The final session yielded nothing of note, and neither did teardown. But we did remember to do something that I think every team should make a habit of (ourselves included): Just before teardown we followed Dawn’s suggestion to record baselines of various sounds at command central that could potentially contaminate the audio we’d collected. This kind of baseline is not only helpful for reviewing audio from a given investigation, but you’ll then have them to refer to later should you investigate the same location again.
And that’s pretty much all I have to say about that. Onwards…
~ Kim