Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (8 page)

These paranormal hot spots are actually more reliable for evidence gathering than intelligent hauntings because they are moments in time that repeat themselves, so they are somewhat predictable, although I don’t think they can be timed and expected. Intelligent spirits can choose to hide or ignore the living altogether, but residual hauntings don’t have the free will to choose when they appear and when they don’t. I believe the environment affects the coming and going of residual hauntings. Temperature, humidity, air pressure, and the electrical charge in the air are all ingredients that come together to form a residual casserole, like the lantern-carrying soldier at Castillo de San Marcos.

Situated in the oldest city in America, Castillo de San Marcos is a Spanish bastion built in 1672 to protect the city of Saint Augustine, Florida. It is the oldest masonry fort and the only existing seventeenth-century fort in North America. Its walls have seen more history and bloodshed than almost any structure on the continent, and its walkways and dungeons still echo with the voices of those who lived, served, and died there.

On one of the Castillo’s upper ramparts are a series of cannons that soldiers would patrol across during all hours of the day and night to look for any suspicious activity outside the fort’s walls. During the years before electricity, they would use kerosene or oil lamps, and it’s believed that one soldier still roams the ramparts, lighting his lamp and doing his duty night after night. I conducted an investigation of the Castillo in 2008 and captured on film a series of events that support this claim.

I had heard a lot about Castillo de San Marcos and was not disappointed with the paranormal activity there. Voices, growls, footsteps, blasts of cold air, and orbs littered the old fort, but it was the night watchman that was really captivating. Caught by a static night vision camera, a light on the upper ramparts clearly lit, flickered for a moment, and then moved away. The actions were very reminiscent of a soldier lighting a lamp and then walking his patrol and I believe this is a residual haunting from the days when the garrison was manned by the Spanish Army. I do not believe this is the intelligent spirit of a deceased soldier, but rather a brief window into another time when troops walked those ramparts, doing their duty to ensure everyone inside was safe.

The Birdcage Theater in Tombstone, Arizona, provides another great example of a residual haunting, but with a very intriguing twist. The Birdcage’s history is ripe for paranormal activity. It was a combination theater, poker hall, saloon, and brothel during the mining boom of the 1880s. It operated continuously for eight years until the silver veins dried up, the people left, and the town went with it. During its short, eight-year lifespan, it is estimated that over ten million dollars changed hands in the basement poker room, and in 1882 the
New York Times
called it “the wickedest, wildest place between Basin Street and the Barbary Coast.”

There is not a lot of documented death associated with the Birdcage Theater, though many reports of ghost sightings on the main floor have been documented. What’s more interesting is how hundreds of people (including me) have heard the unmistakable sounds of a poker game being played in the basement. Late at night the sounds of plastic chips hitting the wooden table, people laughing and singing, and even glasses clinking together in an old-west toast echo throughout the floor. It’s a Class A residual haunting of a bygone era.

But upstairs something different is happening. The old theater and its private “birdcages,” which were built so prostitutes could have a little privacy for entertaining their clients, has a platoon of intelligent spirits roaming its halls. I saw a clear apparition of a woman’s face as she moved quickly through the theater, and had several other experiences with intelligent spirits on that floor.

This dichotomy of hauntings brings up a fascinating question. If there are intelligent spirits wandering the Earth in the nonphysical plane, then how can there be a moment in time that repeats itself over and over again in the same building? How can there be intelligent hauntings upstairs and a residual haunting downstairs? Do the two ever interact? Can the intelligent spirits interact with the residual ones or do they even know each one exists? How does this work?

Residual hauntings are the one phenomenon in paranormal science that may be explainable by purely natural means, but you have to open your mind a little. Quantum physics tells us that we shouldn’t think of time as being linear. It doesn’t have a beginning and an end and doesn’t travel in a straight line. Humans only characterize it that way because we have to. Putting time in a straight line with a beginning (the dawn of mankind) and an end (present day) is the only way we can comprehend it. The day begins and ends. We celebrate the passing of each year and we count the years to document our lives.

But in fact, some of our leading scholars on the subject say time is infinite and does not travel in a straight line. Like many things in nature, it wanders and branches out in several directions and maybe even double-backs on itself. There’s almost nothing in nature that is perfectly straight. Trees grow upward in every direction to absorb light and rivers flow downhill following the path of least resistance. Quantum physics says time is the same. There are several theories that suggest time either branches out in several directions at once or flows like a river, wandering throughout the universe.

If we accept this “river theory” of time, then it’s possible that time can double-back on itself and create an isolated pocket where the present and the past are in close contact, much like a salient point on a river. It’s possible that today and a certain day in 1873 are separated by a thin layer of time and space, so we can find a hotspot where we can see and hear the past playing itself over and over again. This could explain residual hauntings, and it’s why I think paranormal investigators and quantum physicists seek answers to the same questions. We both seem to be working toward the same goal—to understand the unexplained phenomena of the universe—and should work together to achieve it.

Sounds and Smells

The sounds of the Birdcage Theater are wonderful to experience, and they illustrate how some of the most common paranormal activity is heard, but not seen. I’ve had literally hundreds of incidents of door slams, footsteps, objects being dragged, and various other sounds while conducting investigations. Many times these incidents are caused by drafts, changes in barometric pressure, the cooling and settling of a building, or pipes knocking together when air or water is pumped through them. But many times none of the natural conditions necessary to cause objects to strike each other and make noise are present, which leaves no other explanation but to label it as paranormal activity. Every time I hear something out of place, I investigate it and try to debunk it. At least 50 percent of the time I find nothing that could have caused the sound.

Footsteps are very common in paranormal investigations, so much so that I expect to hear footsteps above me almost everywhere I go. They seem to happen with more regularity than other sights, smells, and sounds. At the Moon River Brewing Company in Savannah, Georgia, I was preparing for an investigation of this old building when I heard the distinct sounds of boot heels clacking on the wooden floor above. It was loud and unmistakable and I was absolutely sure someone else was in the building. Nick and I ran upstairs to see who it was and tell them to get out of the building, but no one was there. We had already been locked into the establishment for the evening and confirmed that no one else was in the building. My only conclusion is that it was the residual energy of a former worker walking across the floor and dragging something heavy, like a barrel or a chest . . . or a body.

Footsteps like these were also common during an investigation at the Vulture Mine outside Phoenix, Arizona. Once a thriving community centered on the most productive gold mine in the state’s history, the Vulture Mine was a community of nearly five thousand people at one point. The mine closed during World War II, and a once-flourishing community became a cold, desolate spot on a forgotten map. At least twenty-five people are known to have died suddenly and violently in what was once Vulture City and their spirits are trapped in a lonely town with nothing but miles of open desert to keep them company . . . until I showed up.

Everywhere I went in those buildings, footsteps echoed from different rooms and floors. And these were not modernday tennis shoes or soft-soled kicks. Those would have sounded different. The sounds were clearly hard-soled boots with heels, so it’s easy to believe that they were the footwear of a past era. It was like an entire company of miners had just gotten off work and marched through the old town, but didn’t want to be seen. They were as elusive as heat waves on the desert floor that you only see from miles away but not up close.

If I was in one room, the footsteps were in another. When I was on the ground floor, boots walked across the floor upstairs. When I went upstairs, they were downstairs. It was like a game to them and since it was harmless, I played along. I would rather hear footsteps all around me than nothing at all. That way, at least I know they’re there and I’m doing all I can to make contact with them.

But when it comes to phantom sounds, one of the creepiest things I’ve ever witnessed also “played out” at the Vulture Mine. During our investigation there, Aaron distinctly heard the sounds of a piano playing in the schoolhouse. He stood motionless in the main room listening to the music, but the keys on the dilapidated piano, which had sat unused for probably one hundred years, were not moving. Beyond that, the piano was incapable of playing music. Its strings were long gone and its keys were stuck. Aaron walked over to it and pushed on several keys to make sure it wasn’t capable of making sound and nothing came out of it. There was no way it could play music, yet we all heard the notes floating through the air of the abandoned building.

How does a piano that doesn’t even work make music? Was this a residual haunting of a room full of miners and entertainers letting off steam after a long day in 1880? Was it a child’s recital after long hours of laborious practice? I can’t ascribe any intelligence to sounds like these. To me, random sounds that are not human voices, and especially footsteps, are residual hauntings. They’re the echoes of prison guards still walking their beats, of miners striding over an old wooden floor, of brewery workers dragging goods from one end of the store to another, and of history that refuses to be forgotten. Whatever it was it gave us a priceless Aaron Goodwin facial expression for the books.

Smells are another part of paranormal investigation that boggles me. I’ve smelled horse manure in Castillo de San Marcos, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Aaron’s gas, because he doesn’t eat hay. I’ve smelled perfume in the Old Washoe Club, a rotting corpse in my apartment in Michigan, the foul and musty air of mold at the Ancient Ram Inn, and the putrid stench of sulfur in Bobby Mackey’s Music World. These smells were always out of place and had no source. It’s something I love about paranormal investigation, because it takes me to the time period when the building was alive and teeming with activity. It also serves as a warning that more paranormal activity is about to happen. It’s a yellow light at an intersection begging you to make a decision— slam on the brakes or floor it. I’m not big on brakes.

Like sounds, I would classify these incidents as residual hauntings, but then again they always seem to precede paranormal phenomena, so they might be the precursors to something bigger. I’ve heard the tales of a pipe-smoking, nineteenth-century mogul wandering the halls of his old home and a perfumesoaked prostitute stalking an old inn, so it’s certainly feasible that odors can be one characteristic of an intelligent spirit that still roams its old stomping grounds. If I smell sulfur in a dilapidated barn and no one has eaten White Castle hamburgers, then bad stuff is about to happen.

The People We Meet

Just as with life, someone can be in the wrong place at the wrong time and become part of a paranormal experience, whether they want to or not. Innocent bystanders frequently get left in the wake of ghostly activity. It’s one of the best parts of paranormal investigation: listening to the stories of the people who were there. Former residents, patients, caregivers, guards, workers, or inmates can unlock clues to the source of a haunting. They witnessed the weirdness as it happened and had to live or work in an environment that most people are not subjected to. They had to deal with these phenomena on a daily basis, listen to the voices that people told them weren’t there, and do a self-assessment to determine their own sanity. I respect people who dealt with that and came through it. A big part of being a paranormal investigator is listening to these people and, many times, helping them cope with it.

Red Bone

One of the first people I ever met was outside Moundsville Penitentiary in West Virginia. We were filming some background footage when a little red car pulled up and an older man I can only describe as a “character” interrupted us.