Ghost Hunting (17 page)

HORROR HOTEL JUNE 2005

M
ost groups in search of the paranormal are only too happy to embrace “evidence” when they find it. T.A.P.S. is different. We examine that evidence five ways to Sunday, looking for a way to disprove it—to show that it’s attributable to a breeze, or a reflection, or some other normal, everyday phenomenon. And the more spectacular the finding, the more eager we are to find an explanation for it.

It sounds masochistic, I know. But that’s how we’ve established a reputation for credibility. Our first impulse is to debunk even when it’s our own findings that we’re debunking. In fact, we often go at our own observations
harder
than we go at other people’s, because we don’t want to put our stamp of approval on them and then see someone else pick them apart.

Of course, there are times when we
can’t
debunk a finding, when the evidence is so clear that we have to accept it as evidence of the paranormal—which brings us to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, home of the infamous Crescent Hotel.

The Crescent Hotel and Spa was built in 1886 by investors who believed the hot springs in the area possessed healing powers. Its first house physician was a man named Dr. Ellis, a respected doctor in his day. For a long time, the Crescent was known as America’s most luxurious hotel.

Then time passed it by, and people began to catch on that the hot springs were just hot springs. Shortly after 1900, the building became a conservatory for young ladies, and it stayed that way pretty much until the 1930s, when a quack named Norman Baker, who claimed to be a doctor, conned people into thinking he had developed a cure for cancer.

That was when things got ugly. Taking the life savings of desperate cancer patients, Baker subjected them to cruel and outlandish methods that had no chance of working. One of his favorite techniques was to open a person’s skull, treat the brain with a paste of mashed walnuts and mineral oil, then close the skull up again. In the end, his patients all died, some of them in terrible pain without the benefit of anesthesia.

T.A.P.S. responded to an invitation to check out the hotel with a team of six—Steve, Donna, Dustin, and Dave Tango in addition to Grant and me. We were greeted by Jack Moyer, the hotel’s general manager, as well as Ken Fugate, Eureka Springs’ resident historian.

The first thing they showed us was the dining room, where a table in the corner was set for two—a Victorian gentleman known as Jacob and the lady he loved, who was supposed to have met him for breakfast in the hotel but never showed up.

Our next destination was room 212, where the esteemed Dr. Ellis had had his offices. Guests of the hotel had reported seeing a man in Victorian dress come out of the elevator, cross the hall, and go straight through the door of room 212—without opening it. In room 419, guests had woken in the morning to find their clothes packed and their bags neatly stacked by the door.

Down in the morgue, where Norman Baker carried out autopsies, the table he used was still standing against the wall. It was in that same room that he’d stored human body parts in large glass jars full of formaldehyde.

The paranormal activity in that area, according to Fugate, was attributable to the guard, who had a hostile nature. Moyer said that any number of guests and employees had had experiences in the hotel, but he wanted T.A.P.S. to document them.

Whenever we can, we stay up late the night before an investigation in order to acclimate ourselves to working into the wee hours. That’s what we did our first night in Eureka Springs, finally going to bed at four-thirty or five in the morning.

Sometime later, I heard someone knocking on my door. When I looked at the clock, I saw that it was 5: 30. Too fuzzy to figure out what was going on, I said, “Who is it?” A voice outside said, “The building’s on fire. You’ve got to leave.”

I put on my clothes and opened the door. There was no sign of a fire—just a little old man going about two miles an hour, knocking on doors. I didn’t believe the hotel was on fire, not at the pace this guy was going. Still, I went outside and saw everyone else out there, and realized there was a fire all right.

It was the roof. Apparently, it had been hit by lightning. But like the little old man, no one seemed in any particular hurry. Not even the fire department, when it finally showed up. For a while, I had to wonder if we were still going to be able to investigate the place, or if we were going to have to call it off. Or maybe be restricted in terms of where we could set up.

Fortunately, the damage was minimal and we weren’t restricted at all—not that it was going to be an easy job. For one thing, the place was huge. For another, the rooms we were going to check out offered logistical problems. Knowing this, Grant and I had given Donna a list of everything we wanted to cover.

But when she met with Steve, Dustin, and Dave, it became obvious that she couldn’t answer their questions—for instance, how to get a cord all the way down into the morgue and where to aim our cameras.

It was Steve who pointed out that we needed to give the rest of the team better information. Grant and I agreed that we would take Steve on the tour next, so he could get a better understanding of the job at hand.

The first inkling we got that there was genuine activity in the hotel was when Dustin tried to get into room 419, where Grant had left his laptop, and felt resistance against the door. Pushing against it, he heard a thump.

It was the laptop. Although Grant had left it on the other side of the room, in front of the TV, it had somehow gotten propped up against the base of the door—even though
there was no one in the room.
Putting the laptop back in front of the television, Dustin made a mental note to tell Grant and me about the incident.

When we heard about it, we immediately made an EMF sweep of the room. It didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. However, it was a promising beginning. Encouraged, Grant and I took our new favorite toy—our thermal-imaging camera—and went to check out the morgue.

It was eerie down there. Even without the jars full of human body parts, we had no trouble remembering how many corpses had lain in that room, victims of Norman Baker as much as their own cancers.

The camera didn’t show us anything as we scanned the morgue table. Everything seemed to be more or less the same temperature, the same energy level, so it appeared pretty much the same color in the viewfinder.

We checked our watches—which showed us it was a few minutes after one—and kept going. In a back room of the morgue, we found a series of numbered lockers. Grant was scanning them when he came across something. Something
incredible,
judging by the look on his face.

He rewound the camera and showed it to me. It was clearly and unmistakably the figure of a man rendered in gaudy thermal colors, less than six feet from Grant and the camera. And the figure was looking back at Grant, as if it was as curious about him as we were about
it
.

When I saw what my partner had captured, my mouth went dry. We had stumbled on a full-body apparition, the Holy Grail of the ghost-hunting field!

Looking closer, I saw that the apparition had a numeral 2 on its sleeve—or seemed to. Actually, it was the numeral on the locker behind the apparition. But it looked like it was embroidered on the apparition’s sleeve, and—for no reason we could figure out—it was burning a bright, fiery red.

Also, the apparition seemed to be wearing a hat of some kind. A Civil War soldier’s cap? That was how it looked, but it was hard to tell.

Part of me was jazzed beyond belief. But there was another part that told me to be cautious, to keep my enthusiasm in check. We weren’t amateurs on our first jaunt through a cemetery. We had to make sure the apparition wasn’t something else before we could put any faith in it.

Maybe it was a reflection of Grant. After all, it was looking back at him the way a reflection would. Putting him back where he was standing when he caught the image of the mysterious figure, we looked for a way the light could have bounced off a locker surface into the camera. We couldn’t find one.

We also couldn’t figure out why that numeral 2 had glowed so red. On the locker, it was spray painted white, and it was as cool to the touch as the rest of the locker. There wasn’t any reason for it to be so hot, yet it had definitely shown up that way in the thermal image.

I should have been ecstatic, but I wasn’t. I couldn’t allow myself to trust what I had seen. We called Steve down, knowing he would approach the problem with a level head, but he couldn’t explain the figure either.

The rest of the night was pretty quiet. But then, given what we had already captured, it was hard to concentrate. By 4: 30 we had logged nearly fifty hours of recordings. We decided to pack it up.

Usually, I’m perfectly happy to get my sleep and leave the analysis phase of the investigation to someone else. This time, while Steve and Dave were going over our footage, Grant and I got up and returned to the morgue.

I wanted to disprove the apparition before someone else did. As it turned out, we couldn’t do it. We couldn’t find anything to make that numeral 2 heat up, we couldn’t make Grant’s reflection in a mirror fit the form of that figure, and we couldn’t figure out where the hat came from.

Also, we couldn’t imagine how Grant’s laptop had wound up leaning against the door of room 419. Unless, of course, there was some bona fide paranormal activity in the place. So there you have it.

I don’t often find myself saying this about a place, but the Crescent Hotel is haunted.

DOCTOR’S HOUSE JUNE 2005

W
hile we were down in Eureka Springs, we visited the house of Dr. Ellis, the Crescent Hotel’s staff physician back in the 1890s. Filled with handsome, well-preserved Victorian furniture and an amazing collection of antiques, the place was owned by a guy named Carroll Heath, who claimed he was a medium.

Heath had long believed that he shared his house with a number of “unseen friends,” including Dr. Ellis himself. When he played the piano in his parlor, he said he could feel a crowd gather around him, attracted by the music. On other occasions, he could hear people walking upstairs.

He had seen a lady in Victorian clothing sitting and reading in the bay window of the master bedroom. And in the wooded hollow across the street, visible from that same bedroom, there had been sightings of ghostly beings and strange animals.

Heath was the twelfth owner of the place. One of his predecessors had had the house exorcised, but—according to Heath—the exorcism hadn’t been successful. He was hoping T.A.P.S. could provide documentation.

This time, we took Steve along when Heath gave Grant and me a tour of the place. It allowed the setup to proceed much more smoothly. Grant and I decided we would continue with that approach from then on.

The plan was for Dustin and Dave to walk through the hollow across the street. We would have sent Steve, but he’s afraid of spiders. Before Dustin and Dave set out, they sprayed themselves with insect repellent. After all, this was Arkansas, a breeding ground for mosquitoes if there ever was one.

Meanwhile, Steve and Donna turned the lights out in the house and took a walk through it with Heath as their guide. I must say it was good working with him. He had never met us before, but he seemed to fit right in.

Dustin and Dave—who was wearing a headlamp that made him look like a cyborg out of a
Star Trek
episode—spent quite a bit of time in that hollow, dodging flying insects and huge spiders. Finally they came across something substantial, which could have been one of those strange animals Heath mentioned. As luck would have it, it was just a confused and scared-looking deer.

At the same time, Grant and I were making our way around Heath’s house. At one point, we heard a distinct bang. Following the sound to what we believed was its source, we found something unexpected—but it wasn’t evidence of the paranormal. It was evidence that Steve, our tech guru, had screwed up.

One of our cameras was on the floor, having fallen from the place where he’d taped it up. “Looks like Steve owes us four hundred dollars,” I muttered. I hate the idea of losing expensive equipment.

As it turned out, the camera was okay. And according to Grant we were actually better off, since we had a better idea of how durable our cameras were. But then, my partner’s always looking on the bright side. To me, every silver lining’s got a dark cloud.

Back at the hollow, Dustin and Dave weren’t having much luck, headlamp or no headlamp. They ran into a cat to go along with the deer, but that was about it.

While Steve and Donna continued to take readings all around the house, Grant and I invited Heath to sit down with us and demonstrate his medium ability by giving me a personal reading. And since he didn’t mind, we would record the whole thing.

Over the years, we’ve come across any number of people claiming to be mediums or sensitives. Of course, when we tested them, very few had any legitimate affinity for the paranormal. We were eager to see how Heath stacked up.

Again, we put our thermal-imaging device to good use. While Heath gave me a reading, Grant trained the camera on us. I have to say here that Heath wasn’t working under the best conditions. In addition to Grant, we had a couple of guys with TV cameras in the room, so it wasn’t exactly a private encounter.

Also, I was doing my best to block Heath’s efforts. Though I willingly repeated my full name three times, giving him permission to read me, I didn’t want my innermost secrets plastered all over national television.

Nonetheless, Heath came up with some interesting stuff. He mentioned a farmhouse in the country and said I had memories of it but had never lived there. Check. He said deceased ancestors came to me when I slept. Check again. He said my wife wasn’t especially interested in the paranormal. Double check.

Grant didn’t comment, but he did seem eager to get his reading next. He handed me the camera. Then, repeating his full name three times, he gave Heath the go-ahead. Heath told him that he had had a visitation from “the other side,” a near-death experience. Grant confirmed it.

It was only after Heath had finished with him that Grant showed me what was in the thermal-imaging camera. Though I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary when Heath read my partner, Heath’s reading of me was a different story. As he proceeded, you could see my face and forehead turning bright red, as if my temperature was suddenly skyrocketing. And Heath? He was what Grant called “a psychedelic show,” a riot of every color in the rainbow.

Then it got even stranger. As Heath and I spoke, a thick tendril of red moved out of me and began crossing the space between us. It migrated slowly but unmistakably in Heath’s direction. Suddenly, just before it reached him, he gestured with his hand—and unknowingly wiped the tendril away.

Now, the thermal-imaging camera is a new tool in our field, which is why we use it every chance we get. There could have been an explanation for what happened that didn’t involve the paranormal—for instance, something about the camera itself—so we called the company that made it and got hold of a tech guy.

He didn’t seem especially interested in talking to a couple of ghost hunters, making sure to tell us he didn’t believe in the paranormal. He also couldn’t explain why the camera had recorded that kind of energy.

When Steve saw the footage, he said, “Maybe it’s Heath that’s haunted, not his house.”

When we returned to Heath’s parlor to tell him what we had found, he said his “unseen friends” had been active since we’d left, and were interested in our investigation. Grant and I told him that we hadn’t picked up anything significant in the hollow, but we had recorded something interesting in his house.

Then we showed him the thermal-image recording. Needless to say, he was delighted. It validated the fact that he had the ability to draw energy from another person, which is a key to any psychic reading.

We were delighted too. With a full-body apparition and a psychic energy migration in the can, our drive back to Rhode Island was a happy one.