Ever Seen a Ghost?

Spirit hunters like Lisa Olive prowl local historic sites, searching for haunted souls

originally posted by Megan Feldman on May 17, 2007

Driving down a darkened Red Oak street with rain pelting the windshield, I almost miss the turn. At the last minute I see an iron arch that reads "Reindeer Manor" and swing into the narrow drive. It winds uphill for what seems like a long time, and just when I think I must have passed it, the house looms up ahead. Reindeer Manor is used as a haunted house at Halloween, and according to the attraction's Web site, it has an unfortunate history. The original wooden house burned down in 1915, killing an entire family of sharecroppers. After the owner rebuilt it using steel, brick and concrete, his son, James Sharp Jr., moved into it with his wife, who was active in the Spiritualist movement. Sharp lost his fortune in the Great Depression and went insane, and his wife became convinced that the house was cursed. She employed séances, potions and incantations to rid the house of the hex, but she and her husband eventually turned up dead in a murder-suicide—she was found poisoned in the house, he hanging from a noose in the barn.
A group is assembling in the Manor parking lot. Four women who belong to GIRLS (Ghost Investigators and Researchers of Legends and Sightings), an offshoot of the Fort Worth ghost group, are readying headlamps, infrared video cameras and recording devices for the hunt. Waiting to take us into the house are a bearded PR representative for the Manor who frequented the house as a Boy Scout growing up, and Alex Lohmann, a mohawked 30-something in a Dungeon of Doom T-shirt. Though he owns a different haunted house on the property and analyzes audio recordings for another ghost-hunting group, he calls himself a skeptic. His specialty is EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, which along with photographs of orbs and other images is a hallmark of ghost hunting. "People from other groups send me recordings to spectro-analyze," he would later tell me. The frequency has to be below 300 hertz for him to investigate paranormal evidence, he says, because humans can't speak below that level. He's not convinced he's ever come across a ghostly voice, though. "Everything I've gotten below that I've chalked up to anomalies."

Watching as the women prepare their gear, I recall what I'd heard the week before at the group's meeting. I'd listened to EVPs that a veteran hunter told me she'd captured at historic Revolutionary War sites in Georgia. A boisterous woman with long, gray hair who spends much of her free time roaming cemeteries and other haunted places of renown, Lisa Olive had set up a laptop. She handed me a set of headphones and pressed some buttons. I heard her voice and the voice of another woman talking, asking questions of any ghosts that might be present. "We're here to help you. You know that, right?" What came next was like something out of a horror movie—a pair of breathy, whispered voices answered, "Yessss" and "Heyyy." I heard the women chatting away, apparently oblivious to the voices, while a low, male whisper growled, "Get off me." Goose flesh rose on my arms, and I handed the headphones back. "Those can be pretty creepy, huh?" Olive said. An analyst such as Lohmann would likely write the recording off as an anomaly, something unexplained but not necessarily attributable to ghosts. That's the thing about investigating the paranormal—there aren't many answers, just questions, assertions and beliefs. And of course, goosebumps. Which, despite the cheesy haunted house skeletons and signs that read "Graveyard members only," is what I feel as we walk into Reindeer Manor.

The house is roughly hewn, made to look like some old, abandoned haunt filled with cobwebs and the macabre evidence of evil. Phyllis Clark, a middle-aged woman with bright blue eyes, shows me her standard tape recorder and points out the attached microphone. "This is the best kind to use for EVPs—it helps the sound," she says. The table in the front room is covered with random plastic limbs and creepy doll heads. Above it hangs a skeleton, suspended face down, with a plastic intestine trailing down onto the table in Nazi doctor fashion. Amy Wainwright, a 30-ish mother of two who acts as the group's organizer, sets up a tripod. "The last time I was here, I was standing there in the doorway talking to the owner, and I saw a man—that's why I'm setting the camcorder up here," she says. "He was old and creepy—like something you'd see on The Twilight Zone." She used to date a mortician, she tells me, and one evening while they were in the funeral home they saw a "black, winged thing" that came toward them and pushed them up against the pew. They ran out and never spoke of it again. "Part of me thinks I was just hallucinating, and I want proof," she says. Soon after, she found the ghost group online.

We walk through a narrow hallway and into the living room, which the public relations guy explains used to be the entry room. He doesn't say much more, because the women want to see what they can glean about the history on their own. There's a coffin with a skeleton inside and shelves lined with books and skulls. The women talk about how their hearts are pounding or their scalps are tingling, and Clark says she has a weird taste on her lips. I don't feel anything, but as one of the women shows me a crated wall space where at Halloween they keep rat snakes, I remember why I've always hated haunted houses. We walk into the back room, and one of the women sets up the tape recorder. Donna Hawkins, a stock trader who says she's always had psychic abilities and has worked on missing person cases, walks the room's perimeter, shining her flashlight on the walls.

"Did anything happen in this room?" Clark asks, looking from floor to ceiling.

"He wants some of us to leave," Hawkins says suddenly. "And I keep getting something about up there—something happened up there." She points to the ceiling. Then she walks out of the room, telling Amy to ask "him" why he's so tired. For a moment the only sound is the crickets outside.

"Why are you tired?" Wainwright asks. "Did I see you that night? The first time I came here?" After a while we walk back out to the hallway, where we're shushed by the others. "Do you hear that movement right there? We heard breathing." "It's a female—like giggling." I strain my ears but don't hear anything. Clark, her headlamp hanging around her neck, slowly waves the microphone through the air. "I think we got too close," she says. Then it gets cold. Really cold. "Whoa," everyone says at once, looking around. "Thanks for coming to see us," Clark says with a smile, taking out her camera.

But as we step into an adjoining room, Hawkins says whoever it was went to the back of the house. I follow her there. "I've been doing this since I was little—I help them move on if they want to," she tells me. "There's something back here. Do you feel the tingling on your scalp?"

"No," I say. "I just feel light-headed."

She nods. "They're saying, 'It's all messed up.'" Then she addresses the ghosts that are apparently swirling in our midst. "You don't need to be afraid," she tells them, heading for the back door, where there's a pile of plastic Halloween bodies: legs, arms and heads in an unruly heap. "I bet a lot of them are hanging out back there," she says, pointing beyond the door. "They don't really like people." Then she grimaces. "I'm starting to feel sick—that usually only happens when they're negative."

Great, I think. I'm feeling a little nauseated myself. And ready, ghosts or not, to get the hell out of that nasty little room. All of a sudden, an image pops into my mind—it's an old, gnarled woman glaring at me with wide, glowing eyes, like something out of Lord of the Rings. She's shoving handfuls of something into her mouth. Alrighty then. Now I'm really ready to leave, since I've apparently lost my mind and could use some anti-psychotic medication. As we walk out, I notice I'm nearly running.

The others are talking outside. Tammy's telling how she sensed a male spirit come from the staircase and follow her out of the house. "It was definitely a man," she says.

The PR guy nods. "Yeah, that sounds about right." The women share other discoveries: the giggling, a woman's perfume, being directed to the ceiling. "I'll have Jim tell you about the spot in the ceiling," he says, pointing to Jim Scott, a mustachioed guy with a baseball hat and silver belt buckle, who has owned the property since the '70s.

"There was a man who came out here a few years ago," Jim begins as we gather 'round. "He was a member of the last family that lived in the house. He said he'd heard that the man who lived here before—his two wives found out about each other." This story wasn't on the Web site. "They decided he was the one who had to pay, so they cut him up and put his body in the attic." The man said that when his family moved in, the plaster kept breaking open in that spot and they'd have it repaired, only for it to break open again. "When we came out here to use it as a haunted house," he tells us, "there was a gaping hole in the ceiling."