Here's another story that ran in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette this week for your Halloween fun:
LITTLE ROCK — Arkansas’ most famously haunted old places include the 122-year-old Crescent Hotel and Spa in Eureka Springs. Ghosthunting guests ask for room 218 in hopes of a midnight visit from the ectoplasmic entity they call Michael.
The King Opera House in Van Buren is home to another ghost, by some accounts. The lore is that a young actor fell in love with the wrong girl, and her father whipped him to death.
Legend claims the Gurdon Light - a strange light that hovers over the railroad tracks - is the spirit of a decapitated railroad worker, out with a lantern to look for his head.
And other ghostly fingers point to The Old State House Museum in Little Rock, the Rialto movie theater in El Dorado, certainhouses in Fort Smith’s Belle Grove Historic District ...
Some people laugh at the possibility. Some get the chills. Some go have a look.
“We’re out to help people find answers,” says Alan Silva, founder of Arkansas Paranormal Investigations in Fayetteville. The 4-year-old agency is one of several that seek out the unnatural in the Natural State.
“I’ve been doing this for over 16 years,” Silva says. “I got into it when my brother committed suicide.”
He’s never seen a ghost for sure, and the question remains: “Is there life in the hereafter?”
But evidence of strange energies? - weird things in the dark? - things that prickle the hair on the back of your neck? - yes, Silva says, and especially at the Old Hardy Hotel Antique Mall.
The team’s dozen volunteer members investigate about one site a month for free, Silva says. They answer calls for help, like the one they received from the hotel’s owners, Steve and Marcia Weaver.
The Weavers reported happenings they couldn’t explain- a dresser drawer that opens by itself, and footsteps they both heard coming from rooms they knew were empty.
(“When you hear it by yourself, you just don’t know,” Steve Weaver says, “But when two people hear it ...”)
The team responded with a 16-foot trailer “command post” packed with cameras and other recording gear, thermometers, barometers, night vision - all the gear it takes to catch a ghost.
“Thirty seconds we can’t explain, that’s like finding gold to us,” Silva says.
Here’s what they found at the Old Hardy Hotel.
The cameras caught “over 117 orbs,” floating balls of light, according to the team’s report.
The investigators found a “30-degree drop in temperature” inone room, and took pictures of “an unexplained shadow in the main lobby and the doll room,” where staring-eyed dolls are for sale.
Also, they reported “the smell of perfume, the feeling of a young woman running up and down the hall on the second floor ... a sickness near the Murder Room ... feelings of heaviness ... the presence of at least four other entities at this location.”
And there’s the video that shows, well - a squiggle, a blur, something ... could be a ghost that seems to pass right through one of the investigators, a woman in the narrow hallway on the building’s second floor.
Not to mention the “Yellow Room,” where the awful presence turns out to be, hmm ... just the icky yellow paint.
“We’re scientific-based,” Silvasays. Without recorded evidence, “it’s just another one tossed up as ‘an encounter.’”
Some places, nothing happens. But the old hotel convinced him it has secrets.
“It’s definitely not normal,” he says.
Arkansas Paranormal Investigations is at ParanormalBeliever.com. Also, the hotel owners report a visit from The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS), the group featured in the SciFi Channel’s Ghost Hunters series, but no report yet. A Google search for “Arkansas paranormal” turns up still more ghost trackers in the state. And for do-it-yourselfers, there’s the Ghost Hunter's Guidebook: The Essential Guide to Investigating Ghosts & Hauntings by Troy Taylor (Whitechapel, $24.95).
This article was published Tuesday, October 28, 2008.
written by Ron Wolfe
Style, Pages 30 on 10/28/2008
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