FAYETTEVILLE — It was a cold and damp night last fall when Jeanne Jones saw the specter standing inside the old parachute packing room at the Arkansas Air Museum.Executive Director Warren Jones and his wife had driven to Dallas and back that day to retrieve a valuable collection of aviation resource material, and the museum had long shut its doors when they pulled up to White Hangar at Drake Field.
Jeanne Jones was standing among the propellers of the museum’s old aircraft when she turned and, from an unobstructed viewpoint several paces away, saw the figure of a man standing at the threshold of the Restoration Shop where rookie pilots had packed their parachutes. His face was ordinary, so much so that when she turned away she had the faint idea it was her husband. He wore a pair of khakis and a light blue shirt. He looked handsome, in an unremarkable way.
“I don’t have any idea why, but I think he was someone from the 1940s. I have nothing to base that on,” Jones said. “Apparently he was a benign kind of spirit because he didn’t frighten me, and I wasn’t frightened afterward.”
Far from disbelieving his wife’s story, the executive director was disappointed he hasn’t had a similar experience. He’s familiar with the less ambiguous ghost story now several years old of a museum employee confronted by a man standing just a few feet away.
The similarities are striking. In both cases the apparition is of a tallish, slender white man with dark hair who’s wearing a blue top. In both cases the figure is not a ghost so much as a man who vanishes as suddenly as he appeared. In neither case is the witness frightened.
On Nov. 8, the hangar will lay bare its secrets - whatever they may be - to the group Paranormal Ozarks Investigations. Its leader, Rick Marshall of Springdale, said his team got one of its best hits at the museum last year - an inexplicably low temperature reading and a muffled voice captured by digital recorder - though he admits the hangar is among the state’s second-tier ghost haunts.
“I would say it’s not as big as the Booneville sanitarium. I would say it would be in the middle. You can definitely catch some good things there, but you also can come up empty.”
Despite their attention to technology, science and man’s conquest of the sky, air museums across the country are no less immune to spooky speculation.
For the second consecutive year the 106-aircraft Mid-America Air Museum in Liberal, Kan., opened its hangar doors last week to a team of paranormal investigators - and the general public - who spent the night listening closely for the things that go bump, said restoration technician Andrew Lovato. Last year, the museum charged $7 a head - regular admission - and generated a few hundred dollars. Coincidentally, Lovato said the paranormal investigation team from Wichita is “convinced” the space is haunted and will likely return next year for further investigation.
Nearby Tulsa Air and Space Museum, the institution Warren Jones looks to for guidance directing Fayetteville’s growing operation, has its own hoary record of human-spirit interactions.
“When you’re alone at night, we too have noises, voices, footsteps upstairs, what you could swear are footsteps, small items move and no one ’fessing up to moving them,” says curator Kim Jones. “Anywhere that you have old artifacts, I’m sure that you could get the same response from museum workers.”
The two museums share something larger in common, being historically and architecturally significant hangars. Both are products of the armament that marked the years of World War II. While more than one plane in the collection is loosely connected to air disasters - replicas of planes that crashed long ago - Ray Boudreaux, director of aviation and economic development for the city of Fayetteville, said he’s unaware of any fatal incident inside the hangar or at the field itself - that is, grist for the ghost story mill.
“It’s nonsense. Ghosts and ghost detection - it’s a cultural thing. It’s been with us since we were kicked out of trees,” said University of Arkansas professor Jeff Lohr, who studies manufactured anxiety and pseudo-science in the application of psychology. “Better we should make up stories to make the world look more predictable and controllable than to not have those stories, [which would leave] us very, very frightened if not actively depressed.”
There are ghost trappers. Then there are those who would ensnare the trappers.
Lohr said the Amherst, N.Y.-based Committee on Skeptical Inquiry is the closest thing to the application of science to the paranormal. Senior research fellow Joe Nickell is its chief debunker.
There’s a disturbing counter cultural trend in this country of paranormal research gaining traction and popularity, Nickell said. “It’s really very discouraging that in the United States of America in the 21st century such superstition is becoming commonplace ... it’s a growing superstition.”
He predicted correctly the paranormal group set to investigate the museum will rely on infrared digital cameras, digital sound recorders and electromagnetic field meters. Rick Marshall confirmed that arsenal. Nickell said the equipment is not designed to detect ghosts but will prove conveniently ambiguous in the hands of the untrained. And very few scientists have signed on to paranormal research.
“The burden of proof of any claim in science is to prove [ positive], not someone to prove a negative. You do not have to prove there are no leprechauns,” he said. “The most common hallmark of the paranormal is logic that says ‘If we don’t know what it is, therefore it’s a ghost.’ It’s a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance. No scientist would ever make that argument.”
Marshall said his group remains open to either possibility - the existence or nonexistence of supernatural phenomena - and has set about to collect evidence adhering as much as possible to the precepts of science.
“The air museum might be looking for publicity, but we also have private cases - people who think there’s something going on in their house,” he said. “These people aren’t looking for money ... fame. These people have something going on in their houses that they want determined: Is my house haunted?”
In the case of the air museum, Jeanne Jones said her ghost sighting paired with an earlier experience in her Savannah, Ga., home has left her with “definite feelings about ghosts.” Museum greeter Joan Hickerson also said she’s felt uncomfortable in the Restoration Shop, long before Jones saw an apparition there, but she admitted that feeling has passed. But she doesn’t count herself among the ranks of the nonbelievers.
“I’m still expecting something at the museum.”
This article was published Saturday, November 1, 2008
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Pages 13 on 11/01/2008
By Bobby Ampezzan
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