Ghost hunting with the city’s premier paranormal research team
I was crouching in a dank and dusty crawlspace underneath a funeral home at midnight. I was engulfed in a darkness only cave crickets are comfortable with. I pressed my back against the cinderblock foundation and felt the weight of the giant creepy mansion overhead.
I stilled my breaths and tuned my ear for something, anything, that would or could stir in the dark. To my right further down the crawlspace I heard a grunt and a shuffle.
“Something just grabbed my arm!” Todd Clay said.
As his words trailed off, the electromagnetic field (EMF) detector started clicking in my hand and the floor above us thumped and creaked. It dawned on me that the whole building could drop, sealing us in like a tomb. I watched the EMF settle back down to normal levels, and the temperature started rising again. Nothing was normal here and according to the curator of this macabre mansion: my location put me dead center of a paranormal vortex.
This was my first paranormal investigation in the belly of Lynchburg’s Haunted Home, a hotspot for ghost hunters to collect data or evidence of the paranormal. I had the honor to go out with Chattanooga’s Paranormal Research Ghost Investigations (PRGI) for a half-night stay in an old funeral home where Jack Daniel's whiskey is born.
The Lynchburg Haunted Home is eleven-thousand square feet of genuine spookiness ripped straight from Stephen King’s mind. It has been used numerous times as the town’s haunted attraction with kooky Halloween decorations and props still on display. This is complete with a horror maze complemented by the old embalming room and wooden cadaver lift.
Jason Henley is the tech guru for the team. He ran me through the various motion sensors, EMF detectors and motion capture devices. The Structured Light Sensor camera (SLS) is a gadget that utilizes the Kinect Xbox camera.
The SLS scans and tracks the environment for articulatable joints and shapes indicative to the humanoid shape. In the paranormal research community, it’s a valued tool to pick up anomalies outside of the visible spectrum of the human eye. SLS cameras can work in complete darkness, which is great if you want to know if you’re not alone in a pitch-black room.
Before our delve into the house, Jason fires up the equipment and tests batteries. The SLS immediately displays a short wire frame standing next to the group’s founder Mark Holland. Everyone goes still, Jason and I look at the figure on the screen. Tiny blinking lights start dancing on activated EMF readers as the wire figure extends a hand toward Mark and posts itself on a short stool.
Mark talks to the figure but the figure doesn’t move. This lasts for five minutes until the wire figure pops off the screen just as quickly as it had appeared.
Seventeen years ago, Mark Holland and A.J. Antuna started PRGI with the hopes of answering some questions about the paranormal and forces beyond this mortal coil.
“I started PRGI based on the experiences I had as a kid. I always wondered what they were. They didn’t scare me but instead left me wanting to know what and why,” Mark said.
Today PRGI investigates private residences, public attractions, and abandoned facilities all over the South. They do this without charge to the owners and without the desire to sell products or spirit displacement services.
In other words: PRGI are regular folks who are respectful and courteous with a genuine curiosity to discover the answers to that age-old question: is there life after death?
There were five of us; Mark, Jason, A.J., Todd and I huddled in the downstairs dining area which served as our command post and the only room with lights on. After we setup motion cameras and digital voice recorders, we killed the lights and paired up. I teamed up with Todd, the veteran police officer. As we set off, he stopped short at the threshold of the dining room and the foyer, just on the edge of darkness. He looked over his shoulder at me with a wild gleam in his eye, before applying a large pinch of tobacco to his cheek.
“I love this stuff,” he said with the eerie calm of a Hollywood gunslinger.
What waited for us on the other side of the foyer in the rest of the house would be another world. As we eased our way through dark corridors, the entire building took on a life of its own. We’d stop and listen, watch the EMF detectors then move on. We explored the hearse garage, the embalming studio, the aforementioned crawl space, the upstairs bedrooms which hosted an entity previous investigators named The Creeper.
Todd and I gained the layout of the structure without much activity at first, until we went outside. Nestled a few feet at a rear exit of the haunted maze was a pristine pet cemetery. Each animal buried there had its own polished marble headstone with impressive bronze plaques. Upon inspection I noticed the largest headstone belonged to a familiar family pet that also had a matching oil painting in the foyer right before stepping into the house proper. Duke the Mastiff, Beware of Dog, I recalled.
Then the night sky was ripped apart in a cacophony of squawks and shrieks above our heads. The backyard where we stood was host to what sounded like millions of evil birds dwelling within the overgrown magnolias, bamboo, and kudzu. The longer we stood the louder the creatures became until we couldn’t hear each other standing shoulder to shoulder.
We walked around towards the front of the house and once we got a few feet away from the cemetery, the birds went eerily silent at once. Then I felt a tug on my right sleeve. I froze. I looked around as Todd was on my left and a few feet ahead of me.
The real party started when we doubled back into the main haunted house area. Todd took point as I meandered through the darkness with his flashlight as a guide. We were going towards the open space of the maze that enjoyed blacklights and dayglow painted Satanic imagery on the walls.
Haunted houses have a hidden hallway for traversal between areas of a haunted house. It’s a nifty trick to induce maximum jump scares by allowing actors to appear or disappear from one location to another. Lynchburg’s has a narrow one with a low ceiling that runs down the center of the entire maze. It’s completely hidden in the dark, perfect for ambushes. The type of place a thing would be coiled up and ready to spring on unsuspecting prey.
The guttural growl came low on my left side just at my knee. My body responded before my brain could process. I leapt ten feet forward, spun around, and dropped into a fighting stance facing the threat. But nothing pursued me from beyond that corridor. Todd moved up to my side. “What happened?” he said.
I was on the balls of my feet, scanning through the dust particles, EMF at the ready like a useless movie prop.
“Growl...over there,” I said.
Mark entered the room and asked if any of us just growled.
You can go to PRGI’s Facebook page and give the growl a listen since it was captured on his recording device.
Another experience happened when Mark and I sat in the master bedroom connected to the large bathroom that was used for dressing the dead for funeral service. I carried the FLIR camera, which gave me a daytime view of the entire room. I propped it on my knees for stability and waited as Mark talked to the air.
Then it happened. Something appeared on the viewscreen moving towards Mark from the bathroom door to his side. It emitted its own infrared light and appeared to “swim” against an invisible current. If you’ve spent days around small creeks, then the best description is that it looked like a glowing minnow going upstream.
Mark continued to speak as I panned back to the bathroom door. The glowing thing quickly raced across the viewscreen back into the bathroom. A motion sensor in the bathroom barked to life emitting a shrill scream, so I gave chase, FLIR at the ready. I scanned the bathroom, nothing. Then a motion sensor down the hallway to my left comes to life; it was running whatever it was. After some searching it was clear it wouldn’t reappear. All at once it felt as if the entire house settled for the night.
I left the investigation with more questions than I’d arrived with. I can’t confirm or deny that ghosts are real but one thing for sure is the world is full of wonders and mysteries that are begging to be explored. Thankfully there are men and women like PRGI who attempt to sneak a peak beyond the veil and maybe prove just how not alone we truly are in the dark.