First Investigations

WELL. Lori and I did our first two investigations this weekend (with our parents tagging along). Well, more like we did our first. Our second investigation ended before it even began :/

Let's start with the first investigation. We went to Bardstown on Saturday, 7/7/12, when I got off work. We went on Patti Starr's ghost walk which was mostly uneventful. Supposed manifestations did occur when we went into a conference room in the Talbott Inn with Patti, like the lights going on and off, and EMF meters going off, but none of it was our equipment. Our EMF meter never spiked, the EVPs she caught didn't show up on our recorder, and a door opened on its own a lot, but I wasn't near it to see myself how it was built and how likely it was to open on its own anyway.

HOWEVER, today, after going through my pictures, I found one from that part of the ghost walk that I didn't notice before, and I've included it in our photo evidence page. I'm still questioning it. It is a picture of a mirror that was up on the wall, near the ceiling. It was dark in the room. In the mirror you can see the reflection of the dimly lit chandelier, as well as a basket of flowers sitting on the shelf under the mirror. Next to the chandelier, in the corner of the room, is the reflection of a shadow that I can't find a source for. It can't be a person from the room, as it is near the ceiling. It isn't a dirty mirror because I have pictures of the same mirror from the same angle both before and after which show no shadow. I see a very clear face in the shadow, but it wasn't so clear to my sister, so I may be biased. If anyone has any suggestions of what the shadow could be, please leave a comment on the evidence page and let me know.

The rest of the ghost walk was uneventful until it ended at a graveyard behind the Jailer Inn. After Patti left, we were the first to wander into the graveyard. There were two above-ground concrete box things that marked two graves next to each other. Right above these graves, our EMF meter spiked to red (20+ milliGaussians) consistently. Because it was consistent I think there must have been something underground or around to cause an electromagnetic field, but I don't know what it could have been. However, when I snapped photos of my father walking up to the graves, we captured a couple different photos with solid, clear clouds of mists. There was absolutely no fog that night, and no smoke anywhere. Next to another grave, I got a streak of green through the air which has no light source that I could find. Patti had told us ahead of time that often around that specific grave people would get green or orange energy. The fact that it happens a lot would tend to make me think there must be something in the area to cause it, but I searched and found no source. It wouldn't make sense to be a lens defect when it occurs using many different cameras. Near this same grave, we caught a large dark shadow standing behind my mother. It was black around the outside edge and kind of turns to purple toward the center. There is a fairly clear face, and even what looks like a hand or arm around her shoulder. It is a head taller than her. All these photos have been included in our photo evidence.

I also noticed in some of these pictures, though the bottom half of the photo is clear, in the top half, all the lights tend to be smeared upward. I can't figure out how half the picture could be clear if the other half is blurred from motion, (and I can assure you I wasn't moving.) It looks like something I might expect if there were extreme heat waves rising into the air, like the distortion you get over the road on a hot day. Except it wasn't hot and we were on grass. I'm not sure why this happened in some pictures and not in others, even when the pictures were taken in quick succession with no movement or change in settings. Somehow, the air or something in the top half of the photos seemed to be moving upward. I would blame steam pipes or something if there had been any vents or sewage lids around, but of course there weren't any.

Anyway, on to the investigation of the actual Talbott Inn. We rented two rooms - The Daniel Boone Room and the Washington-Irving Suite.

First, we made a huge mistake. Before the ghost walk, we set up two DVR cameras on the chairs in the Daniel Boone room, because we'd been told that things set in the chair there tends to be knocked off while the guests are gone. The way these two chairs were arranged in the room, we had the cameras forming a V, which got each corner of the bed, but most of the bed was not in the field of view.

When we came back, we started our investigation in that room, and sat on the bed to do our EVP session. It didn't even cross our minds that we weren't in the field of view of the cameras.

For this session, my dad sat in a chair in the corner snapping pictures with a digital camera. My sister and I sat on the end of the bed, and my mom sat up against the head board of the bed. Between Lori and I we had an EMF meter, a digital voice recorder, and a flashlight that twists on and off.

At first we got nothing. No responses on the EVP, no flickers of the flashlight. A few EMF spikes, but nothing reliable. At this point, the glow of our flashlight could be easily seen by the DVR camera because it was shining on a wall in the camera's view. Then my dad starting getting a weird reflection in his photos, so we started searching for the cause. During this search, we turned off the flashlight and shifted it so it was facing in a direction it could not be seen by the cameras (we didn't intend that, but we had forgotten to change the DVR cameras). We figured out soon that the reflection was coming from an oval mirror, and we covered it up.

Then, out of no where, the flashlight turned on. It surprised us, and my sister picked it up and twisted it on and off. We thought maybe when we had turned it off, we hadn't twisted it far enough and left it kind of stuck in between, but it was all the way off. In fact, even when it went on, the twisting part still showed it being turned off. She had to twist it to the on position, then twist it back to the off position. So we set the flashlight back down on the bed. It was turned as far as it could be to the off position, and we bounced on the bed and rolled it around to ensure movement couldn't turn it on. Then we asked if a spirit had turned it on, could they please turn the flashlight on again. It came on for a couple seconds, and then went off.

At this point, my dad snapped a picture of us. I was laughing, but Lori had the funniest shocked expression ever. We said later that it didn't matter that we didn't get this on video...that expression was evidence enough, because there is no way it could be faked. However, she won't let me post it online anywhere, so I'll just add the closest approximation I can.

We then asked the spirit if it would mind answering questions by turning the flashlight on for yes and off for no. The flashlight came on again, but dimly, and kind of flickered between dim and bright, and then went off. Afterward it began answering with only very dim light, which was even stranger because it is impossible to get dim light by twisting that flashlight...it is either entirely on or entirely off. (We tried for about twenty minutes later on.)

When the light stopped going on, we asked if it was because the spirit was tired of talking and wanted us to leave. Before my sister even finished the word "leave," the flashlight went from off to very very brightly on. We took the hint, thanked the spirit, packed up and left.

Again...SUPER frustrated that this didn't get on the DVR cameras. We went back and looked. One camera kind of shows the glow of the flashlight going on and off in a corner, but that is hardly evidence. We didn't really get any photo evidence from that room except one very bright orb. Still, we are very hesitant to provide orbs as evidence since they can so easily be caused by bugs or dust.

After this we did an EVP session in the Washington-Irving bedroom with no results, and the same in the sitting room of the Washington-Irving. Last we did an EVP and EMF session in the same conference room we'd been in earlier with Patti Starr. We caught some knocking and a door knob jiggling on the voice recorder that we never heard when we were in the room, and we were able to get a few answers by having the spirit spike the EMF reader for yes. It was weak though, and only happened a few times.

We have not fully analyzed the voice recorder files yet, but during the EVP sessions, we periodically went back and replayed sections, and never heard any voices or other anomalies except the knocking in the conference room. If that changes when we analyze the files, I'll create a new post to let our readers know, and post the files to our evidence page.

We also have not watched the hours of DVR camera recordings yet. If we catch anything on them, I will add the video files to the evidence page and create a new post to inform our readers. For now, our evidence is all in photos and the story about the flashlight (which, granted, isn't really evidence. But I know I'm not lying, so that's enough for me.)

The second investigation was going to be overnight at an old 1800s era graveyard near the property of a friend's farm in the woods of Frenchburg, KY. Unfortunately, it was a fiasco from the start. The graveyard was bigger than we thought and we almost didn't have enough cable. In fretting over that, we ran the cable backwards and plugged the wrong ends into the cameras, leaving connections that wouldn't fit the DVR unit. We underestimated how long set up would take and ended up doing the last half in the dark. Then, in trying to fix the reversed cables, we came upon a bunch of extremely large copperhead snakes slithering around the graveyard. We had two dogs with us, not to mention if one of us got bit there was no nearby hospital.

So in the end, my sister and I took a pistol. One of us gathered cable and cameras while the other kept the pistol trained on the ground, watching for the copperheads. My parents took the other pistol and did the same. We locked the dogs in the car. We threw everything in the back of the jeep and left, sorting out all the equipment when we got home. The only thing we did there was take pictures, and none of them featured any anomalies.

So what did we learn?

- ALWAYS have someone check the DVR cameras right before we begin any session to ensure everything is still visible and no cameras have shifted or been put in the wrong spot.

- We have to decide which way we are going to run cables (from the DVR unit to the cameras, or from the cameras to the DVR unit), spool them accordingly, and know that we can't deviate from that decision.

- If doing an investigation outside, we need to scout ahead, measure for size and check out the nearby wildlife BEFOREHAND.

- Only do ONE type of session at a time. It's not very effective to say "please leave a message on our recorder OR spike the EMF OR appear to the camera" because if you're recording the thing with an IR camcorder, you don't know where to focus it to look for interaction. Then you end up moving back and forth recording the whole room, and never remaining in one spot long enough to allow for a manifestation. You also tend to miss smaller interactions. In the Conference room, our EMF meter spiked in answer to questions multiple times and we didn't catch it because we were trying to record and take pictures at the same time. Poor spirit was probably very frustrated :S

- And lots of other general experience-related stuff.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE check out the evidence photos and leave us comments with what you think! We're pretty smart, but we don't always think of everything :)


Check back next week when we've had time to analyze the video and voice files in case we find anything more.