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| Photo by Eliza Thompson |
I'm standing in a room filled with haunted objects. A doll from the Villisca ax murder house. Cursed carvings from a church in Pennsylvania. A mask that makes its wearer astral project. Ouija boards from various people who learned the hard way that they’re most definitely not toys. A painting that whispers "Mommy and Daddy don't love you" in children’s ears at night. On one wall there's a replica of Fox Mulder's iconic "I WANT TO BELIEVE" poster, but as far as I know that's not haunted — it's just decoration.
This is the office of Dana Matthews and Greg Newkirk, professional paranormal investigators, and these objects are part of their Traveling Museum of the Paranormal and the Occult. Dana and Greg (37 and 33 years old, respectively) have been full-time paranormal investigators for about five years, but they've been interested in all things strange for much longer than that. Growing up outside Toronto, Ontario, Dana first became interested in the paranormal after watching Unsolved Mysteries and The X-Files; she quite literally wanted to be Scully until her mother told her Canadians can’t join the FBI. She met Greg as a teenager, when he was a 12-year-old running a rival ghost website (hosted by Geocities). Later, after an older, wiser Greg got over his youthful jealousy about Dana and her friends landing a TV show called The Girly Ghost Hunters (its 13 episodes aired on Canada's Space network in 2005), he tracked her down, they went on a ghost hunt, and as Dana puts it, "Now we're married."
This isn't the first time I've been to a museum of the occult, but it is the first time I've been to one where the curators offered to let me hold some of the exhibits. "That one is fine, I promise," says Dana, gesturing to the plaster-cast molding of the aforementioned carvings. "It won’t do anything to you," adds Greg. He pauses. "Wait, are you a witch? Because then it might." I'm pretty sure he's joking, but I still refuse to play with fire and decide not to take him up on the chance to hold a 200-year-old curse to ward off witches. Later, they assure me it'll be fine to hold an African statue officially known as "The Idol of Nightmares" that they affectionately refer to as "Billy," but again I demur. "Billy was found under a house in Dayton, Ohio, wrapped in a burlap sack, bound in twine,” says Greg. "No one's really sure what he was doing down there. The guy [and his family] had only lived there for about six months. He was running some new cable and he finds this big lump of dirt, brings it upstairs, and cuts Billy out of the burlap. Then his kid starts having nightmares that the little man's coming in his room at night, pulling the covers off of him while he sleeps. Then they started hearing people rummaging through their kitchen at night. Televisions were going on and off, faucets, and then they started having terrible nightmares." Perhaps you can see why I said no, even if Billy's EVP (electronic voice phenomena) sessions have gotten so "conversational" that visitors bring him offerings of rum, tobacco, and shot glasses, and the Newkirks feel comfortable keeping him displayed in the living room.
I'll have to get over my fear of the paranormal in the next few hours, though, because Dana and Greg are taking me ghost hunting. We're going to Lawrenceburg, Kentucky to see the T.B. Ripy mansion, the former home of bourbon baron T.B. Ripy. Built in the 1880s, the 11,000-square-foot house is three stories tall (plus a basement and an attic), with 50 rooms full of hidden alcoves, original stained glass, and gorgeous tilework. The house is owned by descendants of T.B Ripy himself, and they allow occasional tours led by the house's caretaker, Jeff Waldridge, who happens to be a freelance paranormal investigator. They also let him conduct his own investigations of the house with the help of his paranormally-inclined friends; Dana and Greg have already been here two or three times with Jeff.
The evening begins around 8 p.m. with a moonlit ghost walk that loops through the approximately two blocks that make up Lawrenceburg's downtown before ending up at the Ripy house. Having been on plenty of ghost walks in my time, I assume this will be the easiest and least scary portion of the night, but this illusion is shattered as soon as we stroll up to a Valero station for a bathroom break and notice a man pulling two very large and very dead Canadian geese out of his truck bed. I'm no paranormal investigator, but I'm pretty sure dead birds have been a sign of bad shit to come since like, ancient Rome.
The terror vibes continue as we walk along Main Street, which according to Jeff was once a hotbed of criminal activity related to whiskey bootlegging during Prohibition. Maybe that sounds glamorous if you hear "whiskey bootlegging" and think Boardwalk Empire, but please remember that Boardwalk Empire was also the show where a guy got buried alive up to his neck in sand then beaten to death with a shovel. At one stop alone — the Anderson Hotel — Jeff told us stories about hangings, people on fire, bloody mattresses, bloody bathtubs, brother ghosts that may or not be dragging each other down the hall, and multiple instances of paranormal investigators spending the night and coming out with mysterious bites. Had I known about this malevolent little hamlet while growing up an hour away in Louisville, I would have…never once visited.
After stopping by the Anderson County courthouse (whose bell started chiming ominously as we approached, just to really set the mood), we make our way back to the Ripy house. The first thing I see upon entering is a headless doll perched atop a fireplace; Jeff says it was found inside a wall about two years ago and at that point had already lost its head. The doll is propped up on a REM pod — a tool ghost hunters use to detect paranormal activity — but Jeff says it hasn't gone off during his tours. "Whatever it is, it’s very skittish," he explains. "It almost acts like a child ghost." Great, wonderful, exactly the thing I want to hear before a ghost hunt.
Jeff tells us a few more stories about encounters in the house and the crowd disperses to take photos, which is Dana and Greg's cue to take me up to the third floor (the servants' quarters) and begin our investigation. I have been low-key dreading this moment since my mother texted me more than 12 hours earlier to tell me she was certain "something was going to happen," but there was no turning back. It was time to ghost hunt.
The first thing Dana does is build an altar to foster a sense of communication with any spirits in the home and create a safe space for humans (or non-humans) who might feel like they need one. She lays out a thin blanket printed with the zodiac, then begins arranging crystals around the center — quartz, hematite, and labradorite, the last of which she says is "the stone of living between the two worlds." As far as ghost hunting goes, this seems pretty chill, and I even help her lay out some of the stones. I can totally do this.
Then the bats start screeching. Having not heard a bat since I was maybe 10 years old, my initial assumption is that this is a voice of the damned, but Dana assures me that bat sounds are par for the course on this sort of ghost hunt. "That's another fun thing about haunted and abandoned buildings that you deal with all the time," she says. "Rats and/or bats."
After finishing the altar and lighting a couple of tea lights, Dana and Greg pull out more traditional ghost-hunting equipment. There's a Mel meter, which measures fluctuations in temperature and electromagnetic fields, and a K2 meter, another EMF-measuring device that lights up from green to red based on changes in the nearby environment. ("Red means ghost," says Greg.) They've also brought a Panasonic RR-DR60, the gold standard of paranormal voice recorders. The RR-DR60 is notorious for picking up sounds you didn't notice while recording, and since it's voice-activated, paranormal investigators often use them in EVP sessions, the thinking being that the device is capturing voices the human ear is incapable of hearing. No longer produced, they now sell for hundreds of dollars on eBay.
Listening to my recording of the night later, I realize this whole set-up process took about 20 minutes, but in my paranoid, keyed-up state, it felt like we were done in two. We start by sitting in silence for about 30 seconds with the recorder on to see if we get anything, and when Greg plays back the recording, there are indeed garbled sounds coming out of the speaker. "Alright, there’s already something," he says. "It can be a little bit hard to decipher at first. That first one kind of sounds like 'hey,' or hi.'" He plays it again, and though it could just be the power of suggestion, it really does sound like someone saying "hi."
Then there's a thump from a room behind me, and though this is normally the kind of thing I'd hear in my own apartment and chalk up to the building settling, Dana sees it as evidence that we're not alone and I'm 100 percent on board. "You can come and sit down with us," she says to any unseen presences that might be listening, pulling out a deck of tarot cards — also haunted — that she uses to "give readings to the dead" during investigations. "We really just want to communicate with you. We already know that you’re here."
Dana and Greg’s approach to speaking with the dead is very different than what you see depicted in most horror movies, both in their investigations of locations and in their collection of paranormal objects. For example, Ed and Lorraine Warren, the real-life paranormal investigators depicted in the Conjuring movies, were often called in to rid locations or objects of unwanted presences; if it couldn't be done, as in the case with Annabelle the doll, they kept the item locked away in a box. Dana and Greg aren't interested in containment so much as they are opening up a dialogue with entities outside the human realm, and their work, as nebulous as it may seem to skeptics, tends toward the scientific. They recently conducted a 3D-scanning experiment with Billy where the machine was unable to scan the idol's face; the manufacturer of the scanner contacted them to say the scanner absolutely should not have been operating that way. They keep a 24-hour webcam on a rotating cast of paranormal objects in their office, just to see what happens, and in their living room, there's a painting of a man whose identity they keep a secret to see how many mediums and psychics come up with the same response. "If you believe that these things potentially have something intelligent attached to them," says Greg, "putting them on a shelf with a ring of salt around them while they're trying desperately to tell you they need help seems pretty wrong."
"Were you the lady of the house?" Dana asks as the queen of wands pops out of her tarot deck. "The queen suggests to me that you were the top lady, so you were probably everybody's boss. Which room did you stay in? Can you make a sound in that room for us? Can you tap on a wall?" No one taps and I take a deep breath, but Dana, undeterred, continues to shuffle the cards. "Is there anyone else who wants to come and pick a card? I'm gonna pull one for you. Ooo, the tower reversed, that's not good." I have no idea what this means, but I do know that sitting on the floor of a haunted mansion while a professional ghost hunter says "that's not good" is the closest I've ever come to feeling like I was about to die.
"Maybe you didn’t like your job very much," Dana continues. "Did you feel like you didn’t have any control over your job? Did you not enjoy working here maybe?" When the Panasonic fails to record anything too unusual, we change tactics. Greg gets up and walks to the door of a room in which Dana feels a presence. "Are you curious about what we're doing?" he says. "Can you say hello?" He plays back the recording and it again sounds like something talked, though this time I can't decipher any of the words Dana and Greg say they hear.
Dana and I move on to the room where I'd heard the thump earlier. This room is undeniably creepy and has a hole in the ceiling that Dana darts away from as soon as we walk in, but it turns out her response is about living creatures and not dead ones. "Open surfaces," she explains. "That's how you get pooped on." We do another EVP session, and this time there are even more garbled responses on playback. I'm still not quite hearing the words that Dana and Greg are hearing, but I do have the distinct feeling that I'm being watched.
Greg decides to go downstairs while Dana and I continue our exploration in a second-floor bedroom covered in the remnants of wallpaper put there by a previous owner who had a thing for leopard print. I feel less spied-upon in this room, but then Dana says "that's not good" again and I try not to worry that a chandelier is about to come crashing down on my head. After heading back to the first floor and conferring with Greg and Jeff, Dana decides that we'll go back up to the servants' quarters for one more session before heading out. "Sometimes they just don't wanna talk," she says.
Had I not already been convinced that our mission was absolutely legitimate, this last EVP session would have been the one that changed my mind. When we get back up to the third floor, Dana says she feels nauseous, and once again I start to feel like I'm being watched. Another thumping sound emanates from the room we'd heard them in earlier. "Do you want us to bring you anything?" Dana asks, then pauses for about 30 seconds. "Alright, we're gonna turn the recorder off now so here's your last chance." Another lengthy pause. Greg plays the recording back, and this time, the words sound clearer to me than they have all night. Both he and Dana come to the conclusion that the voice has said, "Get out." He plays it again several times and it is unmistakable: "Get out." They laugh about it, but Dana also reassures whatever we're hearing that we're leaving, thanks it for talking to us, and says good night. When Greg plays back the last recording of the night, the voice returns one more time to say, "Good night." At least it's polite!
Dana and Greg pack up their equipment and break down the altar, then we make our way back to our cars. They seem completely unfazed by everything we've just experienced and laugh again as they tell Jeff that something told us to "get out." Then they invite me to Denny's, as if it's the most normal thing in the world to go to Denny's after a ghost hunt. Once we get there I see that it kind of is, only instead of talking about sports or whatever we talk about goblins, ghosts, and this alien abductee who won't return their calls anymore.
By the time I get back to my hotel it's 3 a.m. and I don't want to go to sleep, but not because I'm afraid of ghosts — it's because I have to get up in two hours for my flight home. When I get back to my apartment, I fully expect to need whiskey and Tylenol PM to put me to sleep, but I pass out without a problem for a four-hour afternoon nap and still manage to drift off into dreamless sleep at my usual bedtime. Even though I am certain that I have just witnessed paranormal activity, I'm less afraid of it than I've ever been, so maybe the "listen and understand" approach really is better. I’m still never touching a Ouija board though.
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