Ghost Whisperings

By Katherine Ramsland

Blair is a character. The son of two funeral directors, he's an eager explorer, but more important, he's been my companion into realms that few people dare enter. A documentarian of unique experiences and a willing risk-taker, he invited me to come ghosting in one of more extraordinary
places I've ever been.

When I met Blair, he lived in California, but a few years back he
purchased an old hotel on eBay up in the mountains of western Pennsylvania.
I can't offer an address, but I can reveal that it's near Johnstown, where a
dam burst in 1889 and caused a sudden flood that injured and killed
thousands of people. So you know there are ghosts. In fact, according to the
Johnstown Flood Museum, because of the harsh conditions, it used to be said
of this town where the hotel stands, that you went there to die.

The hotel is not open for business, but Blair made it his home and along
the way, he collected stories from townspeople about the old place. There
were deaths of various kinds, from homicides to accidents, and whispers of
bodies buried in the basement. When a psychic confirmed this, I mentioned
that I knew a Native American cadaver dog handler whom I was hoping to test
for spiritual receptivity. Two birds with one stone, as they say. So on
May 7, we orchestrated a convergence.

Four people were present: Blair; Cassandra, the dog handler; Dana, who
desperately wants to be a coroner; and me, a.k.a., Indie Annie Jones. A
fearsome and strange quartet ready to delve into god-knows-what.
Appropriately, it was a day of thunderstorms and rain. That made the dark,
old three-story building more ominous from the kitchen to the second floor
that everyone wanted to avoid. The dog showed a mild interest in a few
areas in the dirt basement, including the corner where the psychic said someone
was buried, but not enough to getexcited. But upstairs on the second floor,
on a wall situated between what we had dubbed the dead monkey room
(for the taxidermy monkey from the movie Medicine Man that lay across a chair)
and the cactus room, he grew quite excited. We learned from Blair that
someone who had lived in the cactus room for a while was always
uncharacteristically irritated. That was significant some negative energy there.

So with Blair's permission, we broke down the suspect wall and scooped
out some debris. The dog whimpered over some hunks of rock that looked like
mummified bone. Whatever it was, we were later to learn that we may have
disturbed something in the room. (We were also later to learn that the
substance had calcium deposits, possibly indicative of bone.)

With Cassandra's help, we decided that night to do a ceremony. To get
into the spirit, so to speak. Blair contributed the requested milk and blueberries (as
per the instructions from our long-distance consultant, Iron Bear) and my
sister had sent the finest acorns from the post-winter Michigan soil. Cass
had her bells and rattles and I set up the ghosting equipment. She led the
ceremony that night and each person participated as he or she was able. We
went from the bar, where a man had been killed, and into Blair's quarters,
where the psychic had said a ghostly prostitute does whatever such entities
do (no evidence of that), and then into the room where we had knocked
through the wall. Cass reported numerous instances of feeling cold, even
when she was very active with her dancing. This was a first for her, and
she'd never had an interest in the gothic, so she was apprehensive. Her
chanting was quiet and repetitive, part of a specific ritual, and it felt
like the perfect way to "whisper" a ghost.

We got plenty of infrared footage and digital photos, and these we
watched on Blair's TV. There were orbs, to be sure, both thin and opaque,
but no evp that I could hear. Around 2:30 a.m., exhausted, we wrapped it up
and went our separate ways. We'd had fun, but it seemed that the ghosting
was pretty much done. Little did we know what was brewing in the dead
monkey room.

In the morning, we considered leaving right away. Cass was still
inside, using the bathroom that was under the tall staircase to the second
floor, while Dana, Blair and I were outside with the dog. Soon we heard
Cass yelling something we couldn't make out. I thought it might be part of
her cleansing ritual watch. He went inside and found Cass halfway up the stairs.
"What are you doing?" he asked.

She turned, beckoned to him, and said, "Come on, Katherine wants us
upstairs."

I came in behind him and Cass looked at me in shock. "How did you get
down there?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"You were upstairs just now. I heard you. You yelled, OCass, get up
here.' It was your voice."

Blair and I looked at each other. We were thinking the same thing. I
had not been upstairs. I hadnOt even been talking. This was a haunting
event. I could only shake my head and say to Cass, "I sure wish you'd have
gone all the way up."

I asked her to describe exactly what had happened, and she said that when
she was in the bathroom she had heard footsteps go up the stairs over her
head and then a shuffling sound, like someone moving furniture. She thought
we were back at it. Just then she heard me yell quite sharply, "Cass!
Cass!"

"What?" she had shouted back. She left the bathroom and came to the foot of
the steps to ask, "Do you want the dog?"

"I" apparently then said, "Get up here!" But the first part was
slurred.

She asked again, "Do you want the dog?"

Then she heard some mumbling, as if "I" were now farther away, so she
went halfway up the steps to shout my name, and that's when Blair came in.
I bolted up the staircase to look around. Nothing there. I took some
pictures, and tried to get some recordings. Nothing. It was exhilarating
but also disappointing. Something had happened, most definitely, but I
couldn't pin it down.

We went outside to discuss it, and a curious neighbor happened by with a
dress which has its own ghost story involving a building near the hotel.
I got this sudden Dark Shadows idea and thought that
maybe Cass looked like her. I urged her to put on the dress, and to her
credit, she did. And, small as it was, it fit perfectly. So she put her
hair up in the style of olden times and we went up the steps to film her in
the dead monkey room on the second floor. Orbs showed up, but I wanted
more. Again, nothing.

When we finally stopped and Cass went downstairs, I checked the room
again. There was a pile of old ledgers stacked on a table, a lot of plaster
on the floor, and the stuffed monkey, of course, on his chair. Nothing out
of the ordinary. I was the last one out. The light was off. Everything
was quiet.

Outside, Cass decided to go look through the window of that room once
more, and Dana went with her. Suddenly they both screamed and came running.
They insisted that as they were watching, the curtain had been pulled aside
and the light had come on. Blair went up to see, and I followed. The
ledgers were now scattered across the floor, the light was on, and the
curtain had indeed been pulled aside and set in a certain way that defied an
explanation that any stray breeze had done it. (No windows were open,
anyway.) I wasn't certain that it had not already been that way, so I
checked the photos and films. In all of those, the curtain hung straight
down room.

So it seemed that there had been some activity. We tried again to
record something but again came up empty. Finally, by the end of that
afternoon, we did the cleansing ceremony. We were ready to go. But it was
not done. A number of incidents indicated the possibility of active
residual energy. I call these AIEs, for "ambiguously interpretable events."
The night before, I had lost my gray pearl earring. Dana watched me go
through everything in my bags looking for it. I looked all over the hotel
as well, to no avail, and I was unhappy. When I got home that night, some
five hours from the hotel, I went to bed and had a dream or impression that
the earring was in my overnight bag--the one I had searched three times.
When I got up the next morning, I opened the bag and there it was, right on
top of the clothing I had taken out, shaken, and searched through. I had
not taken that bag back into the hotel, but had left it in my car. I have
no idea how the earring got there. Yes, perhaps it had been caught in some
flap of clothing, but why had I had an impression of it exactly where it
lay? Okay, the foibles of memory and the subconscious. But I hadn't opened
the bag when I got home, accidentally glimpsing it. So it remained an AIE.
Then Blair emailed me that same day to let me know that, after we left,
he had decided to go get coffee. When he opened the car door, it sprang at
him, smacking him hard in the face and cutting him badly. It nearly took
out an eye. I remembered the good-bye hug that Cass had given him, and
thought about the way this "energy" seemed to have some connection to her.
Had we disturbed something? Another AIE? Hard to say.

The following weekend, Cass took eight other dog handlers to the hotel, and
all of the dogs showed strong interest in the dead monkey room, reacting to
the very same spot that her dog had. Larry, a former police officer, was in
the room with Cass that evening and saw her shadow against the wall, but
next to hers was a second shadow that launched him into a hasty exit.
Everyone felt the cold air around Cass, despite the heat that summer night,
and a few even saw frost on their breath guy who made fun of the supposed
ghost ended up getting three flat tires on his way home the next night,
one in each of three different states. Another AIE.

During the following week, Cass had the first of a series of dreams that
offered information that we were able to verify. In it, she heard her name
and she called, "Katherine." Someone said, "What?"

She walked up the stairs to a tall, lean man with an aquiline nose, dressed
in charcoal pants, a long dark coat with silver buttons, a white linen shirt
and scruffy boots, who took her hand. She described him as "pretty boy
handsome." His hand was warm as he led her to the back stairway and she
floated down and then back up. As she returned, he hugged her to his chest.
He did not talk to her, but he smiled sadly. He brushed her bangs away from
her eyes, gestured down the back stairs, and then was gone.

Cass said that he had seemed familiar. She had not been afraid of him, but
sensed that he was trying to show her something. She referred to him as
"Liam" another dream that same week, he offered a long last name that began with T and did sound Slavic. Something like Thryelwoki. I wrote it down as she
told it to me, and she then asked Larry to use his research resources to see
what he could find. Not long after, Larry called back to say that in the
census records, he had had found a Liam Trithaneylwi in that town in the
early 1900s, who was from Poland. He was 39.

Okay, that was strange. The name was very much like the one Cass and I
had tried to spell out. It was one thing to have AIEs, quite another to get
verifiable information. And we continued to get more, but no definite
answers as to what this entity--if that's what it is have some ideas.
And that's what came of our search of only two rooms of this 32-room
building. We plan to return for more extensive research. After years of
ghost whispering in various types of places, this PA-based mystery one has
been one of my most intriguing experiences.