Welcome To My World

"Welcome to my world" is a statement I write frequently when I sign one of my books for a reader. For this piece, however, someone else is offering me a welcome, and the world is one that only sometimes (thank you, God) touches mine.

Last week, I wrote about places that were haunted but didn't reveal anything in particular to me when I visited. The week before that, I wrote about places I didn't find out were haunted until after I had been there, and experienced something just a wee bit suspicious. Today is about going someplace that is reportedly haunted and coming away thinking, "Yup, that place is haunted."

On most ghost tours, Jim and I are treated to deliciously scary venues and fascinating history, great photo ops, and usually, not much else. That's fine; we enjoy ghost tours just for the experience. Besides, who doesn't like listening to a bunch of scary stories in the appropriate settings? But there have been at least two places that gave us more than a good story and an interesting site.

The first place was the Ryan Mansion in Galena, Illinois (and a big shout-out to Terri Reid, who suggested the Galena ghost tour in the first place!)  The Ryan Mansion is a 24-room private home/museum that was built in 1876. When we toured it, it had been renovated and restored and it was positively gorgeous. The upkeep is imperative or it could wind up easily looking like that house on the Munsters; as it is, the place is definitely worth a visit, ghosts or not. 

The ghost tour we took was the first I've ever been on that included a ghost box as well as an EMF detector, and dowsing rods for tour participants to play with on site. We went into the front room and were treated to a ghost box session. (For those of you who might not know, the ghost box is a device that picks up both AM and FM radio waves, in theory to allow spirit to use the energy to communicate. If you ask a ghost box a question, at some point it will spit out disjointed answers cobbled together from random words on different wave lengths.) The front room is known to be haunted, and there was definitely an uneasy feeling as random words were tossed out by the ghost box in answer to questions that the guide was asking. Incidentally, all the words spoken by the ghost box made sense in context of those questions.

The guide also handed out the EMF detectors and the dowsing rods so that people could pick up on different energies, or even communicate yes-or-no fashion with the dowsing rods. There was a door in this room that was known to open and close on its own, and if you stand close enough to it with the EMF detector, you will see the lights go up into the active zone as something or someone unseen passes close enough to trigger it. If you ask the dowsing rods about someone being present, they will give you a "yes" or a "no" answer. We got plenty of "yes-es" that night.

 I didn't see anything there, but I could feel something. It was cold, but it wasn't malevolent. It was just there. Perhaps whoever it was felt as curious about us as we were about him/her. So while it wasn't out-and-out scary, it was definitely unsettling, and very tangible. I won't say I was sorry when the guide said that it was time to leave. Especially since I felt as if we were escorted back onto the bus by something unseen.

The second place is from a little longer ago, up in my beloved Door County. There is a company up there called Trolley Tours, and  a ghost tour is one of their mainstays. It doesn't just run in October: it runs as soon as tourist season opens some time in May and keeps going through early November. We took the tour in summer, and had the good fortune of having one of those unusually cool summer evenings that made the tales just a bit more chilling, and the experience jut a bit more shivery.

One of the stops on the tour is a place called the Alexander Noble House, right in the heart of Fish Creek. The house is currently run as a museum and I know I've written about it before, especially since this past year they featured an exhibit called "A House in Mourning" that entailed the entire house being decked out for a Victorian funeral. When we visited last summer, our lovely tour guide had already had some weird experiences there, but then, the place is haunted.

When we visited for our very first time on the Door County ghost tour, we were led up into a bedroom at the top of the stairs and told that the mirror in the room frequently featured images that only showed up in pictures. "You won't see anything when you look at it," the guide explained, "but if you take some pictures of it, you might be surprised when you look at them later." That sounded interesting, so both Jim and I took a few pictures with our cameras.

We were allowed to roam the place for a few minutes after the official house tour ended, and then we were all shepherded back onto the trolley. "I didn't see anything," Jim said as we took our seats. I hadn't either, so as our ride pulled back onto the street and headed toward our next destination,we went through our pictures. He had taken more shots than I had and was just glancing through them quickly. "Nothing," he said.

But that's not what I saw. "Go back a few," I told him. "And look there." In one of the two pictures he had taken in the upstairs bedroom, there was the image of a face in the mirror. "What do you call that?" I asked.

I won't print his answer.

I'm going to be taking another ghost tour within the next few weeks, so if there is anything noteworthy, I will certainly come back and report.

Notes from a Ghost Tour

Every time I go someplace new, I try to take a ghost tour. Luckily, Jim is always willing to do that with me. He likes the history he learns that provides the background to most of the hauntings. And while he's savoring history and I've savoring the ghost part, I'm also taking notes. Looking back over some of them is both evocative and eyebrow-raising. Sometimes I remember exactly what I meant, and other times, well, I don't know.

For instance, I have notes about forensic students using dowsing rods at a body farm at the University of Tennessee. After finding sites of buried bodies, apparently the students willing to use dowsing rods to answer simple yes and no questions were 95% accurate in determining the body's gender, whether the head lay in the direction of North, South, East, or West, and whether the body was that of a child or an adult. The reason the tour guide (this was for haunted Gatlinburg) brought this up is that there is currently a trend in using dowsing rods to communicate with the dead.

Something I saw done live on a ghost tour in Galena, Illinois. (More on that a little later).

But back to Gatlinburg: the guide told us stories about one of the big hotels down the street from us. He did mention something that stuck in my head: "Not everyone knows about these events because not all incidents make the papers." I will find a way to use that in one of my books one day.

As for the dowsing rods in Galena, well, the tour guide for that particular trip also had an EMF (electromagnetic field) indicator and a ghost box (a contraption that picks up radio waves and is meant to give ghosts a way to communicate by picking out random words over the airwaves and spitting them out.) I know a ghost hunter who got a pretty solid "Get Out" on one of those things. They make me nervous.

On the tour in Williamsburg, our guide told us the story of a woman named Lady Skipworth who killed herself in the house of George Wythe. (George Wythe was the first Virginian to sign the Declaration of Independence, by the way). Supposedly there is the ghost of a woman spotted in the third-floor bedroom. Our guide then added that he has seen the ghost of a woman on the porch of the Wythe house, and that she backs up and disappears through the door.

And then there was Savannah, Georgia. Savannah was the first and probably only place where people discuss ghosts the same way they discuss the weather. Jim and I sat down to a wonderful Southern lunch at a restaurant in Savannah and when we mentioned we were taking the ghost tour that evening, he was prompt with a "You should get a lot out of that. You know that hotel in the next block? That place is haunted. I saw a woman on the staircase, there." And then he asked us if we needed hot sauce, ketchup, or anything else. No one in Savannah even bats an eyelid when you say you are looking for ghosts. They're more likely to direct you to the nearest haunted spot they know. Which could very easily be where you're standing and having the conversation. Savannah is a giant burial ground, from the Native Americans who were there first, to the sad mass graves of the plantation slaves, and then the dead from the wars that happened in the area, both Revolutionary and Civil.

The ghost tour through Charleston was interesting because the last story involved the inn where we had our rooms. Fortunately, we weren't on the right floor to run into the ghost. On the other hand, it was a little unsettling to find out that our temporary domicile was included on an actual ghost tour. I would have expected that in Savannah. But then Charleston is not that far away from Georgia.

This summer, we will be taking another family trip, this time to Missouri. And of course we will take a ghost tour. Just can't wait to see what kind of stories we get on that one.

Ghost Tours of Galena

Last Saturday, Jim and I got to hang around with incredible writer Terri Reid and her husband, Richard, as well as incredible writer/formatter Donnie Light and his wife, Barb, and one of our activities was going on a ghost tour in Galena, Illinois.

I have never been to Galena before, even though I've lived in Illinois all of my life. (Kind of like I've never been to most of the tourist sites in Chicago.) At any event, I was surprised by 1) how old the city actually is and 2) how much it reminded me of Savanna, Georgia. Galena, like Savanna, is built on levels, so sometimes traversing from one street to another means taking flights of stairs to another level. Streets run up- and downhill and some intersections resemble the switchbacks on hiking trails despite the asphalt and concrete. 

The tour, one of several offered by Amelia's Tours, was a bus tour that included use of an EMF meter, dowsing rods, a Rem pod, and a ghost box. Sites included an old cemetery that is haunted by a cloaked woman with glowing red eyes, drive-bys of at least two businesses that were former funeral parlors and are now eateries, the oldest still-in-business hotel in the state of Illinois, and a community center, among a slew of others. 

We stopped at the cemetery and made contact with the spirit of a woman who told us, through yes-and-no questions answered by dowsing rod, that she was buried there with her children. She was between the ages of 30 and 40 and we got the sense that she had died during a cholera or other epidemic. She did tell us that the cloaked woman with the red eyes was not only present, but that this red-eyed woman was not a friendly spirit. We left pretty shortly after that. 

But the best stop was haunted Ryan Mansion. The mansion was built in 1884 (or thereabouts) and after being recently uninhabited for a year and a half while owned by the bank, was finally sold to a family brave enough to want to live in a haunted house. The tour guide told us that the real estate agents had a hard time showing the place due to the hauntings. One agent who was touching up her makeup in a mirror there before her next client meeting, had looked down to take and respond to a text message, only to look up and find someone in the mirror staring back at her. She left and never took the meeting.

Doors open on their own, the piano in the formal parlor plays itself during the night, apparitions appear. While we were there, the tour guide did not only communicate with the dowsing rods. The EMF meter indicated that there was a disturbance in the electromagnetic field close to a door leading to the servant's hall (close to where I was standing, I might add). This was the door that would swing open by itself. It opened for the new lady of the house shortly after she moved in, and she took it as a welcome, indicating that the spirits there were happy that she had moved into the property. The owner's nine-year-old daughter stopped in front of the door and said, "You opened for my mom. Open for me." The door obliged. 

Since we got the EMF disturbance, the tour guide also set up the Rem pod and invited the spirit to touch it. And it did it twice while being asked to do so. The ghost box, a device that scans radio signals and allows spirit energy to form words from random radio broadcasts, spit out a few answers, but they were not very clear.

Ryan Mansion was the last stop on the tour and it would have been a hard one to top. From the original furnishings that still grace the first floor (since the house is occupied, tours are restricted to the first floor) to the modern dress-form mannequins that display period clothing, the house is an elegant nineteenth century example of upper-class living that is like a Hollywood movie come to life. With ghosts.