What do you pack for a ghost hunt? The answer depends on what you hope to find. For my first ghost hunt I have brought a digital voice recorder (for EVP, electronic voice phenomena) and an EMF (electromagnetic field) reader, both purchased from Amazon after reading reviews on various ghost-hunting sites and seeing how little I could spend for something reliable. But as I will learn later, “reliability” is not a quality sought by ghost-hunters—or at least, means different things to different people.
The event takes place from nine p.m. until five a.m. at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston, West Virginia. The asylum was constructed in the late 1800s and was originally designed to house 250 patients, though at its peak packed in more than 2,400. It was operational until 1994, and now a foundation runs a busy schedule of historic tours and ghost hunts. Tonight’s event is a birthday present from my husband, who is more skeptical than I, but who wants to see me happy.
I grew up in a house that was over 200 years old and desperately wanted it to be haunted. I don’t know when or how I first became aware of the idea of haunted houses—probably from a book—but believe me that as a child I had a dozen Barbies, mounds of stuffed animals, a blank check at the Scholastic Book Fair each year, and would have given it all up for a ghost. As an adult I attended a seance in which everyone made contact with a dead person but me. I’ve never had any experience I could classify as paranormal, and I’m beginning to think I never will.
When we made the reservation, I expected there would be eight or nine people, newbies like me, ghost-curious. In fact, there are closer to fifty in attendance, some profoundly professional-looking. After we check in, we watch other groups enter bearing hard equipment cases, stacks of them bungee’d together on a dolly, including a group of three that appears to be mother, father, and pubescent kid in matching t-shirts featuring a variation on the Ghostbusters logo. In a meeting room where we wait to get started, these groups begin unpacking and testing their equipment, laser focused. While I am hardly expecting a transparent figure roaming the halls ahead of us, I realize, watching the other investigators around me, I don’t want an experience solely explained via meter readings, temperature fluctuations, the bright red light and alarmed beeping my new EMF reader gave out when I walked too close to the TV. Just—a ghost, whatever that may look like.
After everyone has checked in we are divided into four groups of ten to twelve, plus a tour guide. Each group will start on one of the Asylum’s four floors, spend two hours investigating, then move to another floor. Our tour guide’s name is Ryan, an EMT from Tennessee who treks out to volunteer on the weekends.
We start with a tour of the top floor, Ryan showing us the layout of the building and telling us a bit of history. The asylum’s wings seem to unfold in a fractal, and the changes in ceiling heights, floor tiles, etc., means I am frequently disoriented, unsure how far we are from the center or how to get back. The mood is perfect—the sky outside crackles with a coming storm, and at various points in the evening we will hear thunder. It is also very hot. Above the first floor, there is no electricity. It is July, and there is no air conditioning anywhere in the building. On the upper floors, most of the windows are painted shut. The hallways, the individual rooms are stagnant, the only cool air in a lobby-ish area in the middle of each floor, decorated with old furniture and featuring, crucially, a balcony to the outside. Three older women in our group whom I dub the Smokin’ Grannies take advantage of these balconies for cigarette breaks.
As the orientation comes to an end, Ryan can perhaps sense a little hesitancy in our group. We are less weighed down with the heavy equipment of more practiced investigators. In addition to the Smokin’ Grannies there is another couple, similar in age to my husband and I, a few teenage-looking girls, and two teenage-looking boys who move as a unit and make me feel, as all teenage boys do, deeply uncool. Ryan suggests we take a little time to explore on our own and then meet together in one of the hallways for a group session. My husband and I walk away from the others. I am not sure what I want to do, exactly, but I don’t want to do it in front of any of these strangers.
We find a room with an old chalkboard that has been scrawled over, but it’s clear that the markings are recent, probably from prior ghost hunts. I try a Q&A with my voice recorder but I feel so awkward, sitting on the floor asking questions to an empty room. Most of the rooms are empty even of furniture, though some retain bed frames, the odd chair. Later, I will understand the secondary purpose of Ryan’s tour: not only does it give us a history of the asylum and some of its more tragic residents, but the rooms he draws our attention to are a shortcut: here is where you might detect some activity. Instead, I go into whatever room looks creepiest, stand in the middle a while, think, yup, pretty creepy, and move on.
At one point we are in a hallway and I hear a loud beeping from somewhere else on the floor, a beeping I’ve never heard in person.
“Is that a REM-POD?” I ask aloud.
*
A REM-POD is a small cylindrical device with an antenna sticking up from the top, surrounded by a ring of lights. It detects ambient temperature changes and electromagnetism. I’ve seen them on reality TV, but never in person. When it’s time for all of us to get together, Ryan has set it up near the doorway of a room previously belonging to two men, Frank and Larry. The floor of the room has offerings to the residents—playing cards, cigarettes, poker chips. Ryan turns the REM-POD on and the twelve of us sit a good twenty or thirty feet away, facing each other across the hallway. Ryan puts the flashlight in the middle of the floor: a ghost may be able to move it, cause it to flicker. He begins to ask questions. At first one of the Smokin’ Grannies answers, until she is shushed by a companion.
The thing about having the gear is, you do get results. While the entire building is perfect for feeling spooked, for interpreting any movement of air as a hand on the back of the neck, it’s another thing entirely to hear a man ask questions and get a response from out of the darkness, an invisible intelligence yards away. When Ryan asks Frank and Larry to come out of their room the REM-POD beeps, loudly and continuously, until Ryan politely asks them to step away. At another point, as the flashlight flickers, untouched, we all feel a cool breeze move down the hallway. As much as I want to be skeptical of the meters, the data-fication of the indelible, I also want this—something that feels unambiguously not possible, shared by a dozen people all at once.
*
When our two hours on the fourth floor are up, we move down to the first, where we get more history: In the 19th century, one of the uses of the asylum was as a place for men to drop off wives they were sick of, claiming anything from insubordination to “novel reading.” Those same husbands were the only ones who could legally declare the women fit to go home. Children could be born and even raised at the asylum as their fathers pursued other relationships. A large display shows pictures of dozens of these women along with their “diagnoses.”
We are in a big tiled room, bats flapping in the beams of our headlamps, when Ryan tells my husband and I about another form of activity: doppelgänger apparitions. Visitors have reported looking out the windows and seeing themselves, or a double of Ryan, walking the grounds. I look outside. It’s very dark, but I do see figures, asylum staff moving between buildings.
On the first floor is where I connect to the Smokin’ Grannies, the trio of women accompanying one’s grandson. One wears a t-shirt that reads “Y’all ain’t right.” She’s spent hundreds of dollars on Amazon buying equipment she has no idea how to use—the aforementioned REM-POD, a kaleidoscope flashlight, a handful of light-up cat toys that spirits can manipulate. Despite being, from my perspective, extraordinarily game (I cannot imagine either of my grandmothers, may they rest in peace, attending such an excursion with me for even an hour, much less an entire overnight), she and her friends are immediately ditched by her grandson and his friend, history repeating itself as the guys pursue, with their more elaborate equipment, other signals.
The Smokin’ Grannies have teamed up with the teenage girls from our group to conduct a spirit box session in the room of a young girl who died in the asylum. A spirit box is a handheld device that scans radio frequencies, looking for static between stations in the hopes that discarnates can drop words into that static, responses to questions.
Colin Dickey writes that ghost hunting tools largely hinge on glitches—tape recorders and EMF readers emit “random static and noise that is primed to be transmuted into meaningful signals. Ghost hunters work through confirmation bias.”
One of the (living) girls listens to the spirit box through headphones, so she cannot hear the Grannies’ questions and provide biased answers. The pauses between question and answer are long, the white noise hypnotizing. Some words pop out seemingly at random, but a couple times we receive coherent answers, a brief interview that amounts to: please leave me alone. Nevertheless, one of the grannies continues to ask if the spirit wants to play, if she wants to talk, if she likes us and wants to be our friend.
*
On the second floor we get more grisly stories. For a period in the 1970s the asylum was used as an auxiliary drunk tank, which meant inebriated teenagers could be thrown in with men who were actually mentally ill, and violent. At least one young person died this way, dragging his stabbed body down the hallway to the nurses’ station just a moment too late.
Ryan takes us past the room of another young girl, someone nine or ten years old when she died. As in other children’s rooms, there are a number of toys, offerings to her spirit. There are two balloons, a pink and a blue, inflated but resting on the floor.
Ryan shines his flashlight into the room and asks the spirit if she wants to play with her balloons. The pink rocks in response.
“The pink one today?” Ryan asks. “Usually it’s the blue one.” The pink balloon bobs a little more.
Later my husband will walk past the room, sure that our movements must have disturbed the air and the balloons will rock again. But they are still, too far from the doorway to be affected by activity outside.
This is our least mediated encounter—less flashy than the REM-POD, the spirit box. A balloon bobbing in an empty room may not look like a Hollywood ghost, except those of the early Paranormal Activity movies, films that lulled us with seemingly static closed-circuit footage, training us to gasp at the slightest movement of doors. A lot of ghost hunting, I’ve learned, is like this: hundreds of empty rooms, one in which you get a little something you can’t explain, a word or movement, and over time these events construct a narrative. It takes me a long time to understand a very simple truth—that belief ultimately depends on the believer. Each person on the ghost hunt has to decide for themselves what a ghost “looks” like, when the scales have been tipped. And to the believers, I ask, how many EMF readings and cold spots were enough for you? One, two, seventeen? For the folks who are kitted out, who clearly have done this many times before, why keep coming back? What are you still looking for?
Adrenaline spikes from earlier have begun to wear off. It’s getting toward two a.m. After touring the second floor, we tell Ryan we’re tapping out. We never expected to make it until five. He understands. On our way out, we pass through the waiting area, where people are napping or eating full meals, pasta and the like, out of Tupperware. They are tag-teaming their investigation, in it for the long haul. We slip out a side door to the parking lot.
The next day we have plans with friends who know we’ve been on a ghost hunt. One of our friends asks questions, trying to poke holes—could the REM-POD have been manipulated remotely? Was anyone running around pulling strings, pushing buttons, perhaps on another floor? We say no to all of it, but my husband refuses to say a ghost caused any of it—the most he will say is that something happened that we can’t explain. I feel more confident that we did make contact—that the coincidences are too numerous to be written off. But that’s the most that I want to speak about our experiences. As time goes by, I do not want to hold this story up for any more scrutiny. Explaining the night, carving down the sum total of the experience into words is damaging—the easier it is to talk about, the less extraordinary it becomes. But we both, my husband and I, talk about signing up for another overnight in the future. When might we be able to return to the rooms we left uninvestigated, peer out the windows on the ground floor and possibly see ourselves, peering back?
***
