The ghost hunters

Investigators with the Virginia Paranormal Society seek out spirits in a Wythe County mansion.

Roanoke Times, New River Current Oct. 28, 2007
By Lindsay Key

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GRAHAMS FORGE -- Even with the late afternoon sun bathing the hillside, there's something grisly about the Victorian-style mansion sitting behind a black iron gate in Wythe County.

Maybe it's the two gaping lion statues that flank the driveway, regarding visitors a bit too closely. Maybe it's the sensation that the wind is always blowing. Or maybe it's the stories about the house that span almost 150 years -- stories of war, murder and punishment.

While these sorts of things would send some people running, it's the very reason members of the Virginia Paranormal Society, formerly the New River Paranormal Group, took the Grahams Forge exit off Interstate 81 and headed down five miles of paved and then crunchy, graveled road on Oct. 13. Here, they came face to face with the Major David Graham Mansion.

The Virginia Paranormal Society, formed in January 2006 by Nick Ferra and Ron Thorne, hunts ghosts. Its members, who live in the New River Valley, use technology and their own senses to detect paranormal activity. Ferra and Thorne have researched paranormal activity in books and online for years.

The group, which has also investigated the Pearis Cemetery, has never found what could unfailingly be labeled a ghost during an investigation. But its members still believe a spirit world exists.

Investigations are free and can be initiated by either the property owner or the paranormal group.

This time, Ferra e-mailed Graham mansion owner Josiah "J.C." Weaver in hopes of getting inside. For years, Ferra has heard that the mansion is haunted. So on the sunny afternoon of Oct. 13, the first step in 12 hours of work began. Weaver's assistant Mary Lin Brewer led four investigators around the property so they could collect data about the place.

3:30 p.m.: Research

"It's a fairly unknown piece of historical property," Brewer told the group. "Either people have lived here all of their lives and they don't know about it or they've always wanted to get in here or they broke into it when they were kids."

The investigators followed Brewer through the house with clipboards and cameras, eager to find out who lived in the house, or better yet, who died there. A property's history gives the group an idea of whose ghost they could be hunting. Plus, photos taken during daylight hours are helpful to refer back to when preparing a report, the investigators said.

The Graham mansion is rumored to have been built around a log cabin that was home to Joseph Baker in the 1700s, Brewer said.

"Around 1770, Baker was murdered by his two slaves, Sam and Bob," she said. "They were making moonshine outside of the log cabin, and he told his slaves that he would give them their freedom whenever he died. Well they fast-forwarded that process and killed him right then and put him in the mash."

The slaves were hanged on the ridge behind the mansion, Brewer said.

A stuffy third-floor room is rumored to have been a meeting place for Confederate soldiers, she told the group, and a room on the second floor is where family descendent Betty Graham was thought to have taught school children during the Civil War.

Brewer said a clairvoyant friend felt the presence of a little girl in the room during a music festival on the property on Labor Day. The woman didn't know that it had once been a classroom, she added.

Halfway through the tour, Thorne asked Brewer if she had ever had a paranormal experience in the house. She shuddered.

"I don't go in the basement."

6:30 p.m.: Setting up

The investigators moved their equipment into the dining room, which contained a long table and wing-back upholstered chairs.

"When you stay here tonight, you'll see," Weaver had warned them during the day. "You're going to feel different in some rooms in this place."

Weaver, a developer and musician, owns almost 5,000 acres along the Interstate 81 and Interstate 77 corridor. No one lives in the Graham mansion, except for a black and white cat the investigators named Dusty McSpook.

Ferra pulled the group's gear out of a duffel bag: flashlights, headlamps, video cameras, voice recorders, an electromagnetic field detector and a thermometer.

Cameras and recorders would be used to capture ghost images and electronic voice phenomenons, if they made themselves known. The detector and the thermometer track electricity and coldness in the air.

"The entity ... has to get energy from somewhere, and so it will take the warmth out of the room to manifest something, to make a sound," investigator Demitria Gerken said.

But members try to find a natural reason for paranormal activity before declaring a place haunted, Thorne said. For example, a high reading on an electromagnetic field detector may mean that electrical wires -- not a ghost -- are nearby.

9 p.m.: The investigation

"Are there any spirits here? If so, can you tell us your name? If you're here, will you make a noise?" Thorne called into the darkness of the third-floor Confederate room as he held up a digital recorder. He and investigator Connie Grove waited patiently in the stuffy darkness. Thorne's headlamp sent an eerie red glow across the room.

All was quiet.

"Ghost hunting is kind of like fishing," Thorne mused as the pair headed back downstairs. "You don't really know if you're going to catch anything or not, and most of the time you're just waiting."

Two video cameras were set up in the house, one in a bedroom near the front of the house and the other in the school room.

Thorne and Grove walked to the second-floor school room, where Grove felt a cold chill in the air. Still, no ghost appeared. Meanwhile, Ferra and Gerken went to look around in an outdoor building that once served as a summer kitchen.

Investigators typically split into smaller groups, as to not influence one another's experiences. If all groups experience the same sensation in a room, it adds credibility to the paranormal investigation. The downside is that noises recorded could simply be another group, which can make reviewing the audio tedious.

After a half-hour, both groups retired to the dining room. Dusty McSpook immediately found a lap and began purring.

The investigators made coffee and small talk. They decided that the men would investigate the basement, where Brewer was afraid to go. The basement was once a shackle room for slaves, Brewer had told them.

The women headed upstairs, where Ferra hoped their maternal presence would coax the little girl's spirit out of hiding.

When the women walked into the former classroom, Grove's mouth flew open.

The two closet doors on either side of the room had been shut when she and Thorne had passed through.

Now, one of the doors gaped open like a big, black mouth.

Wilson and Gerken calmed Grove as she told them what she had observed. They made notes in their investigation logs.

Meanwhile, Ferra and Thorne had sensed a cold chill in the basement, but were unable to pin a ghost.

It wasn't until about 1:30 a.m. that the investigators believe they actually communicated with a ghost.

Thorne and Wilson had gone back to the summer kitchen. They came back breathless and wide-eyed and waited until Ferra and Gerken had left to investigate before they told their story.

"We were down in that room, and we heard this sound, like a stick breaking, but it was inside of the room," Thorne said. "It was right beside Donna, and we both heard it. ... Me and Donna were asking questions back and forth like, 'Who are you?' and all that. And we just kept feeling that sensation."

When asked what kind of ghost they thought it might have been, Thorne and Wilson were unanimous.

A curious one.

Debunking

During the following week, the investigators reviewed their video, audio and photos from the mansion.

"Based on the evidence that we've mainly heard and felt ... I feel like it's haunted," Gerken said.

The open door in the former classroom that had so startled Grove was not the work of a spirit. Ferra had opened the door when he went into the room.

But the investigators did pick up two strange voices on their audio recordings that they can't explain.

One is a little girl's voice, recorded on the landing outside of the Confederate room, muttering something close to "What's your name?" Another recording, which is much clearer, is a man's voice in the parlor room, saying, "I don't play that tune."

Is the mansion really haunted? The Virginia Paranormal Society is still investigating.