I was always one to roll my eyes whenever my wife would have ‘Ghost Hunters’ playing on the TV.

“This stuff is complete bullshit,” I would murmur, attempting to ease the remote away from her so I could switch over to Spongebob.

To this day, I still don’t buy much of the ghost hunting that is exhibited on TV, primarily because it’s all about ratings, and if something doesn’t happen at a series of locations over time, I believe the editors of the footage start to work a little magic to keep interest peaked.

To be sure, I’ll be the first to admit that ghost hunting is a current mainstream fad. But who can blame anyone for enjoying it? It’s a quick exciting thrill! And usually if people get bored enough of it, they drop off the grid soon enough, and make way for a new batch of fickle flakes. But some of us out there brave the long bouts of boring nothingness to eventually end up with something unique and fascinating!

Even I gave in to the trend. I stood in as an onlooker at an investigation taking place in Adamsville cemetery with my friend and ‘Ghosts of Arizona’ founder Lindsay Brown. My decision to go in the first place, was simply out of pure boredom. There is very little in Arizona to keep people entertained. It was interesting to witness the investigational process, and at the same time, an eerie experience to run around for three hours in a place with grave markers older than my grandfather. It was also sad to see the markers of children who barely made it to three years before some sickness befell them that is curable now, but wasn’t while they lived. But through the course of the night, nothing really happened that would make me any kind of believer in paranormal phenomena. There were occasional shifts in temperature, and some sudden changes in the scent of the air, but nothing so radical as to make me react with much else than a shrug of my shoulders.

That was my first experience. The next experience would turn all of my predispositions about the paranormal upside-down.

It was the night between May 30th and 31st, 2009, at an old mining ghost town outside of Wickenburg, Arizona called Vulture City. I tagged along once more with Lindsay and some new members of his team. Before we were there, I had decided that this would be the last time I would do anything like this, because I was so sure that we would never come across anything, per my luck, and it just seemed like a waste of my weekends to persist in something about which I generally felt lukewarm.

After we set up camp we did a day run that yielded nothing, save for a couple of inconclusive moments where we may or may not have encountered something paranormal. I thought I saw a face materialize from across a room, and the eyes seemed mischievous, but it could have been a trick of the sunlight, and my mind overreacting to my senses.

Our second run was after dinner, around dusk. We set up our lantern in the heart of town as the central meeting point. We then split into groups of two or three, and made our way around the town. At one point, when we were in the town’s brothel, we were alerted to a possible presence when a glow stick we were using was thought to have moved by itself, but again, the video cameras revealed that it just turned out to be one of the team mates accidentally brushing by the table on which the glow stick was placed, and not realizing it at the time.

Meanwhile, in an old schoolhouse on the other end of the town near the camp site, cameras were fixed on a frame made of tape on the floor. A rubber ball was placed in the center of the frame, then flour was sprinkled around the floor near the ball, to see if we could catch something moving the ball.

As our cameras revealed, the ball did in fact move, but there was nothing paranormal about it: The ball was nudged by a rat.

By around 11pm, we reconvened at camp for an hour while we talked about potential hot spots of interest, and gathered pictures, audio, and video information on a laptop for later perusal.
At that point my thrill buzz had admittedly dwindled. I was a little dejected that we hadn’t caught anything concrete and extraordinary. That said, I laid down for a short snooze just to get a little wind back in my sails. A half hour later, we would commence with the final phase of the investigation.

We separated into two groups. Lindsay and one team member went back to the town-proper, while the other three of us were directed to go out to an old mill on the outskirts of the area.

The alleged story of the mill is that while a young man, about 16 years old, was working near a large belt-run machine, the belt snapped, and either sliced his throat, or decapitated him completely. So now, there is supposedly a headless apparition lurking around the old mill.

During an investigation, part of the analysis is to determine whether a haunting is either intelligent, or residual.

An intelligent haunting is when a spirit is actually able to react and communicate with you, while a residual haunting is best described as a sort of scar left in space and time manifested by an event of significance. Most of the reported haunting out there is usually residual.

We made our way through the town, toward the mill, as Friday night gave way to Saturday morning. The darkness of the hour was sinister as a warm wind rolled and hummed over the curved hills and rocky crevasses of the long-unoccupied mining town. Since our day run didn’t include a stop at the mill, finding the right path with nothing but our small flashlights in the engulfing blackness took some doing.

Finally making our way to the mill building silhouetted against the bleak night sky, we looked around but couldn’t seem to find the entrance, until we moved some collapsed brush. A small set of crudely placed steps gave way to a gutter-like passage into the mill.

In my mind’s eye, I had pictured our time as being spent on the second story of the building, but any place that once accessed the upper levels were now caved in. Maintaining our investigation in the lower level, we placed recorders all around and doused the lights.

As the recorders rolled, we snapped pictures anywhere we felt compelled to do so. We asked questions, and invited whatever was or was not there to speak to us.

After about 10 or 15 minutes, we hadn’t caught anything with our cameras, and we heard no disembodied voices answer us. The only thing that happened was that I was struck with a sudden grief and began to weep for no apparent reason, other than feeling a sudden wave of sadness over the parents’ loss of this young man all those years ago. But that could have just been me acting on pure emotions based on that which I already knew about the building, so there is no conclusive way to determine whether or not what I was feeling was a paranormal occurrence.

When we finished with the building, we went back outside to the path and noticed a small building adjacent to the mill. This building resembled a small holding cell with bars in the window. With our lights back on, we placed a recorder on one of the window ledges, then returned to the path, and to darkness. Out of the men in the group, I was the closest one to the building where the recorder was perched, standing about 20 feet away. We flashed some pictures and tried to ask some more questions, but we heard nothing reply or respond in any way.

After another 10 minutes or so, we packed up and headed back down the hill toward the town-proper.  The team member who owned the tape recorder that was perched on the barred windowsill, rewound the tape a little as we were walking.

When he pressed play, we were greeted with what, at the time, sounded like savage, heavy, labored breathing! None of us heard anything remotely like this with our naked ears during the session. It only came through in the playback.

My immediate reaction was to book it back down the hill, because I felt that whatever we heard on that tape did not want us up there!

The following day, we packed our gear and headed home. Two weeks later, I had a copy of the recording in my hands. I couldn’t wait to hear the recording in its entirety for the first time.

The tape rolled, and after a few minutes of listening to me cry like a baby, I arrived at the point when we were outside of the holding cell, which in actuality ended up being an old explosive silo, as revealed to us by one of Lindsay‘s colleagues outside of his team.

The recording included a machine turning on in a place with no electricity, followed by that machine going off kilter. The sound of the machine faded, then the low moaning of a sad voice arose. The breathing we had heard on our way back into the town that night was then to follow, then the machine revved back up to life once more, as though chortling over a claimed victim.

It was unlike anything I had ever experienced before in my life, and while it made my skin crawl, I was officially addicted.

Upon analysis of the audio, we found that if the tape was sped up, it sounded like a young man crying for help, followed by the labored last breathes of someone who was dying, but that is merely a theory. It was explained to me that the reason the manifestation may have occurred in slow motion may have been due to the lack of electricity in the town, therefore, the residual energy could not muster up proper speed when reenacting the traumatic events of the mill.

One question that still remains unexplained is why the haunting manifested when the recorder was near the explosive silo, and not inside the mill where the event allegedly occurred. I may never know.

In my personal experience, I cannot say whether or not I believe in intelligent hauntings, but I definitely do believe that residual haunting are a very real phenomenon.

Since that night in May, I have made arrangements for a return to Vulture City in October. I need one more night to see if there is anything else there that may be revealed to me.

The Follow up to this report will be published upon my return from the second excursion.

If you would like more information about Lindsay Brown and The Ghosts of Arizona Paranormal Society, please visit:

www.ghostsofarizona.com

Click on the “audio” link to hear clips that have been caught by the team over time, including the explosives silo clip mentioned in this article.