Newcomer gets an introduction to ghosts at the museum
, Richmond News Staff
03-01-2010
The things people can’t explain don’t always go “bump” in the night. Sometimes, they just don’t bump at all.
That’s why paranormal investigators, or “ghost-hunters,” do what they do: so they can prove those things are there, even when they aren’t making books float or slamming doors.
Like so many things – romances between emergency room doctors, crime-scene investigation and what happens when you really put a dozen strangers together to survive in a wilderness area – things don’t always work like they do on TV. Popular basic-cable TV shows like SyFy’s “Ghost Hunters” and its spin-offs or the more recent Travel Channel series “Ghost Adventures” make ghost-hunting look like 60 minutes spent running from eerie shadows, disembodied voices and angry, physically violent spirits.
The reality? Not so much.
Investigator Mitzi Miller visited the Ray County Museum on a chilly Saturday night, Feb. 20, in association with Ghost Tours of Kansas and Missouri and the Paranormal Education Documentation and Research Organization (PEDRO) hoping she could find her own proof.
She and other investigators lead tours of willing, paying believers on investigations through Missouri and Kansas’s most reputedly haunted places.
Sometimes, these investigations can be hard-luck affairs.
“I’ve never actually seen a ghost,” she said. “I’m always next to the one who has an experience.
The big, Georgian, brick building was once the county’s poor farm and rest home. As far as anyone can tell, it doesn’t have an especially violent history. However, the people who called it “home” so long ago might’ve had such sad lives, they decided they would stay a little longer.
There are a few spirits the PEDRO representatives want to meet. For starters, there’s John Bertie Youngblood, a wheelchair-bound man that called the house’s basement home.
There’s also a ghost people simply call “John.” According to old records, John also stayed in the basement most times, but not because he was handicapped, like Youngblood. Accounts say he was a painfully shy, 7-foot-tall black man who believed the upstairs residents feared him.
Karen Bush, the museum’s archivist, has worked at the museum for some time. She believes that big John sometimes does come out and make himself known. Once, a friend had been in town for a reenactment and visited Bush at the museum. She got sleepy, and Karen told her she could nap on an old sofa in the house’s parlor.
When Bush returned, her friend had awakened and moved before the large black man she’d seen down the hall could see her.
Then there’s Goldie.
Full story is in the Monday, March 1, 2010 edition of The Daily News
Other Top Stories
