Ghost hunters search Putnam, again

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By Kay Luna | Saturday, August 16, 2008 10:04 PM CDT | () comments

Matthew Sweet, left, from Blue Grass, Iowa, and Kent Amerine from LeClaire, Iowa, both members of IPART, use red lenses on their flashlights while investigating a mummy Friday night and early Saturday in the Egyptian room at the Putnam Museum. (John Schultz/Quad-City Times) Buy this Photo

It’s almost midnight, hours and hours after closing time.

We walk slowly, feeling around in complete darkness for the rows of plush seats or a wall — anything to orient ourselves.

We can’t see anything. All of the lights are out at the Putnam Museum’s empty IMAX Theatre. I’m clinging to my sister’s hand as we struggle to sit down.

Then, silence falls, and the ghost hunting begins.

Shining a small red light in front of him, Quad-City area paranormal investigator Kent Amerine of the Iowa Paranormal Advanced Research Team heads to the lower front of the theater. He holds up an electro-magnetic field detector and it suddenly starts tweeting and flashing.

His counterpart, Matthew Sweet, stays near the top of the theater, and his detector is going off, too. He shines his temperature-reading laser into the room, and it shows the temperature is dropping and fluctuating from an initial reading of 76 degrees to about 68 degrees, and then slowly goes back up again.

This could be a sign of paranormal activity.

Sweet gets on the walkie-talkie, telling someone else to record this activity.

“We’re picking up movement, and we can’t explain it,” he says.

Then, from behind us in the shadows, we hear a thud.

Chills run down my spine, and I start shaking, too scared to speak. I squeeze my sister’s hand harder.

“Did anyone else hear that?” Sweet asks.

Yes, we did, we answer.

Amerine keeps walking along the lower rows of seats, with his handheld detector flashing red lights over and over again. He says he can’t figure out what is causing the reader to go off like that, more so on some seats than others.

Except for the soft bumping sounds of him walking in the dark, and Sweet’s heavy breathing in the back, the theater falls mostly silent.

Then, I hear rustling sounds. And they are directly behind me.

I’m not the only one.

“Hey, we’re hearing something over here,” my sister, Diana Yadon, says, trying to alert the ghost hunters.

We freeze in fear for a few seconds.

Then, we hear a woman’s voice.

“It’s me, Eunice,” it says, and I hear what sounds like pant legs rustling together.

Who is this Eunice? Is this a spirit – or an “entity,” as the ghost hunters prefer to call it – using the energy fields in the theater’s extensive electric wiring to manifest herself in sound? Is this an entity from another world trying to communicate with us?

“I’m sorry, I came in a few minutes ago,” the woman’s voice says. “I thought you heard me.”

Oh, geez.

It’s Eunice Schlichting, a curator at the museum. It’s not an entity, but a real woman, who slipped into the theater to watch the ghost-hunting process, too.

I laugh to myself as we keep watch together in this theater, where Amerine says he and other researchers immediately picked up strange readings tonight. A few women in the team even reported losing juice to their batteries during a short visit earlier in the evening.

He had hoped that if any paranormal entities were hanging around in the atmosphere, they would gravitate to the theater. A building does not have to be old to be haunted, he says.

But the ghost hunters enjoyed only brief moments of hope.

They both thought they saw a blinking red light near one of the lower exit doors, and a shadow of a person moving there. But they debunked their initial thoughts, deciding it was a reflection from the softly glowing exit signs that caused the confusion.

It’s all about the science of it all. They might be ghost hunters, but these experts don’t think someplace is haunted based on hunches. Instead, they look for proof – and try to disprove their own ideas – as they perform their investigations, they said.

Ghost hunters can hear EVPs, or electronic voice phenomena, that sound like voices picked up with their sensitive recording equipment. But they usually can come up with good explanations for why those sounds might have been recorded, Amerine said.

“Sometimes, we don’t know if anything happened until we review the recordings,” he said.

I make my way back toward the exit sign in the darkness to leave, and I’m feeling a little paranoid. Is someone following me? I think I feel something at my neck.

“Diana?” I say.

She reaches out and touches my back.

“I’m right here,” she answers.

And we head back into the light.

Kay Luna can be contacted at (563) 383-2323 or kluna@qctimes.com. Comment on this story at qctimes.com.

Why hunt for ghosts (again) at the Putnam?

This is not the first time paranormal researchers have hunted for ghosts at the Putnam Museum in Davenport.

Last fall, a team from IPART, or the Iowa Paranormal Advanced Research Team, went through the museum and recorded 12 EVPs (or electronic voice phenomena), including the sound of someone calling for help, which was picked up while testing a set of slave shackles.

Putnam officials invited the paranormal researchers back Friday to gather additional information for an upcoming exhibit called, “The Science of Ghost Hunting,” which runs from Sept. 5 to Jan. 11 in the museum’s lower level.

This time, they performed a much more thorough and lengthy investigation, long after the museum closed, from about 9 p.m. Friday until well into the early hours Saturday.

Eight members of the local ghost hunters group, led by Kent Amerine of IPART, conducted the investigation, collecting photographs, videotaped footage, digital recordings, electro-magnetic readings and temperature readings throughout the museum.

Eunice Schlichting of the Putnam and lead curator for the new exhibit, Christina Kastell, along with her two interns, also were present to provide access to locked areas of the building.

Amerine expects to review those recordings and gather results within the next two weeks, he said.

In the meantime, his paranormal research team is looking for new possibly haunted places to investigate in the Quad-Cities – including residential, business or public buildings and outdoor areas.

For more information about the ghost hunting team or to suggest a site, call (515) 974-6704, go online to diepart.com or e-mail help@diepart.com.