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A GHOST OF
A CHANCE - 20080311
Paranormal investigation club
hunts buildings for, um, inhabitants
By Winston Ross
The Register-Guard
COOS BAY — The stage at the Broadway
Rock Hall is dark, cold and quiet.
“Is there anybody who would like to talk
to us?” came the placid voice of Sharilyn Brown, her
face illuminated by a small flashlight on the table she fingered
lightly, to sense any movement. “If you’re here,
can you make a sound? Knock on something? Can you touch one
of us, if you’re here?”
Brown waits. “What’s your name?
Do you mind that we’re here?”
Surrounding Brown are her confederates, all
respectfully quiet, all with their fingertips placed lightly
on the table’s edge, vigilant for even the slightest
disturbance. Before them is a plastic red keyboard, devices
that record electromagnetic energy and small rubber balls,
all designed to attract “entities,” ghosts and any
other spirits that might reside in this airy space in downtown
Coos Bay.
“You can talk to any of the machines
with a red light, or touch one of us, or make a noise,”
Brown says, giving any inhabitants an array of options for
making contact. “Do you want us to leave? Do you like
the music that’s played here?”
After a half-hour or so of gentle, prodding
questions, nothing has happened that couldn’t be explained,
save for a couple of times when Don Thurston said he felt
something touch his leg. Without it happening to another person,
however, these ghost hunters wouldn’t put much stock
in such a report. They need something more substantial to
conclude that there’s paranormal activity in this old
theater. That’s why the members of Discoveries Investigators:
Ghosties, Southwestern Oregon Community College’s paranormal
investigation club better known as DI: Ghosties, always travel
in pairs.
That they didn’t see anything Wednesday
night doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything there.
The hunters hooked up night vision-equipped infrared cameras
and voice recorders around the room. They will spend hours
reviewing the footage and sounds later, in case an entity
found a way to reach out without anyone hearing it at the
time.
It’s painstaking work; the wiring, the
setup, the slow march from corner to corner of this dreary
space with flashing monitors in search of electronic activity.
But this work is why the members of this club
are here: to reach the beyond.
“This is the one I call the ‘ghost
buster,’?” Thurston says, waving a cell sensor in
the air in search of any strange spikes. “This is the
one I find them with. I have chased them down walls with this.”
The club is two years old, said member Linda
Sweatt, and it came about after some students agreed that
there may be inhabitants at the building on campus where they
practiced tai chi.
“We started hunting, going to different
buildings, getting access,” Sweatt said. “Everyone
has a story. Everyone knows a building that’s haunted.”
The Broadway Rock has been talked about for
years, Brown added, with people seeing strange things, such
as a figure standing before them and disappearing.
So the Ghosties decided to check it out, researching
its history as a former local theater and music store, the
upstairs once a women’s boutique, all to learn about
who might still want to stick around.
“We find people that like some place,
where they prefer to be after they’ve died,” said
Thurston, the club’s vice president.
Once they hone in on a spot with reports of
activity, the team sets up equipment, in search of spikes
in electromagnetic energy that a human body might mask but
that a spirit couldn’t hide.
“We’re not thrilled with orbs,”
said Thurston of the spots that often accompany digital pictures,
an encouragement to some amateur ghost hunters that something
strange has been captured. “We’re looking for a
couple pieces of information, not just one.”
Whatever’s found goes into a report the
club will turn into a building’s owner once a hunt is
complete. That nothing definitive happened Wednesday isn’t
a disappointment, Brown said. That’s how it is, 90 percent
of the time. It’s the other 10 percent that keeps the
hunters coming back for more.
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