Elgin Paranormal Investigators set out to explain the unexplainable
March 27, 2008
BY EMILY McFARLAN Staff Writer
If there's something strange in your neighborhood, who ya gonna call?
The Elgin Paranormal Investigators.
That's who homeowners on Elgin's west side contacted last year when they heard footsteps on the stairs of their historic home, followed by the smell of toast when no one was in the kitchen.
The house, built more than 100 years ago on land occupied by the McClure family before Elgin was established in 1835, was the site of EPI's first exploration when lead investigator Greg Stout and technician manager Mike Rohr founded the group in January 2007. It also was the site of the group's sixth and most-recent investigation on March 15.
"We have a little more knowledge. We have a lot more equipment," Rohr said. "All we had on that investigation was a little handheld camcorder with a flashlight taped to it. We've grown leaps and bounds since then, thanks to Greg."
On the revisit to the McClure house, Stout and Rohr brought with them five EPI team members, a handheld camcorder, four infrared surveillance cameras, two digital audio recorders, a thermometer and an electromagnetic field meter.
"We aim to find the reason for every noise and everything that happens. We try to debunk it," Stout said.
But some things that happened on the first investigation couldn't be explained, such as the feelings of anxiousness Stout and Rohr felt in the kids' bedroom and the electronic voice phenomena recorded in the master bedroom and servants' quarters.
In the master bedroom, a voice answered "yes" to the investigators' question, "Did this used to be your room?"
In the servants' quarters, a loud crash was followed by, "Ow, you (expletive). You cracked my head."
Electronic voice phenomena, or EVPs, are disembodied voices captured on audio recordings. Stout said he was sure neither voice on the recording belonged to a team member, and there hadn't been a loud crash in the servants' quarters during the investigation.
"I would have been cracking up," Stout said.
And Rohr insisted, "That boom would have been a lot louder if I had fallen."
Rohr began the second investigation of the McClure house in the master bedroom with Stout's stepdaughter and alternate video technician Nicki Holley and alternate field investigator Raul Saldana.
While Holley filmed the investigation with the handheld camcorder, Saldana took readings with the thermometer and EMF meter. But, Stout said, "nobody really knows what a ghost is." Investigators have discovered they appear to draw energy from a room to manifest, which can register on an EMF meter and cause a drop in temperature.
"There's no definite science to paranormal investigating. There are things we've learned that tend to work the best," Rohr explained to Holley and Saldana, both participating in their first EPI investigation.
As the investigation moved into the kids' bedroom, Holley, a self-professed skeptic, said she felt the temperature drop near the head of the bed, where Rohr and Stout had claimed feelings of anxiousness. Since that investigation, a guest also told homeowners she had woken up to see a full-bodied apparition of a woman standing at the foot of the bed carrying towels.
Holley said she felt the clammy cool hovering above the bed in the kids' bedroom on a second sweep of the house that night with video technician and field investigator Krissy Kurtz, audio tech and field investigator Dave Umbach, and Stout's wife and EPI historian Maureen Stout.
"(Krissy) was sitting on the bed and asking questions. I told her I got really cold," Holley said. "I flat-out asked, 'Did something happen to you in that corner?'" and it got really warm. Right after that happened is when Dave said he saw something."
From where he and Maureen Stout were sitting in the master bedroom, Umbach said there appeared to be the shoulder of a white gown around a corner near the servants' quarters. Later that night, sitting in the same spot, Rohr said he and Saldana saw a flicker of light, like a match being struck, and a shadow moving in the doorway of the servants' quarters.
Reviewing the audio recorded in the McClure house after the second investigation, Umbach discovered six EVPs, all captured in the servants' quarters. There were inaudible whispers, a woman's voice saying, "Alright, dear," and a deep, male voice intoning, "Milk."
Nothing appeared on video.
Compared to other EPI investigations across northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin, Rohr said, "This was actually pretty active for personal experiences."
"But personal experiences don't count for anything," Stout said.
Rohr agreed: "It's just another ghost story."
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