It was cold, and dark, and I-swear-one-of-the-mannequins-in- the-room-is-going-to-move-any-second creepy.
Jim Wetherell asked if any spirits were with us, and at that moment something touched the tiny microphone clipped to his chest.
Three minutes into the ghost hunt.
Maybe it was nothing. But maybe ...
We crept through the master bedroom, Wetherell sort of giddy. Before the night was out, several people would swear they heard something whisper his name.
"Jim...Jim...James....."
'Get out!'
For the record, Pamela Brown has never seen, heard or felt a paranormal thing at the Wilton Farm & Home Museum. But Brown, the Wilton Historical Society president, is open to the idea.
The first time Paul Taitt walked in her building, "he sensed a lot of people watching him," she said.
Taitt's a member of the new Central Maine Paranormal Investigations out of Auburn. Brown let the group in for the first time in January, then again last Friday, with friends Central Maine Researchers and Investigators of the Paranormal from Turner in tow.
The building is big, built in 1865 and once used as a boarding house for Bass Shoe workers. Brown had draped each of the museum's period-dressed mannequins in a white sheet for winter, giving an unintended, but altogether eerie effect at lights out.
During the first investigation, people claimed to hear a drum bang and catch words on tape that had been inaudible to the naked ear. Director and case manager Stacey Farrington said she doesn't like to declare a place haunted after one visit.
Based on their interest in a return trip, this place is clearly a contender.
Farrington believes that she's sensitive to psychic energy. She's only been scared once during an investigation, at a house in Brunswick. It had just begun, and investigator Lori Black went into a room to ask, "Who's there?"
"A ghost screamed in Lori's ear, told her to 'Get out of here!' It was mean, mean," Farrington said. Their video camera hiccuped at that exact moment; they didn't catch it on tape. It happened right in front of the homeowners.
She was shaken and Black ran for it. Farrington was a bit embarrassed. "I was like, oh, they must have so much faith in us now..."
'Someone's standing behind you'
For the Wilton museum investigation, 11 people came equipped with seven stationary cameras, three hand-helds, nine audio-recorders and two digital cameras, a non-contact thermometer and a device to measure electromagnetic fields.
A few very serious-looking people wore infrared flashlight headbands.
A lot of ghost-hunting juice.
"When we get going they start messing with (equipment,) it makes it that much harder," Wetherell said. Last time, the group took out a video camera that had charged all day and the battery died in five minutes. (One theory is ghosts drain energy and use it to power themselves.)
After a long technical delay, everything was finally in place.
Brown positioned herself in front of the split-screen monitors in the front room, with a friendly warning: "If anybody screams, they're on their own."
Investigators have to obey the buddy system, "so that way you're not bull----ing" if you claim to see something. Plus if you trip in the dark, someone's there to help, said Adam Wright. He's CMRIP's resident skeptic.
Our little group headed to the master bedroom, then the second floor, where there's the mannequin of a 7'10" giantess - spooky in its own right - then to the third floor, where the temperature dropped and investigators said they felt an ugly entity.
In one bedroom, a closet door hung open just a crack. I eyeballed it, hard, daring it to open.
No luck.
Throughout the night there were reports of the drum banging again in the other room - we got there five minutes too late - of people being pushed and menaced, and things not everyone could see.
Just past midnight, Taitt stood in the giantess' room and said he had just heard a skittering in the hall like rat feet. The group got quiet.
"Somebody's standing behind you, Paul," Black said ominously.
He panned his camera around the room. "I wouldn't be surprised."
The two paranormal groups will get together tomorrow to compare notes on what, if anything, they caught on tape.
Note: You can click on the source link to watch video and listen to audio
http://www.sunjournal.com/story/201609- ... ing_night/
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