Black-shirted hunters use sensitive gadgets and psychic energy to tap into an historic theater's great unknown
ASTORIA -- The ghost hunters arrived as the sky above the Pacific Ocean darkened and the old-fashioned sign at the Liberty Theater glowed to life.
"Got ghosts?" read their black shirts and stylish jackets. For the next four hours, the six would comb through the Liberty Theater, seeking signs that the historic treasure built in 1925 had permanent, otherworldly, residents.
The members of Advanced Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma (yes, AGHOST) share a common curiosity to understand the unknown. Their investigative tools include digital cameras, voice recorders and finely tuned gadgets that measure room temperature and electromagnetic fields. Several members are psychic or empaths. Sensitivity and technology work together.
For the past six months, the ghost hunters have focused their attention on this city built over the Columbia River mud flats, seeking explanations behind stories of spectral firemen, moving furniture and unaccounted noises.
The organization will host its fourth Ghost Hunter's Getaway Nov. 11-12 at the Hotel Elliott, across the street from the Liberty Theater. The weekend will feature lectures and ghost tours.
The Oregon Coast is rich in ghostly lore, from the spirit ship seen sailing up Schooner Creek near Lincoln City to the bloody "bandage man" said to leap onto cars driving past Cannon Beach. But Astoria is a "gem," said Jefferson Davis, a Vancouver paranormal investigator and author who has chronicled ghosts in five books, including three volumes of "Ghosts, Critters and Sacred Places of Washington and Oregon."
"Many of the people living there today are descendents of people who settled there in the 1800s, so you have this town memory, this oral tradition," Davis said.
AGHOST has done 250 investigations since it formed on Halloween Night, 2001. The ghost hunters were returning for a second look at the Liberty. The first, done earlier this fall, captured odd shadows in the lower lobby.
"A lot of these places are old, but they aren't active," said Stephen Zarkos, AGHOST's technical director and the investigative team's leader. "This is kind of a treat."
Theaters always are ripe opportunities for ghost hunters, but the Liberty has an especially vivid past. It was built on the site of a hotel destroyed by the Astoria fire of 1922. Access to underground tunnels -- convenient for trafficking in humans and goods more than a century ago -- are through a doorway in the lower lobby.
Merlyn fe Ahern, the team's lead psychic, sensed a swirl of energy almost immediately.
"You could spend a lot of time here," she said, then smiled. "Instead of running away from ghosts, we run to them."
You are in the upstairs women's restroom at the Liberty Theater. You glance in the mirror. A woman stands behind you. She wears the clothing of another era -- high-necked, cinched waist, decorative hat.
You turn.
There is no one there.
Rosemary Baker-Monaghan told the story as she climbed the sweeping ramp to the Liberty's upper lobby. Baker-Monaghan is the theater's executive director and is primed with history of her beloved charge.
The woman in the mirror is the theater's enduring ghost story, one started back when the Liberty was a movie house -- before it was turned into a ghastly triplex in the 1980s, before vagrants and birds used it for shelter in the 1990s, before money was raised to restore its showcase elegance.
"That mirror is still stored in the theater," Baker-Monaghan said. "We're trying to find it."
She glanced back to the main lobby and lowered her voice, mindful that the psychics didn't want to know anything about the theater's history for fear it would influence their work.
"There's the cleaning lady who refused to work here," Baker-Monaghan whispered. "She said the faucets in the restroom turned on by themselves, and when she'd come out of the bathroom, her cart had been moved.
She quit last January."
One group of hunters moved slowly through the theater, noting temperature changes and electrical disturbances. They would take hundreds of pictures through the night. Sometimes, an apparition or anomaly appears in a photograph or video when it wasn't discernable to the eye.
"Is there someone with us here?" ghost hunter Natalie Giles repeated. "May I take your picture?"
Camera flashes lit the auditorium, capturing in brief, startling detail the beauty of the $6.9 million renovation that makes the Liberty a "treasure," according to the National Trust of Historic Preservation. The huge chandelier, made of cotton and paper. The face of Neptune in sharp relief among the ornate plaster decor. Faux windows, with scenes evoking Venice, Italy.
Ahern was drawn to a seat in the balcony and sat there for long minutes, looking down on the stage and then writing furiously in a notebook, flashlight held in her teeth. Later, she prowled the lower tunnels, cluttered with the debris of decades.
Madeline Clayton. also a psychic, followed Ahern as an observer.
Flashlight beams bounced from dusty floor to splintered lath wall to cavernous ceiling.
"There's so much energy but it's scattered all over the place," Ahern said. "I'm picking up two males and a female. Three distinct personalities."
Clayton, who had been taking photos, stopped and shook her camera.
"See, I told you," she said. The camera, which had been loaded with fresh batteries, already was dead.
Spirits drain electrical energy, Clayton said. Ghost hunters usually carry lots of extra batteries.
The first time AGHOST investigates the Liberty Theater, group founder Ross Allison is in the lower lobby, filming with a handheld camera.
"You don't see it with the naked eye, sometimes," he explains later. "It's the equipment capturing things."
Allison's camera scans a corner near a stairway where equipment picked up a sudden cold shift. A shadow sweeps across the tiny screen.
Allison is startled, but continues filming. Again, a darkness darts across the screen.
The videos are on AGHOST's Web site (http://aghost.us/500.html).
"I personally believe that there's something out there," Allison says. "We're not a group that says, 'Yes, there are ghosts out there and you have to believe it.' We're out there to show there is SOMETHING out there."
When the investigation was done, Baker-Monaghan turned up the house lights and joined the ghost hunters for a debriefing.
Each told what they saw, what they felt or sensed.
Baker-Monaghan nodded as one psychic described images of fire and then flood. The combination of three days of rain and a high tide sent water into the lower lobby last winter -- an hour before the curtain was to go up on an opera.
Baker-Monaghan also said that, yes, the auditorium's automatically folding chairs sometimes were found lowered -- when the theater was empty.
The three psychics had not talked together during the evening. But they recounted similar impressions.
A strong male presence in the balcony. A weaker male presence on the stage. A woman's presence in the lower lobby. A gathering of men.
The strongest energy came from the lower tunnels. Feelings of chaos and images of people -- transporting goods, kidnapping humans. Ships nearby. Gambling. A brothel.
Baker-Monaghan acknowledged that she felt anxious in the lower tunnels and avoided them if she could.
"People don't like going down there alone," Ahern said, and Baker-Monaghan nodded again. "I know I was not alone. None of these guys were there, but I was not alone. I don't think if this theater was empty, I would go down there alone."
The ghost hunters pause in a tunnel doorway to check their instruments. Ahern has joined the group after spending time alone, in the dark. She stands with elbows cocked, hands on hips.
Suddenly, she looks down at her left hand. Puzzlement sweeps her face.
Ahern lifts her hand, shakes it.
At that instant, ghost hunter Racheal Ogan says, "Something just went by. I saw a shadow. It went by Merlyn."
"Something just tugged my arm," Ahern says. "I thought I got it caught on something."
The hunters scan their instruments.
"It was just a haze, a cloudy thing," Ogan says.
"Where did it go?" Zarkos asks Ahern. "Can you see it?"
The tunnels reveal nothing.
Abby Haight: 503-221-8198; abbyhaight@news.oregonian.com
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