- MOUNDSVILLE, W. Va. -- In
a windowless stretch of concrete and steel bars of the vacant West Virginia
State Penitentiary, there are ghosts. They reside in the metal cots where
inmates passed time ruminating on their sins. Or in the remnants of mirrors
still clinging to walls, where a prisoner could face his conscience or
reflect on the crime that brought him here. And in the graffiti splatter
camouflaging the maddening sterility of the institution's walls.
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- Through the marker scribbles, each cell confesses violent
crimes, speaks of wrist-slicingly isolated confinement and the death of
dreams. One cell screams. "The Reaper Is Watching You," cell
No. 9 warns above a sketch of a skull that serves as a centerpiece for
a four-walled museum of forfeited potential and depleted spirit. Every
inch is covered with the black markings of a criminal with nothing but
ink, blood and time on his hands.
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- Close to midnight, on a Saturday, Jennifer Smith stood
at the open door to cell No. 9, as her flashlight beam cut through the
air, heavy with mist and history. The light fixed on a poem scrawled above
the cot. "The sex, the drugs, the shocking truth. She broke my heart
so I ripped hers out," she read aloud.
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- "This is the spot," she said, her words puffing
a ghostly cloud of vapor into the March air. She and the other four members
of the Cuyahoga Falls-based Deadframe Paranormal Research Group dug into
their packs for the crystals, cameras and electromagnetic-field meters
that they say help validate, or at least enhance, their hobby - ghost hunting.
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- Deadframe began in 2000, after Jennifer met J.C. Smith,
now her husband, and discovered an unusual common interest - a fascination
with the paranormal.
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- Having lost loved ones early in life, Jennifer says she
always felt as if the deceased were comforting and watching over her. J.C.,
whose clairsentience - the ability to sense spirit presence - is stronger
than his wife's, says he has frequently experienced other kinds of paranormal
phenomena, such as dreaming of future events.
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- The group, which consisted of the Smiths, J.C.'s two
sisters, El Bury and Lou Smith, and Jennifer's longtime friend Belinda
Pilon, has investigated allegedly haunted houses, cemeteries and former
prisons such as the penitentiary in Moundsville.
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- Pizza and videos, then down to business
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- The penitentiary's historical society usually fills the
majority of its openings for weekend ghost hunts during the spring and
summer, and this - the first hunt of the season - was no exception. Seventy
ghost hunters piled into the prison to spend the night. The evening kicked
off with an informational tour, a pizza party and a showing of an episode
of the MTV series "Fear" that was filmed in the penitentiary.
By 10 p.m., the hunters divided into their respective groups to explore
the grounds.
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- After more than an hour, Deadframe reached the solitary-
confinement area. Jennifer directed the ray of a laser thermometer toward
the most compelling points of cell No. 9 - the samples of morbid graffiti,
the thin, stained mattress and a triangular hole carved in the wall that
separated the cell from its neighbor.
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- Drastic changes in temperature, along with changes in
electromagnetic frequency, dripping water and unexplainable winds, are
indications of a paranormal presence, Jennifer said.
-
- She pulled from her pack a hand-held electromagnetic
field meter and placed it in the entrance to the cell. "It was down
here in solitary confinement where I heard that voice last time we visited,"
Jennifer reminded her husband. "I know something is here. I feel it."
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- Jennifer said she first experienced clairaudience, the
ability to hear sounds outside the range of normal perception, during ghost
hunts at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield and in various cemeteries.
But it was at the Moundsville prison two years ago that what she describes
as normally a light, unintelligible whisper became a frightening and intense
experience. As she and J.C. walked through the soli tary-confinement chamber
that night, Jennifer heard a hissing voice, so loud it seemed as if someone's
mouth were pressed to her ear.
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- Hoping to get a positive reading on the solitary chamber
this time around, Jennifer turned on the meter, which whined as it calibrated
and finally settled on a high-pitched purr signifying normality. However,
within a few moments, the dial began to slowly rise and the small machine's
pitch intensified.
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- The EMF meter is only one piece in thousands of dollars
worth of gear with which the fully outfitted ghost hunter might be equipped.
Other essentials include a 35 mm camera, digital audio recorders, a laser
thermometer and an infrared video camera.
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- Throughout the hunt, the paranormal investigators record
sound and later analyze it with sophisticated software that determines
electronic voice phenomena inaudible to the human ear. The hunters snap
photos randomly in search of spirits in the form of white translucent balls
of energy called orbs.
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- Revisiting scenes of violence and death
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- In the cell entrance, the group huddled, each member
trying to pull into the ambient light of the flashlights like children
cowering from the shadows of a badly lit bedroom. This stretch of the prison
was where the most reprehensible criminals would find themselves. Some
committed suicide by drinking hydraulic brake fluid or bashing their heads
against the wall until death served his pardon.
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- During the penitentiary's operation between 1866 and
1995, only 94 of the 998 men who died there were executed, by either hanging
or electrocution in the chair that an inmate carpenter built.
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- The prison's violent history, Deadframe members believe,
is what makes it a prime site for observing the paranormal. A location
where violent deaths occurred is likely to be haunted by either the spirit
of the deceased or by ghosts attracted to the emotional energy in its walls,
Jennifer said.
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- During Deadframe's last visit to the penitentiary, the
group had a chilling brush with the paranormal in a seemingly unlikely
place - the prison's outdoor basketball court. Surrounded by barbed wire,
the court was one of the few places where inmates could escape the seclusion
of their 5-by-7-foot cells. However, when J.C. made his way to a particular
corner of the court, members said, the wind picked up to a fierce 50 mph,
and the sky was growling. When the group sought shelter from what had become
flailing debris, the wind stopped dead, Jennifer said.
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- Deadframe learned that the basketball court was once
the location of the Death House, the site of executions until West Virginia
abolished the death penalty in 1959. The goal of this second visit, said
Bury, Deadframe's resident skeptic, was for the group to make its way back
to the North Yard - to step out onto the court and wait for the lost souls
to kick up the wind.
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- As the group traveled on a Saturday night through the
rooms of the prison, each member's style of paranormal observation was
pronounced. Jennifer and Pilon lugged equipment - including video and digital
cameras, the electromagnetic field meter and laser thermometer - breaking
it out in rooms of historical significance. J.C.'s sisters relied on the
guidance of rose quartz and kyanite crystals that are meant to promote
psychic energy and divination.
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- J.C., however, preferred to go it alone, sitting in silence
with a pen and notebook ready to receive messages that come to him "like
a memory that wasn't there a few seconds ago," he said.
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- However, in the midst of channeling spirits, snapping
digital photos and taking electromagnetic readings, it's easy to forget
that communicating with the prison's gruesome history is as simple as reading
the writing on the wall. In the Sugar Shack, the room where inmates enjoyed
indoor recreation, the walls are decorated with artwork done by talented
prisoners. One pillar features an inmate chalking up a pool cue with an
8-ball and chain around his ankle. The man's eyes are disproportionately
large, as if warning to watch your back in a room where inmates often were
raped or brutalized when caught unawares.
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- A bubble scribbled in black marker from the man's mouth
reads, "Chump, you are in jail" a reminder that any talent in
prison is wasted on pillars and concrete walls.
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- Most of the people who spent the night along with Deadframe
were earnest ghost hunters. However, Jennifer said there are always a few
who treat the opportunity like Halloween and spend the evening attempting
to frighten the others.
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- "I don't think those people realize that not only
are they being disrespectful to us, but they're disrespecting the fact
that people died here," Jennifer said. "And besides, just because
you don't believe in something doesn't mean it doesn't believe in you."
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- Skeptics seek other explanations
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- Count world renowned skeptic James Randi among the disbelievers.
"Just because you haven't found the explanation for something doesn't
mean there isn't one," he said in a later interview.
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- Randi travels around the world debunking paranormal claims.
The Randi Foundation offers a $1 million prize for proof of the paranormal
to any psychic or paranormal investigator who successfully can demonstrate
the phenomenon they wish to prove. Hundreds have tried. None has succeeded.
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- No matter how many pounds of equipment a ghost hunter
hauls, hard evidence of the paranormal's existence is lacking. Orbs in
a photo easily could be pollen, dust or insects. Changes in electromagnetic
frequency could be caused by old wiring in the building's infrastructure.
And feelings of extrasensory perception could be the imagination getting
the best of a ghost hunter, said Randi.
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- "They want to assign every kind of anomaly some
signifi cance," Randi said. "The only thing I've ever seen that
couldn't be explained with science is Sophia Loren. She looks so great.
That's not Oil of Olay; that's witchcraft."
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- Although Deadframe isn't interested in accepting the
foundation's challenge, Jennifer says that opening the minds of skeptics
is what she enjoys most.
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- "I want skeptics to see that you can't go into a
ghost hunt with scientific assumptions," she said. "Maybe they're
frightened to think that there might be another possibility, that they're
not as in control as they think they are."
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- At 2 a.m. - the height of paranormal activity - Deadframe
headed down to the North Yard, site of the former Death House, where the
group was convinced during its last visit that the souls of the executed
still lingered. The sky was quiet as the team made its way to the caged-in
court. J.C. reached the gate first and let out a sigh of frustration.
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- "It's locked," he said, jerking on the chain
strung through the gate. In the still air of the witching hour, the five
members of Deadframe, locked outside the ground they had waited so long
to experience, tried to get as close to the basketball court as possible.
Regretfully, they clung to the fence in the hopes of recreating the bizarre
event, fingers intertwined with the grate - like prisoners.
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- Nothing.
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- Disappointed, Deadframe called it a night and headed
back to the lobby where tour guide Mike Parnicza, a former prison employee,
showed them to the door. The parting conversation turned to the prisoners
- their living conditions, the small cells, limited time in the sunshine,
their brutal treatment of each other. Tales of the living.
-
- An eavesdropper asked about the prisoner in solitary-confinement
cell No. 9, who, judging by his graffiti, obviously had murdered his wife
or girlfriend and was paying the price - even from the grave.
-
- "Oh, geez," Parnicza said. "That kid couldn't
hurt a fly. He was thrown in here for robbing a liquor store with his brother.
He was in solitary for attempted escape. I'm sure he just scribbled that
stuff on the walls to protect himself - he only weighed about 100 pounds."
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- Illusions. The same deception that guarded a vulnerable
prisoner makes for a compelling ghost story when the lights are out.
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- Deadframe headed to the minivan. J.C. took the wheel,
while the other members promptly fell asleep. The prison, haunted by so
much squandered human potential, soon vanished from the rearview mirror.
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