Believe it or not !

[Loki]

From the Colorado Springs Gazette


Ghost hunter Christopher Moon sat in front of his laptop at 1:30 a.m. Saturday, the back of his black cargo vest split by a blond ponytail.
An editor for Ghost Hunter magazine, he is at a desk in the Peak View room at the Hearthstone Inn in downtown Colorado Springs. His crew -- a reporter, a photographer, another editor and a woman who claims to be "sensitive" to the paranormal -- were getting tired. They had been investigating the inn for 101/2 hours and were going to bed.

Turning, his eyes big, frantic globes, Moon poked one finger in the air and asked, "Hear it?"

A loud, high-pitched clicking echoed as Moon played back a digital recording he just made.

Minutes earlier, Moon and a group of onlookers had been in a pitch-black room in the basement, squeezed in with decidedly creepy props for a Halloween show the inn puts on every year.

Moon switched on the recorder and started talking to the "spirit" in the room.

"What is your name?"

Pause.

"Is there anything that you want to tell us?"

Pause.

In the room, the only sounds were Moon's voice and the occasional clicking of cameras followed by silence.

The noise Moon referred to on the recording was new.

The high-pitched clicks were easily discernible from the softer, mechanical sounds of the cameras. The sound happened only after Moon asked a question, never while he was talking.

Moon said it's a voice he will be able to make out once he uses a computer program to put the recording in slow motion and soften the tone.

For ghost hunters, guests and innkeepers, the night was cruising past strange and heading for bizarre.

The Hearthstone Inn, on Cascade Avenue, has had many reports of strange happenings during the five years since Nancy and David Oxenhandler bought it.

The inn is made up of two houses that were connected by recent construction. The Bemis house was built in 1885 and was the childhood home of Alice Bemis Taylor, a wealthy benefactor of Colorado Springs.

The house was converted later to apartments and finally an inn in the 1970s.

Oxenhandler said he has been told by people who claim to be former Bemis house tenants that a killing and a questionable suicide took place there.

The attached house, the Sumner house, was briefly used as a tuberculosis sanitorium. It houses several rooms and the inn's dining area, Alice's Restaurant.

Oxenhandler said he will not confirm or deny the presence of ghosts in the building.

He said the inn is old. Its lights flicker. Its doors and floors creak. It's drafty. The old radiator makes clanging noises in the middle of the night.

Still, Oxenhandler said he has started to take notice of claims that ghosts haunt the inn. He has received many reports from people who did not know each other about strange events in the inn.

Oddly, the reports are often the same. Radios and lights turn off and on, and radios switch stations. About five people reported that the mirror in the Peak View room has floated off the wall and onto the floor.

Several guests reported seeing the ghost of Taylor walking up the front staircase. In the East room, guests say there seems to be a cold, heavy presence.

Frequently, guests have been so frightened they asked to change rooms.

Employees have reported strange happenings. A waiter had a glass break in his hand. Employees are often locked in or out of rooms. One employee's pen disappears frequently and shows up hooked in a lace curtain in the dining room.

"To me the best scientific evidence is a pattern of evidence," Oxenhandler said.

"The 10th time you start to say, 'That's just too much of a coincidence.'"

When Ghost Hunter magazine called and asked if it could investigate the inn, Oxenhandler was interested. The ghost hunters were given free room and board but were not otherwise paid.

In the Peak View room, the recording ended.

Moon was eager to try another voice recording. He led the group to the East room on the third floor, where earlier in the night two luminous white dots were captured by two cameras and a video camera.

The room is pink and girlishly decorated.

Pictures of kittens and other animals hang on the walls, remnants of a former innkeeper's decorating scheme.

Oxenhandler said that innkeeper believed house pets would ward off evil spirits.

Moon has packed a special piece of equipment for this venture -- a hand-held electromagnetic field detector he says will detect disturbances. He used the instrument earlier, with some results, but in the East room the meter is making a racket -- letting out elongated beeps.

Its needle wagged frantically up and down.

Moon took out the recorder, dimmed the lights and began asking questions. The room fell silent. At the end of his questions, he asked repeatedly for the lights to be dimmed. The lights flickered after three requests.

The group left but returned five minutes later. When the lights went on, a small cloud of smoky fog lingered beneath them.

Moon shot some video but was ready to leave. Looking anxious as he walked quickly away, he said, "I wouldn't stay in that room by myself."

When the voice recording is played, the results are the same as before. The highpitched clicking that had not been audible in the room seemed to respond to Moon's questions.

Moon agreed to test the recorder.

In the Peak View room, he switched the recorder on and recorded a normal conversation. At the end of the conversation, he asked if there are any invisible spirits in the room.

The recording was normal at first. The clicking noise was gone. Then Moon asked the question. A few seconds of silence passed, then the noise returned -- first one, than two, high pitched clicks.

Moon does one more voice recording. This time, he handed the recorder to an observer to hold.

In the dark storage closet on the back staircase, he asked his questions. The room is silent after each question, but on the playback, the clicks return -- a series after each question.

Nancy and David Oxenhandler listened to the recordings, their eyes wide open. There is an occasional nervous giggle in the room. The Oxenhandlers' two young sons are laid out on the bed. They look pale and clammy.

"Electronic equipment can pick up things far beyond (what) we can," Moon said.

The innkeepers and their sons followed Moon to the Solitude room. At this point, Moon just wanted to take photographs and shoot video. He set up a white noise machine, which he said attracts spirits.

A few minutes later, Moon spotted a white glow above the radiator.

Although less than half the group can see it, the moving, glowing spot is visible on the screen of Moon's digital video camera. It's also visible on another observer's digital camera screen. During a period of a few minutes, more white spots appeared.

One observer shot a photo as the group left the room. At least five glowing spots were visible against the dark blue wallpaper.

Moon called the bright spheres "orbs" and said they are the most basic form of a visible apparition.

Although the "orbs" are visible via the cameras to Moon, the innkeepers, their two sons and four other observers, not everything that Moon sees is.

Moon, who has been hunting ghosts for seven years, saw translucent faces and bodies where other observers saw only a glowing spot on a camera screen, or nothing at all.

He said several times that a spirit touched him or tugged on his hair or earrings.

"When I can feel things happening, it's almost like a feeling like my legs going weak," he said.

Other sensations Moon said he feels include: an inability to focus his eyes, a heaviness in the chest and light-headedness.

During the investigation, Moon and others recorded many pictures and video segments with white, red or yellow globes of light. There was no obvious technical reason for them to appear, although unusual light spots in pictures can be caused by scratches in the lens of the camera, dust or humidity in the air, or stray light.

Observers said they noticed cold spots in the building, many participants got headaches and every person carrying a camera had batteries die at least once -- a problem Moon blamed on the ghosts.

"They need to take energy, so they'll take energy out of you (and) out of batteries," he said.

By 5 a.m. the investigation was over, and most participants felt they had just had a paranormal experience.

David Oxenhandler wasn't so sure.

"In the end, it's what you see -- it's what you believe," he said.

[Sonnillon]

I belive I can fly!... but I wont test my theory...