Last night was very...AAAHH! AAAHH! AAAAAHHHHH!
Allow me to explain.
Jon-oh met me at my apartment so we could carpool to Atchison. This resulted in us trying for about half an hour to find an alternate route out of KC because the exit to I-29 was closed. Finally, after about an hour and forty-five minutes, we arrived in the most haunted town in America.
We made our way the Sallie House, a two story home that use to house the practice of a local doctor. Sallie, a six year old girl, was brought to the doctor's house due to a horrible pain in her stomach. The doctor quickly diagnosed the pain as appendicitis, and he put her under to operate. Sallie died under the impression that a man was torturing. While going over the story and the investigation process, Jon-oh gave me a look. "What?" I asked. He grinned a little and told me, "You are legitimately scared." I shrugged, "Yeah...because I want to be. I want to have the shit scared out of me. It's more fun that way."
About twenty-five people came for the investigation, so we were split into three groups. Jon-oh and I were in the group that started on the second floor. Nothing really happened in the first bedroom, but in the second bedroom--the Toy Room, so named because someone had placed toys in rows to see if the spirits would move them--things started go get eerie. We brought out the dowsing rods and were asking questions that eventually led us to believe we were speaking to the doctor, who believed he did not do anything wrong. The rods would move by themselves, crossing and uncrossing, pointing in specific directions. My analytical side made me think that it was a bit like a Ouija board, where people push the cursor without realizing it.
While in the third bedroom, Jon-oh put aside his cynicism and began using his military training in questioning to talk to the ghosts in a polite fashion, explaining that we were there so that the ghosts would neither be forgotten nor have their story skewed. That's when we saw the light. A light shone on the opposite side of the closed door--we could see it through the crack. Then there was a thud. We ran back to the Toy Room to see what was going on, but nothing manifested, and none of the toys had been moved.
While the three groups reconvened in the living room, Jon-oh and I wondered back upstairs to look around. He admitted that, unbeknownst to anyone, Jon-oh vocally invited the ghost to come downstairs with us. We weren't sure what to expect next. We made our way to the basement with the rest of the group. A woman had been pushed down the stairs to her death, and her evil spirit haunts the house.
There was a large hole in the wall leading to what could have been a separate room, and psychics had said that the hole was a portal to hell or another dimension or some junk. Of course, Jon-oh and I climbed right in, tral-la-la. We didn't find anything of note, so we climbed back out. One of the other members of the group had a Geiger counter, and we had set up a motion sensor on the stairs, facing away from us. The guy with the Geiger counter would ask questions, and the red light on the Geiger counter would flicker on when answering yes. Then, the blue light on the motion sensor started going on and off, as if someone was walking up and down the stairs. I walked up and waved my hand back and forth on the back side of the motion sensor, but that didn't set it off; it had to have been set off from the front, which was facing the stairs.
It was about that time that Jon-oh decided to antagonize the ghost, with the intention that it would make itself known to prove Jon-oh wrong. He began saying things like, "People say you're evil, but I don't think you're as evil as they say you are. They're writing a check you just can't cash." And that's when the pain in my chest started. It wasn't like a panic attack; it was more like someone grabbed my heart and slowly crumpled it like a piece of paper. I announced my pain, and people began taking pictures of me to see if anything showed up in the photos that they couldn't see face-to-face. In fear, I went to stand by Jon-oh across the room, and I felt the pain slowly stop.
The motion sensor lit up again. Members of the group gathered around it, taking readings and asking the spirit questions. Jon-on went along with them and continued trying to piss off the ghost. Then, the pain started again. It started to click that the pain was happening either while Jon-oh and I were separated or while he was antagonizing the ghost. I stood by Jon-oh again and told him what was happening. "It's like it responds positively to your banter," one of the women pointed out.
Finally, after all that agony, we went upstairs and the three groups converged in the living room again. At some point, Jon-oh wondered away from me, and I didn't realize it. My chest was in pain again, and this time it was the worst. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to breathe. He came back in the living room, as I explained my predicament to him. He asked if we should leave, and I told him, "Out of morbid curiosity, I want to see if it happens again." However, Jon-oh promised he wouldn't bother the ghost again, out of fear that it was trying to get back at him by hurting me.
The living room had an infrared camera set up so that we could see any orbs and things in the room. I was skeptical, as dust clouds can easily be misconstrued as orbs. We put pennies and marbles on the floor to see if Sallie would play with them, but nothing happened. My previously mentioned morbid curiosity caused me to move across the room to see if physical distance from Jon-oh would cause anything. I sat in the corner, by the doorway to the vestibule, with a clear view of the stairs to the bedrooms. People kept asking Sallie to play with them, but to no avail.
Suddenly, there was a thud. I turned to look where the noise was coming from--just in time to see the football from the Toy Room bounce slowly down the stairs and roll across the floor of the vestibule right toward me. It might as well have been a severed head that had rolled up next to me, because I was scared into a near-catatonic state. Two women ran up the stairs and started accusing people of throwing the football down the steps to scare us. They said they hadn't done anything with the football, that they didn't even know it was in the Toy Room. Jon-oh came to sit by me and asked if I was okay. "You know I wouldn't let anything bad happen to you," he insisted, like the big brother he is to me. This moment led to the denouement of the evening, with us gradually getting back to our normal, bantering selves.
We left Atchison not long after midnight, and on the way back to my apartment we re-capped the events. Maybe it was herd mentality; maybe it was because we had let ourselves be scared. We could have just craved the event so much that we just decided it had happened. All we could decide was that the environment we had been in felt unnerving, even threatening. Whether or not ghosts are real, or if they are in the Sallie house, remains a mystery.
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