My Date with the Dead: Third Floor
- Oct 10, 2015
- 7 min read
The investigators with SJSS suggested that we begin our investigations on the third floor as the heat and humidity would make it the most uncomfortable temperature wise. This way as the night wore on and we began to get tired we would be making our way downstairs where it would be cooler and hopefully keep us from dozing off, although I am not quite sure I could fall asleep with a bunch of spirits watching me. I donned my facemask and opened my mind for what Pennhurst had to offer.
We ascended the stairs up to the third floor where we were told there were often accounts of “shadow people,” footsteps, opening and closing of doors, and a Nurse named Catherine who would sometimes “show” herself. We were armed with two types of pieces of equipment – EMFs and an Ovilus. The EMF detected electromagnetic frequencies that are said to be associated with the paranormal. When such frequencies are encountered the lights on the machine will light up on a spectrum from green to yellow to orange to red. The red light indicates an intense amount of action. The Ovilus worked by also picking up on EMF’s but then somehow translated the frequencies into words – exactly how it does this I am not sure. Both machines are sensitive to cellular phone frequencies so it was advised to either turn our phones off or put them in airplane mode. My friend did test this out by placing the EMF right by her phone causing the orange indicator light to go off. When she placed her phone in airplane mode however, the light went back to green (and here I thought the whole “turning your phone off on an airplane so it doesn’t mess with the electronics on board” was a bunch of bullshit – I will never test that theory out now!).
EMF – A handheld device used to measure electromagnetic frequencies
Green = “Ghost Free”
Red = “Caution, Ghost present!”
An Ovilus – transmits the EMF’s into words and prints them onto the screen as well as speaks them aloud
So there we were, standing in the dark in a room at the end of one of the 3rd floor hallways in silence with our ghost hunting gadgets waiting for first contact. We had two other individuals who decided they wanted to hang with our crew and the lack of “ghost” noises made me think perhaps our posse was too big for the ghosts to want to check us out. After several moments of standing there in the dark and hearing nothing we turned our flashlights and lamps on and wondered around in and out of the rooms that were in that particular hallway. While it wasn’t the coziest of places, I did not really feel scared or creeped out, had I been on the premises all by myself I may have felt otherwise. I took this opportunity to explore and snap some more pictures. I was not sure how they would turn out, some I took with the flashlights on, others I took in the pitch black and just relied on the flash from my cell phone camera to capture whatever it could.
3rd Floor Hallway Where Nurse Catherine sometimes visits. We had placed some EMF indicators at various locations on the floor to check for the presence of spirits, note the little black box on the floor in the center of the hallway
We were told that the bathroom on the third floor was often “visited” by one of the residents who was not so kind. We made our way to the bathroom and spent sometime in there waiting to see if anyone from the other side wanted to talk or make their presence known in other ways. We tried striking up a conversation by asking questions such as “is there anyone here that wants to talk?” or “if there is anyone here can you make the green light go red?” The ghosts didn’t seem interested as our questioned went unanswered. I did snap a picture of myself in the mirror and analyzed it to see if anything presented itself. Despite my inability to get a ghost to photobomb me I think the pic still turned out kind of cool in an eerie way.
3rd floor bathroom – rumored to have a “visitor”
After checking out the bathroom I meandered back towards one end of the hallway while the rest of the group went to the other end, placing us on opposite sides. I sat down in a chair and the one investigator asked me to turn on my lamp and place it on the floor. I obliged, and there I sat as she explained that sometimes if you had some light you could catch a shadow move across the walls. So I waited, by myself sitting in the tiny room at the end of the hall as my team watched behind me to see if any shadows felt like paying me a visit. I sat there for a while, occasionally calling out to Nurse Catherine waiting to see if my peeps at the other end of the hall could catch a glimpse of her shadow, but much to my dismay nothing happened. After a few more minutes in the dead silent (pun intended), I picked up my lantern and headed back to join the rest of my team.
We investigated another hall and the rooms that were connected to it. I poked my head into a room at the end of one of the other hallways and squealed with excitement, not because I found a ghost, but because I found a Raggedy Ann doll!
The Raggedy Ann Room
As a child I preferred stuffed animals to dolls, the exception being my Raggedy Ann. I ran right into the room, sat down and picked up the doll. It wasn’t in bad shape at all. It practically looked brand new which led me to believe perhaps maybe someone brought it and left it as a gift for the ghosts. I asked one of my friends to take a picture of me with Miss Ann, I think she thought I was crazy, but she did me a solid and snapped a quick picture of the doll and I before quickly exiting the room and rejoining the group. I sat there for a while, just holding Raggedy Ann. I could hear my team shuffling around the halls for a bit but then things went silent.
How I found Raggedy Ann when I walked into the room (top)
Me and Miss Ann posing for a picture (bottom)
I was starting to wonder what had happened to my group so I respectfully placed Raggedy Ann back in her chair and quietly left the room. When I stepped out into the hallway I saw a lamp on at the other end and could hear some whispers from my team who I could just barely make out their figures sitting on the floor. I walked towards them and took a seat myself. Several minutes later I heard some creaking and what sounded like footsteps coming from the Raggedy Ann Room. Apparently I must have been a little too quiet coming back to join my group because I heard someone say it was probably just me leaving the room and heading back to meet them. When I spoke up and told them I was right there on the floor with them everyone got so silent you could hear a pin drop. Then we heard it again. There were two stairwells in the hall we were sitting in and prior to me leaving the Raggedy Ann room the rest of my group was scattered in the hall in such a way that if someone would have come up those stairs from another group they would have tripped over one of my teammates. It soon became clear that we might have been experiencing our first encounter. I am not sure whether I upset someone by playing with the doll, or made him or her curious so they wanted to come and see where I had gone. One thing was for certain…I wasn’t the one making the noises and I definitely wasn’t the only one hearing them.
After the noises subsided we were back at it again exploring more rooms. We went into a room that was directly across the hall from the Raggedy Ann Room. I call this the “Rocking Chair Room” because in it was this old, decrepit rocking chair. I will admit I did not quite feel comfortable sitting in this chair. I took a few photos in the Rocking Chair Room from several angles and in the second it almost looks as though there is a figure peering around the corner of the wall.
Rocking Chair Room
Rocking Chair Room – is that a face peering around the wall in the upper left hand corner???
There was also a table that had a striped tee shirt lying on top of it with a tag that read “K. FleischackER” or “K. Fleischack” and the “ER” written below the name. I couldn’t quite tell if it was all one name and they ran out of room to fit it on the same line, or if the “ER” was separate for another reason. I tired googleing both when I got home but nothing about either came up with any information. I did, however, purchase two books on amazon “Ghosts of the Mayflower” and “Ghosts of the Mayflower II.” I finished reading the first and damn near dropped the book out of my hands when the author mentioned that several people had reported seeing a little boy in a striped shirt walk by them. Could this shirt belong to the little boy ghost?
We spent a little more time meandering around the 3rd floor before deciding we could use some fresh air. We headed out and took a breather just outside the Mayflower building. Next up… the basement!
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