The Register-Herald, Beckley, West Virginia

Today's Front Page

June 28, 2010

Paranormal group interested in findings at uptown building

By Andrea Lannom Register-Herald Reporter

Strange footsteps, voices and even mysterious music sound through the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Building when no one can be found making them. Could the historical Beckley building be haunted?

The president of West Virginia Paranormal Inc., Thomas Moseley, says he wouldn’t call it a “haunting,” but he thinks paranormal activity is going on.

A team of six people set up night vision cameras, digital voice recorders, hand cameras and electro-magnetic field detectors and got to work June 13-14.

“We started setting up at 7 p.m., and with all the problems we had, we didn’t get completely set up till midnight,” Moseley said. “We then left at 5 that morning and we did come across some interesting things.”

Problems included everything from cameras not being set up right to battery-powered hand-held cameras going off completely. Moseley said it could have been paranormal, but some of it was not.

“When the battery-powered cameras went out, we did see a couple of orbs appear,” he said. “When something is trying to manifest, it can draw energy out of things like that to make it go off.”

The building was built in 1931 to honor World War I veterans and housed the theater and arts center. Theatre West Virginia has plans to take over the building in August to set up a year-round performing arts facility.

The team came across the building in an attempt to find local “haunted” places. Upon its research, it came up with the Wildwood House, which it plans to investigate in August, and the Soldiers & Sailors Memorial Building.

West Virginia Paranormal hasn’t been the only one to investigate the alleged ghostly activity. About four years ago, Soldiers Memorial Theatre director Kathy Zirckle says, a seven-member team from World Paranormal Investigations of Ohio went in the building and took a picture of what it believed was an apparition in the basement.

Although Moseley says the team wasn’t lucky enough to find it, it did find a few things that were strange in that area.

“We did get a couple of electronic voice phenomena on our recorders,” he said. “We had another EVP of a Civil War cadence in the auditorium where they sang something like ‘two soldiers going to die.’ It was strange.”

Moseley says something is indeed there, but they have not finished going through the evidence yet. What they have found is that a lot of claims have been debunked.

“A lot of people talked about a ghostly moan, but there are pigeons living up there and their coo could have been confused with it,” he said. “People also talked about seeing orbs, balls of light believed to be from the beyond, and we did see a few, but to be honest, the place was dusty and there’s a fine line between an orb and a dust particle. Orbs emit their own light. They don’t reflect it.”

For that reason, Moseley says, judging by evidence so far, the building looks to be a “residual haunting.” In this type of haunting, Moseley says, leftover energy from another point in time goes on whether someone is there or not.

“I believe there is paranormal activity at Soldiers Memorial, but there isn’t enough evidence right now to say that it’s haunted,” he said. “I think it’s residual because the EVPs were not responding to our questions, which leads me to believe that it could happen at the same time every night whether someone is there or not. The apparition found earlier, though, would imply an intelligent haunting, so we’re not sure.”

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