Lou’s View: THE LHPS FILES

By Lou Bernard

I’ve often said that my team, the Lock Haven Paranormal Seekers, are the most reliable and longest-lasting of the local ghost-hunting teams. The group formed in October of 2007, meaning we’re now on our thirteenth year. In that time, we’ve had some interesting investigations.

Note that I said “investigations.” We’re investigators, not exterminators. We do the research and try to figure out what’s going on in a scientific way, but we can’t promise to get rid of ghosts. That’s for the movies. We look for explanations, is what we do, which is a bit less dramatic than the TV shows portray.

One of our best ones was at the Columbus Hotel. You wouldn’t know it by that name. You’d know it as the old VFW, unless you’ve recently moved into town, in which case you’d know it as the empty lot on the corner of Church and Grove. It burned down in 2014, but about a year before that, we got to investigate it.

The place, originally under the name Girard Hotel, was built in 1863. There was a fire there in 1924, caused by a guy who inexplicably tried using gasoline to clean his suit, which most tailors do not recommend. The VFW bought the place in 1945, and there was another bad fire there in 1973. Tempers flared among some of the fire crews and city personnel, and a few racial epithets were flung around, later to be brought up and reprimanded at a city council meeting.

All of this I found out in the library archives, digging into the historical research. And then in 2013, LHPS was called in to investigate the place.

So. We did what we usually do, set up all our equipment and check things out. Cameras, digital recorders, laser thermometers, and EMF detectors are the big ones. Some of our investigations are more exciting than others. This one was pretty exciting because I got chased by a bat.

I was going down to the basement to pick up one of the recorders, and as I entered the stairwell, I heard a sound and turned around. And I spotted a bat flying at me. The whole thing seemed to happen in an alarming sort of slow-motion; I ducked down and it flew over my right shoulder. And then when it got behind me, I bolted back for the door.

It seemed to take a lot longer than it really did. It felt like about fifteen minutes, but it actually took four seconds. I know this because my teammates had their recorders running, and gleefully played the whole thing back for me later at our meeting. You can hear me close the door, four seconds of silence, and then me coming back through the door, saying,”There’s a bat in there.”

The worst part was that I still had to go down that same stairwell and get the recorder. I couldn’t make someone else do it, because earlier I’d been teasing one of my teammates about bringing a monogrammed purse along, saying,”You make it harder for me to look bad-ass when you do stuff like that.”

Afterward, when we reviewed the evidence, we even got some stuff on the recorders. (Aside from my meet-up with the bat.) In one of the front rooms, we got an odd whistling sound we couldn’t explain, and in an empty hallway, we recorded the sound of metal hitting more metal, as if someone was tossing silverware into a sink.

And that’s often the kind of thing we’re looking for. Some sort of sound we can’t explain, a voice on the recorder. A good place with some history, and evidence to show for it—That’s what makes a good investigation. Aside from the bat.