Second Store Investigation -- Kurt's Impressions

I don't really have a lot to add about the way the investigation was run. Matt's post below this one does a very good job of explaining the way we handled our second investigation at the location. I think we handled this investigation *much* better than the first. We were aware of our weaknesses, and we had a much better schedule of who was going to be investigating what.
As Matt mentioned in his post, I was quite frustrated by the level of noise in the building. On all of my recordings, you can hear people talking, giggling, and laughing in the background. I have absolutely NO problem with people wanting observers to be there, but I do think that we need to establish guidelines when it comes to extra people being at the location. On the other hand, the owners and their friends couldn't have been nicer and couldn't have went more out of their way to accommodate us.
Unlike Matt, I *do* feel that there is some sort of presence in the building. There is just something about that upstairs hallway that makes me feel uneasy. I'm not easily claustrophobic, but I admit that it could very well be a combination of the cramped hallway and the lack of windows there that gives me the creeps. Plus, the two figures that I glimpsed out of the corner of my eyes on the first investigation leads me to believe there is something there.
As far as any sort of conclusive evidence, I have none. The only semi-suspicious thing I caught on my digital recorder was something that I thought sounded like a laugh while we were all outside of the building, but Matt thinks that it might be pipes squeaking or natural building sounds. I think that it may have been one of us outside laughing at something. And all I got on my digital camera photos were a few orbs (mostly in the rave room area).
All in all, I thought we did a pretty good job this time with the investigation. But as far as to whether or not the building is haunted, I think it's still inconclusive.

Kurt

store investigation -- our second visit -- Matt's impressions

This, again, is not yet the official group report. This is just my observations from when we went back on April 9 to continue the store investigation that we began on March 12.

This second visit was better than our first. We brought a smaller group – only 7 people this time – and we had better strategy and coordination.

The store has a basement and two floors. The basement was one zone and the top floor was our second zone. We left the middle floor empty, so the investigators trying to record in the basement wouldn’t have feet stomping around above them. We rotated zones every hour, and we all rotated at the same time by communicating with walkie-talkies. Last time, we had a problem with people not taking good notes, because they didn’t want to stop every five minutes to get out their notebook. This time, we had everybody take notes into voice recorders that they carried with them and just let run all night. Some of us had more than one voice recorder, to use as a stationary. We kept the talking down, and when we did have something important to say we spoke at normal volume. However, the store owners did have some observers in without our prior knowledge, and while they stayed in the office the whole night, they did make a lot of noise depending on where in the building you were. (Speaking for my zone, we stayed on the opposite side where there was quiet; and when we did investigate where we could hear talking, I made note of it into my recorder, so as not to later mistake it for an EVP.) I’m not ungrateful – the owners were very friendly people and did us a favor by inviting us to investigate their store not once but twice. I just want the reader to know that there wasn’t total silence in the building all night.

We all arrived at the store at 6:30PM, and spent about an hour in the office talking about our last investigation, and about our strategy for this visit. The investigation then ran from about 7:30PM to 10:45PM.

Again, Mara, Phil, and I were in a zone together. The other zone was Katie, Keith, Mark, and Kurt. My zone started off in the basement. We investigated one half of the basement only – the 185 N. Main half – and left the other half for Katie, Keith, Mark, and Kurt when we rotated.

I used a Panasonic RRUS360 digital voice recorder with an omni-directional external microphone. I did not use the voice activation mode; I just let the recorder run the whole night, because from experimenting I’ve found that the voice activation mode on this recorder is not very sensitive, and I don’t want to miss an EVP. For taking pictures, I used a Fuji Finepix digital camera.

I did not get any pictures or EVPs while in the basement. I did not feel any cold spots or experience anything at all.

At 8:30PM, I radioed Katie to rotate zones. We all met back in the office where we started. Next, Katie, Keith, Mark, and Kurt went down in the basement, while Phil, Mara, and I took the upstairs.

The upstairs hallway, and one of the adjoining rooms which was unfortunately closed to us this visit, is the only area in the building that made some of us feel uneasy. At the end of this hallway is the stairwell where Amelia, the little girl, supposedly died. But my personal explanation for that feeling of uneasiness is that the hallway is very dark and claustrophobic, not because there’s a ghost girl floating around.

We quietly snapped some pictures of the stairwell, then we took some in Amelia’s room (the room with the doll). Again, I got nothing. So then I left my voice recorder in Amelia’s room, and we went into the rave room to take more pictures.

Kurt came up from the basement while we were taking pictures in the rave room, because he said there was noise and so he couldn’t do anything in the basement. So a few minutes later, Katie radioed me, and everybody in the whole building (the owners, too) just stepped outside from about 9:15 to 9:45, so there would be complete silence. We left our cameras and audio recorders running inside the building. I left mine in Amelia’s room.

It would have really been something if I had caught an EVP during that half hour when everybody was outside, but I didn’t get anything. However, listening through all my recordings from the visit was good for me anyway. It taught me to distinguish between different sounds, like cars driving by outside on the street, squeaky pipes, and other human voices in the building. I won’t believe it’s an EVP unless I can hear it clearly, and it sounds like it's in the room with me, not somebody outside on the street or in the hallway.

When it was time to go back inside at 9:45, we decided to go home, after first sitting down with the store owners for an hour and sharing some of our impressions.

Everybody in our group is encouraged to post their impressions of our first ghost hunt, so hopefully some of you will! Personally, I didn’t believe the store was haunted (that is not a group consensus; some in our group believe there was *something* going on), but I was only there two nights while the owners have been there for years. Perhaps the spirits didn’t like all these strange people in the building.

Thank you to the store owners for inviting us! It was very good for us, and I certainly learned a lot. We would like to come back again sometime soon, with only three or four people, set up our equipment, and then just have everybody go do something else for an hour or two. And that would be our investigation.