Do you believe in ghosts?
There are people who claim to have heard noises or seen apparitions they simply can’t explain, and there are skeptics who will deny the existence of spirits no matter how convincing a story sounds.
Then there are the select few who make it their mission — passion even — to capture concrete evidence of paranormal activity on videos, photographs, or audio recordings.
Such was the case for local ghost hunting group Haunted Toledo on a recent October night at the Toledo Repertoire Theater.
“What’s our mission tonight?” asked Christopher Tillman, founder of Haunted Toledo, while standing on the step to his team’s RV camper.
“To find a ghost!” answered team member Sarah Chelten, standing in the theater’s parking lot.
As the sun was setting and the sky grew darker, the group formed a circle and said a prayer, asking God for protection before the start of the investigation. Ironically, the gusts of wind became stronger, and it started to rain as the prayer came to an end.
A group member’s watch read 8:45 p.m., and the night sky meant it was time to start the ghost hunt inside the dark theater.
It took about an hour to install the group’s equipment throughout the building, which included video cameras in the attic, main theater, and basement as well as microphones and glow sticks placed on the stage, and motion detectors — all provided and paid for out of pocket. A television monitor sat inside the RV, where Ms. Chelten sat and watched each corner of the screen with different views inside the theater. Other members were divided into groups at different sections of the building.
Legend has it that a man named George, who formerly worked at the theater, haunts the main room with the stage and seats and is known to play jokes on employees. There is also supposedly a woman who is trapped in the attic, and others have claimed to have seen a little boy staring out the second-floor office window to the parking lot.
“Hey, it looks like there’s movement down by the stage you might want to go check out,” Ms. Chelten said through a walkie-talkie to a group in the second-floor office room.
The Haunted Toledo group would continue its investigation until 4 a.m. During the several hours of The Blade’s participation in the ghost hunt, sounds of footsteps were heard on the stage, and a flashlight seemed to turn on and off by itself after a group leader asked George to turn the device on and off. While in the attic, after group members introduced themselves by stating their first names, a man’s voice sounded from a radio box that picks up frequencies that can’t be heard by the naked ear. The voice said a group member’s name three times.
Mr. Tillman, 45, who has researched and explored haunted buildings since 1993, started Haunted Toledo in August. Although he’s very much interested in capturing evidence of a spirit, he said he’s also documenting the building’s history through research and video footage inside the structure.
“It's just as much about the history for me as it is about the actual ghost story,” he said.
The group has explored 10 buildings since its inception in August, and Mr. Tillman said he’s had his share of unexplained encounters.
He said they did an overnight investigation at R House on Secor Road where something tugged his shirt while nothing was around him. The story has it that someone died in the building in the 1960s. He also swore something walked behind his group in the upstairs of Georgjz419 on Adams Street and claimed something grabbed Ms. Chelten’s neck at the Toledo Yacht Club. He said another member sustained a first-degree burn from something while in the basement of the Collingwood Arts Center.
Jeanine Diller, assistant professor of philosophy and religion at the University of Toledo, said various religions believe there are both evil and good spirits that exist.
“Many of the world's religions believe spirits are real and that though some are good, like angels, others aren't,” she said. “So they would tell would-be explorers of this realm to proceed with great caution, if at all. Just let the realm come to you, if ever it does, they might say.”
She said belief in spirits or paranormal activity isn’t limited to those who deny God’s existence.
“Believing in spirits doesn't track religious belief,” she said. “There are religious people who don't believe there is an afterlife and so wouldn't believe there are dead spirits around, much less around to talk to, such as some reformed Jews or liberal Christians. There are also non-religious people who believe in spirits.”
She said evidence of the existence of the paranormal relies heavily on testimony.
“The main evidence for such beliefs is testimony from people who think they have had experiences of such things [as] angels, ghosts, etc.,” she said. “I would take the scriptures in the world’s religions to be in some passages an important and kind of complex form of testimony.”
Harold St. John, founder of Toledo Ohio Ghost Hunters Society, whose group conducts ghost hunts throughout the surrounding area, said the more he studies and learns about the paranormal, the more he realizes just how much about the phenomenon he doesn’t know.
“That’s the honest-to-God truth,” he said. “Why would you be shocked if someone you’re talking to answers you? Every great once in a while they hear you, they even answer you, and even further than that, sometimes you can’t see them and they call you out by name. They know your name, and they see you. It gets your nerves up there a little bit.”
Ms. Chelten, 38, said she formerly conducted exorcisms through a church in Toledo and eventually discovered the Haunted Toledo group. She said she was trained to believe that there is no such thing as spirits wandering the world, and that it’s all demonic. Now, through Haunted Toledo, she’s able to get out of that mindset.
“Believing that it’s not just the demonic thing, that there can be spirits, it can be a loved one visiting you or just a spirit traveling or a residual spirits ... when you get out of the mindset that everything is demonic, it gets more interesting and it gets more bearable,” she said. “I like the way I’m thinking now with this different group.”
She said every now and then the group will receive an “intelligent answer” from a spirit through the radio box, a hand-held device that resembles a small speaker and supposedly picks up frequencies beyond the range of human hearing. She’s found these finds to be the most bizarre encounters among the ghost hunts.
“You start questioning a little bit how much you really think you know, your entire religious base, or your afterlife theories,” she said. “It’s scary to find out that there is a possibility that you may be stuck in an area and sometimes these voices come through like, ‘Help me, I’m stuck, I don’t know where I am.’ It kind of breaks your heart, and at the same time you try not to get too attached because technically you really don’t know what you’re speaking to, and if you’re speaking to something that is pretending to get sympathy, and if you start trying to sympathize and attach with it, you give it an OK to be in your life.
“It's hard to make it detach and get it off of you and [you have to expend a lot of energy] to get it away from you, and sometimes even spirits can follow you home.”
After hours of prior research at the library or through online articles, Mr. Tillman said he never comes across a case that is considered solved by Haunted Toledo.
“We just have to dig for it, and there’s always more out there,” he said. “I never really close the book on anything we do.”
Contact Geoff Burns at gburns@theblade.com or 419-724-6054.
First Published October 22, 2017, 4:00 a.m.
