The meeting for The Old Town Pier was set to start briefing at 7pm on September 11, 2006. As usual Ken was late not arriving until almost 8pm by the time the rest of us had nearly finished going over all the floor plans and the search sectors.
For those of you reading my blog regularly, you know I have issues with wannabe ghost hunters. I can’t stand the pretenders that are here only because it sounds cool or like an adventure. What we do is important not just to science but to the research as a whole. It’s only paranormal because people don’t have enough data to explain events, so having a slacker on the team like Ken is starting to make me irritable which draws from my focus when we’re on site. If this lack of serious participation continues much longer, I’m going to ask the group to consider expelling him.
Anyway, The Old Town Pier is one of the greatest finds for our research yet. The property’s original name was actually Silvia’s and it sits on the corner of Frontage and Aurora. The story claims it burned down in the late 1960’s due to a drunken brawl that ended with the deaths of four sailors and a prostitute but the truth is that it caught fire once in March of 1946 and again in March of 1956. Both times the fire was quickly extinguished with only minimal damages to the structure.
The three story building on the waterfront was quickly becoming outdated by the new electrical and plumbing codes and that section of town was turning “seedy”. In the early 60’s the building was sold for the third time in six years to a man named Malcom Campbell whereupon he remodeled everything from top to bottom even giving the old place a new name The Old Town Bar and Restaurant. While the surrounding area continued to decline, the business flourished. As far as our records have been able to dig up – All the proper renovation codes where strictly followed, and there were no serious incidents of violence reported to the authorities.
For all intents and purposes – The Old Town Bar and Restaurant was a well run, and friendly establishment with a good client base and little riff raff. Then on March 12, 1966 the building burned to the ground. It has been reported as fact that four men and one woman perished in the fire. The recovered bodies and missing person’s reports verify that the woman was Annabeth Gilden, a waitress who had been a fairly new addition to the staff. The four men were believed to be Jacob Bearson, Alex Ferguson, Michael Jons, and Burt Harris all these names and identifications were provided by the State Police after a long investigation surrounding ties to the Mob.
Whether the accusations made against the dead men are truth or fiction, I don’t really care. My job is to determine if there is paranormal activity in the ruined building now known as The Old Town Pier which is now a charred relic at the edge of the industrial zone. What once was part of the night life in the city contains railroad track, warehouses and storage facilities.
The regularity of the past fires imply that paranormal activity may have existed in the building prior to the first Fire in March of 1946, but that’s a theory that must be left open without any proof to validate the claim, since there have been no other reported deaths or accidents in the building prior to the tragedy of 1966.
Our preliminary investigation was spent walking around the ruins which surprisingly are still clinging to life in areas around the shore. The old pier on which half of the building was built is still standing and in good enough condition to walk on, so BeanStalk and Hopper have been assigned the last stretch of good boardwalk. Ken and BibleBelt drew the unlucky straw to be on the water. Down the embankment to the jagged rocks and over small boulders to the river to search for readings and camp out with equipment. I pulled FlyNate on my team so we’ll be doing the sweep through the timber piles and walking the perimeter of the foundation as there’s no structure to enter, only collapsed remains and decades old rotted wood on a half-concrete base. The only person missing from out team is CandySpiders, the team psychic because she couldn’t find a sitter for her kid.
Obviously, on the Preliminary we did a visual search by daylight, but as you all know – the tween times are the golden moments, and more so at midnight so tomorrow night– we hunt.
Septemeber 12, 2006
I can’t even talk. I don’t even know what to say. Maybe if I tell it all logical it will make sense.
The team arrived at 5:00 PM to set up the gear for the night. We ran the microphones, motion sensors and infrared camera wires out and set everything up. The usual. Nothing spectacular or different to our routines. We ran through checks on our walkies and double checked all battery levels and put fresh tapes in all the cameras. This last part wouldn’t have been worth mentioning except for the fact that what we caught on film wont logically be explained away by BibleBelt having taped over his daughter’s ballet recital corrupting the tape again.
So we get set up and sun sets at 7:03PM. Everyone knew we’d have to wait for a bit, that’s pretty normal. Pour a cup of coffee from the thermos and sit tight. The best time to get activity is between 10pm and 5 am, but the real golden spot is generally between 12am and 4.
8:57 the temperature in the van dropped significantly. I shuddered and without thinking drew my jacket tighter around my body and as I did so, I noticed Hopper was doing the same also, and Ken gave his hands a brisk rub.
“Quick. Gage the temp,” I said.
BibleBelt was way ahead of me, and took a reading that said the temperature was 8 degrees less than it had been at the last reading fifteen minutes prior.
No one spoke, they just went to work. Routine. Usual. Well, as usual as ghost hunting gets.
We split up.
FlyNate carried our team camera, and I had the EMF detector as we walked around the collapsed base of the old restaurant. We’d checked the batteries on our head lamps as well as the flashlight I carried but it seemed to be darker than the lights were helping. What I mean by that I guess is that it felt like even though I checked my watch at 9:17PM it felt like the night was swallowing up the light from our flashlights without giving us enough to walk by. FlyNate and I made two circles around the foundation at a snails pace because we couldn’t see. On the video there’s a lot of noise from us shuffling our feet.
10:44pm I picked up a random key on my walkie and waited for a team member to speak, but nothing so I pulled it off my belt.
“BeanStalk is your keychain hitting the walkie again?”
I heard the click as I released the button and a second later BeanStalk answered, “No. But you’re getting a lot of static on my end, it took me a minute to figure out what you were askin.”
“I don’t have any static. You’re coming through clear to me.”
“Can you repeat that.”
“You’re clear.”
We received no response. So FlyNate and I decided to make toward the beach side of the foundation. As we shuffled along I pulled out my cell phone and dialed BeanStalk.
“Where are you guys?” He asked as he answered his phone.
“We’re right by the edge of the rocks in the back. Where are you?”
“We’re on the east side of the pier. You guys getting this shit?”
“What shit? What are you getting?” All the nervous excitement and semi-gaseousness flared up in my stomach. I felt panicky and yet I wanted to run to where ever they were – see whatever they were seeing.
“We’ve got orb activity all over the camera. It’s also really fucking cold. The last read was at 39 degrees. You guys got anything?”
“Dark.”
“What.”
I didn’t reply as we’d reached the edge of the rocky embankment where I still could barely see a few feet in front of my face with my flashlight on high. I glanced over at FlyNate who was engrossed in the viewfinder of the camera.
“I think I’m getting something, but we’re going to have to sort the static back at the shop.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“What’s what?” BeanStalk asked into the phone.
“FlyNate might have something but I’ll call you back if it’s anything.”
That’s where the night went crazy. Right before I was about to hang up my cell, I heard a short shout of surprise and a splash clear as day in my right ear and a faint echo of the noise from my left as though it were further away.
“Justin!” I yelled into the phone. I can’t actually remember the last time I called BeanStalk by his real name.
FlyNate and I both shuffled, scrambled and climbed down to the water where we found Ken and BibleBelt helping to drag the partially crawling BeanStalk out of the water. Everyone had soaked feet and BeanStalk though shaken and freezing wasn’t hurt.
“What happened? Where’s Hopper?”
The next 30 minutes were a blur of activity as we rushed BeanStalk back to the van to try desperately to stop him from shivering. Hopper met us coming off the pier as we made it up the rocks but when everyone demanded to know what happened, Hopper shook his head and gave a blank stare, “I have no idea. He was there then he wasn’t”.
“Someone pushed me.” BeanStalk hissed through chattering teeth and we were all beginning to worry about how blue his lips were becoming.
“I didn’t do it!” Hopper yelled at all of us. .
Clearly something was going on and it was going to affect my team so I called it a night.
By Midnight we were back on the freeway after a double-time wrap. Even as we were winding cords and collecting the equipment the headlights from the van didn’t seem like enough light. Perhaps it was paranoia by the time we wrapped, but all the crew reported to me that they felt nervous, like something was behind them.
Hopper took the initiative to set up a tape recorder and ask questions like CandySpider would have had she been there.
“It there an entity here right now? Do you wish to speak?” He then continued with “yes” or “no” questions until the van was packed.
I’m sure we have a lot of material to keep us busy. I positive that something strange happened. BeanStalk may have fallen off the pier, but he swears he was pushed. However, he’s a very lucky man that he didn’t lose more than his cell phone and the camera when he went. The river’s edge is rocky and shallow and full of old pilings so it’s somewhat a miracle that he wasn’t hurt.
As for everyone else, they admit to being shaken, and there’s a lot of insistence and dedication to sitting down right away to go over the collected data and search for EVP or anything that might explain how someone as smart and cautious as Justin –BeanStalk could end up falling off the pier or whether he was pushed.
I can guarantee however, that no one of the team believes Hopper did it. BeanStalk doesn’t even think it was Hopper. So we all want to find the piece of evidence that explains it.
As for me, I’m trying to keep my mind open, obviously, but I’m tired. We never went to bed last night. We ended up taking BeanStalk to the ER because he was just so cold and we also worried he might have broken something and wasn’t feeling it from the shock – the doctors said he was fine and we got him back home and piled under electric blankets.
I need some rest and a hot shower and then I’ll catch up all up on the rest.
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