Veal Station Cemetery

It was about 8PM on January 18, 2003 when all of us, Michelle, Donna, , Allison and I arrived at Veal Station Cemetery just outside of Springtown, Texas. The moon was full, and it was such a clear night there was almost no need for flashlights. As soon as we entered the gate, Allison felt drawn to a grave back and to the right a ways back, so we all followed her. The grave was just past the first large tree, where Donna told us she’d had a lot of activity on her last trip there. I believe Donna contacted a little boy here, but don’t quote me on that. I was trailing Allison and the group, and the only picture I got with a very bright orb was taken right before I got to Allison, who had her hand on the tombstone, and told us that the woman buried there died of pneumonia or tuberculosis.

We read the tombstone after this, and it was the grave of a woman who died young in the early 1900’s whose family name was Gilley. Allison had not read the tombstone before hand, and it was common in the early 1900’s to die young of tuberculosis. During all this, Michelle and Donna are near the tree I mentioned earlier, and someone got quite a few orb shots here. I think they were checking us out at this point, getting a feel for who we were.

Then Donna tells us about the little boy who was here, who was playing in the tree limbs and ran away the last time. Michelle decides to leave her voice recorder here, and we wander down to the area where Donna, and the owners had seen the lady in white on the last trip. From the entrance, this was back and to the left, near the fence. Michelle and I are a little slow getting there because Michelle’s thermal scanner is beeping like crazy, giving readings that make no sense. So we start snapping pictures whenever we hear a beep and got a lot of activity in them.

Michelle and I catch up to the group, and Donna, and Allison are standing as if they were wearing cement boots, staring towards the road. They tell us they’ve been watching the lady in white. Allison told us then that she had felt something attached to the back of her neck, and I take a picture, but nothing shows up. We watch where the lady was, and I see something move, but I can’t swear to what it was. It wasn’t a small animal, though; it was too high off the ground. Behind us, there’s a raised area with a tombstone that has a heart design, and Allison tells us there’s something about it, something attached to it, a child maybe.

In this area Donna finds a tree that’s putting off its own cold air. There isn’t anything in my pictures of this tree but tree, but there was definitely something weird going on with this tree.

Donna and I walk down to where the lady was, and it gets much colder. I start to say that it’s so cold I feel like my face is about to crack, and Donna says her face is very tight too, at the same time. As we’re walking down here, Donna sees something move back where we were to begin with, near where Michelle left her recorder. We walk further towards where the lady was, and then I see something flash in the corner of my eye over there. She and I head over there, and I think everyone else followed. We get there, and it’s colder again, like where the lady was.
We don’t see anything, and Allison’s cell phone rings. It’s Donna’s family, and boom, we’re distracted. We decide to walk to the road and have a smoke break, and Michelle breaks out her huge thermos of hot cocoa, for which she gets the hero of the night award! Even my teeth were cold by then, that cocoa was most welcome!

After we drank our cocoa and started to feel our insides warm up a bit, we head back in.

I’m not sure what happened at this point, but I know Michelle was getting more odd readings, cold spots that were reading –700 and hot spots up to +100. She’s used that particular scanner several times with us, and it’s never done that. So we goggle at that and take more photo’s. She shoots it at a tombstone, and gets a reading of almost –800, and just then a truck pulls up to the gate. It has its headlights off, and it slowing, stopping, starting, slowing…but they never stopped. We decided they must have been getting our tag number. We’ve all walked up to the gate by now, to see what these people wanted. There’s a rumor about a tombstone that glows on the night of the full moon, and we decide to try and find it. The owner mentioned that this caused a lot of vandals to show up, and he planted a tree near this stone a couple years ago to make it less visible. We look and look and never find it. As we’re walking around, Donna walks up onto a raised knoll, and says she smells rotting cloth. I get there next, and I smell something old, but can’t place it. We look and look for that stone, and come across several that are made of very bright stone, but like I said, we never found it. Donna thought it might have been one in the shadows by the tree line, so we may have to visit on another full moon to look again.
I’m not sure what everyone else is doing, but there’s a tree we walked by that was near where we saw the lady in white, and I feel like I need to walk over to it. I get halfway there, and realize I’m leaving everyone else behind, and head back. They’re all engrossed in something (I later learned Donna was making contact with the lady in white) so I walk back. I get to the tree and it just feels electric to me over here! Allison (she’s so great about saying Kira, get your butt back over here!!) calls out to me and I tell her I’m ok, and she joins me. She snaps a picture and gets a great mist! I start snapping, and I got two, as well as several orbs.

Michelle has joined us now, and we’re snapping away like a bunch of tourists! I know I was so engrossed in the ecto I was getting on my digital camera that the idea of slowing down and listening to see what was here never even occurred to me. (DUH!! I’m smacking myself for this!) Donna comes over with a huge grin on her face, and tells us she finally met the lady in white. I believe her story was that her child was buried here, and the woman was so distraught she refused to leave. Donna can elaborate more on that. Allison felt like the woman was attached to that heart-adorned tombstone, and Donna agreed that it well could be.

The owner had wanted us out by 9:30PM and it’s 9:30, so we head home. As much as I know we all wanted to stay, I know we were all glad to be in a warm car! When we’re halfway back to Donna’s, she stops and gets out of the car, and orders the ghost that’s come for a ride with us back to the cemetery. We forgot to pray as we were leaving, and now we’re paying for it, because this ghost smells BAD! Donna stands outside for a minute, then gets back in even though she felt like the ghost didn’t leave. Allison mentioned that there was still something going on with her neck, so maybe it was attached to her. Nothing else happened on the way home, so Allison will have to let us know if she has a guest now. All in all, I think it was a success, and I’m glad Donna got to finally talk to the lady in white and hear her story.

Barber's Books

Allison and I were already in Mineral Wells together on Saturday afternoon, so I followed her to Donna’s house in Ft Worth. We got there a little after 6PM, and Michelle, Mary, her husband Jeremy, Dar, Donna and all the kids were there when we got there. We were at Donna’s for a while, getting to know each other, since Michelle, Allison and I had never met Mary and Jeremy. We left about 7:30 PM for Barber’s Bookstore. Allison and I went in her car; everyone else rode with Donna and Dar. It was about 7:45 PM by the time Allison could find a place to park, and everyone else was waiting outside.

The owner showed up right at 8 PM and let us in. He told us that he was going to leave the key with us, as he had no desire to be up there at night. He also told us that he didn’t like to be up there alone, and that his adult son had been awoken one night while sleeping there by an apparition of a man in a white T shirt and jeans that disappeared right into a wall! We followed the owner, Brian, up a long staircase into a square upstairs room that was ringed with a hallway on all sides, with rooms on either side of the hallway. I believe the upstairs was once run as a hotel as well, as the rooms are all numbered. As we’re walking up the staircase, Donna is in the lead. It’s full dark, and unbeknownst to Donna, there’s a stuffed deer like creature’s head, an emu maybe, at the head of the stairs. She sees it with her flashlight, and the eyes caught her completely off guard. All of the sudden we hear her exclaim “OH SHIT!” and then break into laughter. She and the owner go down the hallway and he flips on the lights for us, hands the key to Donna and leaves for the night.

We take a walk around the building to get our bearings, and then shut the lights off. We wanted to take some initial digital pictures in full dark to locate any activity early, but this doesn’t happen. Donna, Dar, Allison, Michelle, Mary, Jeremy and I are near a room that’s above where the staircase ends at the door below, with Donna and I closest to the head of the stairs. For some reason, Donna and I head down the stairs, and Allison hears “Lock it” being said in a soft voice that doesn’t belong to any of us. Donna checks the door, and sure enough, someone has left it unlocked. Donna locks it and she and I come back up.

The rooms themselves are small and many have connecting doors. The first one on the corner is filled with tagged vintage clothing, everything from dresses to sweaters. There are also dressmaker’s forms, mirrors, and boxes in there; as well as the room to the right that adjoins it. The room above the door we came was the shop office, with a desk, computer, and tables for workspace. That room is sort of catty-corner to the clothing room. To the right of the office room is a room filled with cardboard boxes of old books, magazines, and bookshelves lines the walls. The room next to it has bookshelves, boxes, a naked dressmaker’s form, and a form wearing an old uniform probably used by period re-enactors. There’s a window behind this form, and this rooms adjoins to the left with the next room. There’s an old wooden chair in adjoining doorway to the room on the left, and that room has its hall door blocked. It too is filled with cardboard boxes of books. The next room to the left is a room that you can only access from the corner room adjoining it to the left because the hall door is also blocked with boxes. This room contains and old painted white metal bed frame and an old dollhouse on a table. The corner room has two windows, and is mostly open in the middle.

The rest of the rooms from that corner on are jam packed with bookshelves full of books, boxes of books, and books scattered around. I collect old books; this place is a kind of Mecca to me. If only it were open so I could bring some of these treasure home! From that corner, you go down a hall and at the next corner, there’s a staircase to the main downstairs bookstore area. This staircase has a door that’s boarded up halfway down on a sidewall, which once would have opened into the bookstore itself, albeit high above the floor. Who knows what it was used for! This corner marks the halfway point from where we began; it turns and then turns again to make a full square to where we began at the staircase that open on W 8th Street.

It’s about 8:15 and I think we’re in two or three loose groups. Donna and I are in the back hallway, outside room 13. Donna stops in the doorway, and I hear something move in there, like a person brushing against a book, or snapping on shut. It’s hard to identify exactly what I heard. Donna goes in, and I follow. She immediately picks up on the ghost of a woman there, hiding behind the bookcase in the corner. Donna says she’s standing right where the ghost is, and I do notice it’s kind of cold in here. We don’t have the thermal scanner, so we won’t know for sure. Anyway, Donna says she feels like she steeped into anger, so we back out and go down the hall. At 8:30 PM Allison, Dar, Donna, Michelle and I are in the front office room, and Michelle is trying to get some EVP on tape. We all stand quiet, and Michelle and Donna ask questions and wait silently for answers. Suddenly, my camera clicks off with a snap as the lens covers slides closed. I say this out loud, and that’s the end of the EVP session. Michelle plays back the tape, but all we hear on it is the questions and my outburst. While asking the question “How long have you been here”, Donna hears the answer 56 years. The Donna turns to face the desk, and sees a man there. He’s bald, wearing round old style glasses, and has the appearance of a bookkeeper or clerk of come kind. Donna snaps a picture. Allison says she hears the man asking, “What are you (meaning us) doing here?” and Donna replies that we just want to take pictures and we’re not here to hurt or disturb anyone. Allison hears the reply to this: “Likely story.” We giggle at the ghosts’ wit, and move on.

At this point, Allison is in the hall with Jeremy, I’m not sure who else was around. Allison tells me that right after his, someone sets a tripod in an upholstered antique chair in the corner of the hall with it’s back to the 8th Street side staircase banister. Allison can tell there’s a female ghost there who’s pissed about this. I think it was right around now that something was playing with Allison's hair, and she also heard a soft voice say "Hey!". About an hour later Allison is near this chair again and says that the name of the ghost is Katharine. I’m betting she’s the one who told us to lock the door. Also in the area, Donna said the word “hell” and heard a ghost voice tell her angrily not to talk that way. Donna tries saying “Son of a Bitch!”, loudly, to get a reaction, but doesn’t.

We wander as a group for a little while, and I end up alone in the room with the chair in the connecting doorway that opens into a room full of boxes of books, chest high. I’m in here just looking at the chair and trying to get a feel for the room; it does not feel like I’m the only one here. This is also the room with the dummy in the uniform. Michelle comes down the hall and feels pulled into the same room, I don’t think she could see me in it until she was already in. We both decide that we aren’t alone, and Michelle wants to experiment with her camera to see if she can capture a blurry picture of the two of us. (Michelle, when she takes two pictures of herself in a row at home using the timer on her camera, always gets a blurry picture the second time. She wants to see if it will happen with us here.) I sit in the chair; Michelle set her camera on a box and sets the timer, and kneels down next to me. The timer turns off and no picture was taken. She tries it again, and we see a flash go off, but still no picture. She tries a third time, this time both of us sitting on the chair, and still no picture. Michelle notices that when she's sitting in this chair, her eyes hurt. We decide we’re not going to be allowed to do this, and just then Donna is calling us from the next room. Something is going on with her and Allison in there and she needs notes taken. I’m the one with the notebook, so in we go.

Allison is standing in the room with the white painted metal bed frame, and Donna is in the adjoining room looking in. Michelle and I say nothing about what just happened to us, because Allison is touching the bed frame and telling us that there’s a ghost attached to it. At first she thought he might be attached to the dollhouse, but knows for sure it’s the bed frame when she touches it. Donna takes a picture of Allison and the bed frame, and Allison and Donna hear the ghost say “neat!”. Allison says his name is Robert Templeton, and that he’s draft age, which used to be 16-20 years old. He’s got brown hair, and a tall lanky body.
We go next back to the room Michelle and I were just in, and Donna heads straight for the uniform. She touches it, and says there’s a man here and he has stomach problems. Cancer, dysentery, something. Dar says “Maybe he was shot in the stomach”, Donna says this could be it. Donna hears the ghost say “Please don’t make me leave,” and laughs, because she’s notorious for sending ghosts to the white light. She’s in pain, and lets go of the uniform and asks Allison to see what she can get from it. I took a picture with Donna touching the uniform, and there’s an orb in the window just about the uniform. Allison walks over, and she tells us that the ghosts’ name is Jack, and hears the year 1922. She thinks that may be a birthdate. Dar tells us that this is a Calvary Sergeants uniform, probably a remake. Allison looks for a label, and doesn’t find one. Allison tells us that Jack is annoyed about her ruffling up his uniform; he was a meticulous man who was always straightening his clothes, very proud of his uniform, and in his 20’s. Allison’s stomach also hurts, she thinks Jack may have been having hunger pains, and Donna agrees that this could be what she was feeling. I took a picture with Allison and the uniform, and there’s a blue orb on the jacket.

It’s about 9:45 now, and Donna, Allison and Michelle are in the room with the clothing, the one that you can enter as soon as you get off the 8th Street Stairs. I walk down the hall towards the back hall, and snap a picture of a big red orb. Mary was just around the corner out of my sight at the time, picking up on something. I hear Donna say “I smell semen” and I know I heard her wrong. I walk back to where they are, and sure enough, she said semen. Allison smells old icky blood smell, and Michelle says she can tell there was violence in there. Donna and Allison feel his too. I don’t really feel anything because I’m too busy scribbling down what they’re saying. I know the tale of what happened in this room, but they purposely didn’t research the bookstore so as not to contaminate their subconscious minds. Someone says they feel like there’s sex going on here, and I tell them to go on, they’re nailing the story on the head. I must have distracted their concentration, because now they want me to tell the story. It goes like this: Barber’s Books used to be a hotel run by a family, and there was a teenage daughter. This room was her bedroom. She fell in love with a local cowboy, much to her father’s dismay. Her father caught the two of them in this room late one night doing things they should not have been doing, and shot the cowboy in the face, killing him. In her grief, the daughter hung herself. Semen, blood, violence, teenagers…I say they nailed it.

The group rejoins now, and we learn that Mary has been feeling a lot of things in the back hallway; the hall that room 13 is on. She’s been drawn that way all night. Someone mentions coffee and a smoke break, and we head for the 8th street stairs. We walk a couple blocks to a Bennigan’s, and have coffee and sodas. Donna freaked out the bartender when he asked what we were in town for, and she said ghost hunting. Our mood is so much lighter now! On the walk back, Allison is tired and decides to go home. I get my bag out of her trunk, and Dar walks to the parking lot and back with me to make sure no boogeymen get me. Donna unlocks the door, and hands the key to Dar. Everyone goes up, and Dar starts to lock the door. It’s taking him a minute so I stop a few stairs up so he’s not alone there. The door won’t lock, and I snapped a picture thinking maybe something otherworldly was going on. It takes him a good three minutes to get that door locked, and the picture has a glowing green something on the door. We head up the stairs, and this is when Donna was told to watch her language.

Mary has been feeling a lot through the night, and Jeremy is visibly concerned. I don’t know all her details, but I’ll add them in when I get them. We all walk back around the hallways and Michelle goes into room 13. She’s got her video camera going, and she’s only in there a second when a 5x7 picture frame comes flying off a shelf at her. We’re outta there! Around the hall again, and we’re at the corner room near where the bed frame room is. Michelle has night vision on her video camera, and she points it down the hall. We all cram in behind her to watch the LCD screen. We can see orbs shooting all over the place, squiggling all over the screen as a beam of light, and she actually catches on video a face coming out of the floor, looking at us, and going back down through the floor. Jeremy is incredulous, and a bit spooked out. We all watch in fascination for a good fifteen minutes. After that, Michelle, Jeremy and Mary are in the room with the clothes that adjoins the shot in the face room. They have the camera going in there for a while, and we’re in the doorway. It feels thick and icky. They move out of the room, and decide not to go back in. Donna especially feels that it’s a bad room to go in. The whole bookshop feels darker somehow since we got back, a little malevolent at the edges.

We go around to a corner room near the back stairwell, and Mary tells us this was where a young girl was molested; she feels fear, pain, suffering, bad things in here. We turn our attention to the stairwell now. I walk down, and sit on the floor taking pictures up the stairwell. Donna is at the top, and she and I take a couple pictures of each other taking pictures. We’ve been doing this all night, it’s rather freaky. There are some good orbs in these photos.

Mary comes down the stairs and joins me, but stops about the level where to boarded up door is. She feels that bad stuff happened here too. There’s a photo of her here looking directly at an orb. We come up, and Michelle goes down. It’s just Dar and I at the top watching her. I take a photo of her going down, a great shot of the back of her head! She’s there a minute, and I take one of her coming up a couple stairs. She is not in this photo. Something black down there has obscured her from view.

Then we hear her say “Ok, I’m coming up, alright, I’m coming up now,” and she fairly flies up the stairs. Something down there yanked on her ponytail. We got back to where Donna and the rest of the group is, and Donna feels like we’re not supposed to go back past where Dar, Michelle and I just were, that we’re supposed to leave. Then she s decides screw this, I’m not getting run out of here, this is what I do! We go back that way, and Mary picks up on some more things that I don’t have the details of. It’s about 11:30 now, and we do decide after coming back around the hall that it’s time to go. Michelle and I left our bags in the office room, and while we’re standing in there, Dar has a camera yanked out of his hand. He said it felt like someone was pulling on it. Donna, Michelle and I at least were standing right there and know he didn’t just drop it. We leave that room, and start down the stairs. Dar is still at the top when Donna decides to have a little fun with Jeremy, who’s a bit freaked out by all this. Donna pretends she’s lost her key, and tells Jeremy he needs to go up with Dar and look. Jeremy does NOT want to go! “You mean I really have to go up there? Where’s the flashlight? No, you’re not serious…” He gets a few steps up and Donna lets him in on the joke. He’s visibly relieved! Poor Jeremy! The door locked just fine this time, just like it did every other time but that one with Dar. A spooky night, to be sure!

Baker Hotel Tour

The Baker Hotel Investigation on January 3, 2003

This was a quiet yet eventful night. Allison and I gave a tour, but they spent a lot of time upstairs alone, so she and I had good quiet time to hone in on some things we hadn’t been able to be thorough about before. It was a small tour anyway, only four people. We were there from about 5 pm to a little after 2 am, but these experiences were all between 9 and 11pm. At about 8:50 pm Allison and I had let the tour group wander upstairs and we meandered downstairs, just to see what was going on. We had just come out of the Brazos Room and were resting in the lobby. I walked over to the door we use to come in and out, and as I touched the glass, I was aware of someone. It was a woman, and she wanted to get out of the hotel. She couldn’t understand why she was stuck here when we (the living) were able to come and go as we please in and out of this door. She felt so mournful, and alone. I think she was a newlywed, I felt like I was in a wedding dress. I’ve learned that when I encounter something ghostly, I feel what they felt rather than see them or talk to them like some do. Sometimes I can hear them, but mostly I feel what they do, or did. I called Allison over, and she touched the glass as well. She concentrated for a minute, trying to get a name. She got ‘Emily’ and a “Ruh-cht’ name that wasn’t Ratchett or Racket. Allison said Emily was faint, and here’s the picture I snapped.

Just before going into the lobby, Allison and I had been in the Brazos Room.

Allison felt something playing with her hair, and also a cold spot on her leg, low like a child grabbing onto her. From the lobby, we went up to the mezzanine to use the restroom. As we walked in, we smelled cigar smoke, which happens fairly often in there. When we got done in there, Allison felt that the child was still with her, on her leg, and told me that she felt like it was a little girl who had come up the stairs from the lobby with is.

This was 9:02PM.

We decide to head up the stairs, and Allison leads, stopping on floors where she feels pulled. The next floor up is the Spa floor, and we stopped there. We walked a little bit, letting our senses guide us. This is the first time Allison and I have wandered alone, and we’re really able to focus with the added distraction of people. It’s 9:10 PM, and we both get a queasy feeling in our stomach’s. With me, in this building, this only happens in the kitchen and spa. Food and doctors’ offices, maybe? Anyway, we get into a room on the north side of the building, but not on a wall. It’s like a small anteroom, receiving room, straight down the hall from the elevator. I just feel queasy, but Allison is picking something up. She sees a woman, kind of chunky, and authoritative, like she’s directing people around. This suggests a head nurse type of person. I listen and think I hear the name Lorraine. Allison says she had a sense of humor, calling people ‘honey’. She’s older, and has dyed, dark hair, like maybe she’s covering her gray. Allison is almost giddy, and is giggling at this woman, at her sense of humor.

We got up a floor, and enter room 405. It’s full of Halloween decorations, but Allison hears, almost as soon as we walk in “I’m Edgar”. She at first thinks this was the name of the dying man she encountered down the hall on this floor a few days ago, but quickly changes her mind. Allison says he has a raspy voice, like a whiskey voice. She hears him say “The child doesn’t need to be here’. Allison engages him in conversation, and finds out that he means the little girl who followed her from the Brazos Room. Allison asks ‘Why doesn’t she need to be here” and hears Edgar tell her that “She’ll get me in trouble.’ She then finds out that Edgar is black, and the little girl is white, and he’s worried that people will think the wrong thing. I get a custodian feel from this guy, or this room, and I tell Allison. She asks Edgar what he did here. He says “I fix locks”. Allison tells him we’ll leave now, so the little girl won’t get him in trouble. We walk down the hallway, and Allison goes into another room.. I’m barely in the door when Allison starts laughing, and walks out. She says there’s a couple in there taking advantage of their alone time in a room with a bed. We laugh, and head up the stairwell.
We go up a floor now to the 4th, and Allison immediately feels something take her hand. She starts walking fast down the hall, and I tell her “No, you’re being baited. Come back..” She stops and turns around to look and me, and agrees. We get back into the stairwell landing, and I’m half in and half out when I hear a voice holler at me “GO!”. I jump fully into the stairwell, and Allison is looking up. She says she can see a figure on the stairs above is waving a finger at us and saying ‘no, no, no’ like we’re not supposed to go up. So we go down, back to the 3rd floor, the level just above the Spa.

So now we’re back on the 3rd floor, wandering. Allison is leading, and we go down the hall past the lover’s room and the room where Edgar was, 405. Allison walks into the room with the bloodstains on the floor. They’re recent, probably some idiot killing an animal. Recent like a couple of months, as opposed to in the history of the hotel when it was open for business. Anyway, Allison knows right away this is the room where the little girl from the Brazos Room belongs. Her name is Maggie and she was wandering, lost in the hotel. Allison hears an Irish voice, thick like an immigrants, but gets the sense these people are not immigrant poor. I get the idea from this of ‘lace curtain Irish’, like you hear said in New York. Maggie’s mother, or the woman who was there waiting for Maggie thanks Allison and keeps wanting us to sit down. Well, there are no chairs in here, so we prop our butts on the window sill, half leaning. Allison can hear the woman lightly chiding Maggie “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I thought I’d never find you!”. I don’t hear any of this, Allison is telling me and I’m scribbling in my notepad as fast as I can with gloves on. The room does feel good in here, despite the bloodstains. I look around, and it seems like the writing desk was near the window, but that’s all I get. Allison gets the sense that Maggie and her mother are just passing through. All of the sudden Allison sees a man in the doorway, and looks up with a little bit of alarm, but tells me that Maggie’s mother says ‘Pay him no mind.” We linger here a few more minutes, and then we go out into the hall again and Allison walks into the room directly across the hall from Maggie’s. Allison says there’s a man in here writing sheet music at his desk. It’s 10:30 PM now. Allison says there’s woman here who’s humming on purpose, to playfully mess up his rhythm. As Allison says this, I hear the name June. Allison listens some more, and hears Randall. The woman is calling him by his last name; first names are too personal for her. Allison says the woman is a bit drunk, and then hears the woman say “I am not!”. We’re there for awhile, and I come up with his name as Henry, and I tell this to Allison. She agrees about June and Henry’s names, and says that they aren’t married, but part of a traveling troupe that plays in the area. and they’re here at the hotel waiting for others. Allison sees a 30’s style hairdo, pin curls I think. Anyway, Henry, if that’s his name, is writing frantically, he has to get this down, Allison tells me. I get the sense of hating Chopin. Don’t ask me why, I have no idea. I couldn’t recognize his music if I heard it; I’m not even sure how to correctly pronounce the name Chopin. I think it’s about now that we realize we can see our breath coming out in plumes; it feels like it’s getting colder in here. There’s an old desk in the room, and I sit kind of sideways on it. I feel like there’s something wrong with my legs, and I hear “Get off my desk!”. I get down, and my legs almost go out from under me! We’ve been here for about twenty minutes now, and Allison says she can hear Jazzy/Swing type music playing, or being hummed by June. This could also be what Henry is trying to get down on paper. Allison is really getting the sense that June likes to play and perturb Henry, that’s her way. She also feels like June is the heart of the troupe, or band, which is why he puts up with it. Allison asks Henry if he’s famous, and hears “No, mostly small circuit. We’re going to Cali.” Nothing else really happens, but Allison is still in a jovial mood from all this.

* This information was confirmed the following day when we met two Baker relatives at the hotel for a tour. They had no idea what had happened the day before, and we telling us old stories. We let them tell us all about Henry before we told them we’d met him last night! They, of course, thought we were crazy, but they couldn’t imagine how we knew about him if we weren’t telling the truth!

As we’re walking out of the room, we both hear the elevator start to move. This is not a ghostly sound, this sounds like a real elevator, as if it’s happening in the present. Some feat, there’s no electricity in here! We walk down the hall towards the elevator, and Allison stops very near it. She can feel something here, and I snap a few pictures, but we don’t hear the noise again.

We got into another room, I’m not sure which, but it’s on the same floor, back towards the stairwell that begins on the mezzanine near the Orchid Room. Allison can hear a woman in here crying, in mourning, for someone named Sarah. The cryer has just come here for a funeral, and keeps saying ‘She was a good Christian woman, such a good woman.” Allison feels like this is a residual haunting, she can’t get the cryer to answer her, and we move on.

New Year's Day at the Baker Hotel

I met Allison and the tour group, as well as Donna, Dar, Josh, Mike Fiedler, and Mike Weston and company at the Hotel at 1:30 pm. Jayne was there, and Donna, Dar and Josh talked to her while Allison, Mike F and I took the tour group down to the basement. Mike W and his family wanted to come to the basement with us, but the tour group didn’t want company. It was a historical tour rather than a paranormal one; but we got activity anyway. Near the hall to the kitchen, Mike F takes a photo of me in the closet of the rented ceramics room, and there’s an orb near my side.

While we’re in the kitchen area, I get nauseous again as we pass the Super-Bake oven, and Mike F asks what’s wrong with me. I tell him, and he tells me the story of the woman who was stabbed to death here. We move quickly on.

Donna, Dar and Josh joined us in the basement as we were nearing the laundry room. We four and Mike F hung back so as not to disrupt the tour, and to listen to Allison so when Donna and I give tours, we know what to say! Mike F is the Hotel Historian, he’s full of interesting information. Nothing out of the ordinary happened until we got to the ladies locker room, and I saw an orb near the back, where I had caught one on film before with Donna in the picture. I think this one likes Donna! I didn’t catch a picture, but I didn’t need to. I saw it myself. When we headed back from the pool area to the well area, I did catch an orb there.

This was in the room where the bomb shelter and supposed tunnels are, or very near to it. Donna and hers left now, as they had to get home, and we didn’t see Mike W and his again. The rest of the tour was pretty uneventful until we got to the Cloud Room, the ballroom on the twelfth floor. Mike F had taken the group up to the Bell Tower, and Allison and I sat on a raised dais and waited for them. This was almost directly in front of where Ginny fell to her death from the balcony up there. I felt the worst feeling pass through me; it was like it enveloped me for three feet in every direction. A minute later Allison felt it as well, and we got up and walked to the area by the stairwell, it might have been a coat check area. It felt better here, and we were out of the wind. We took the group down, said our goodbyes, and Blanca rejoined us. She showed up about halfway through the tour, and was preparing vases of flowers with Mike F’s wife in the lobby. She leaves the flowers in various guest rooms for the ghostly inhabitants every couple of months.

Allison, Mike F, his wife, Blanca and I decided it was time for dinner, as it was about 5:00 PM. Blanca called Jeff, who was to meet us there, and told him where to meet us. We ate, and Jeff, his mother Camille and a friend Matt showed up and we headed back to the Hotel. We dropped our stuff in the camp room, which actually has a proper name of the Orchid Room.

Then we headed for the basement. I wasn’t thrilled about going back down there at night, but heck, you only live once. We headed down the stairs through the broken door on the mezzanine, that’s four floors down to the basement, but we stopped first on the ground level, where the kitchens and shops are. There’s picture of me in the rented pottery room that was taken here during the tour with a couple orbs in it, but there was nothing there after dark. We went through the rest of the kitchens, and in the hall that opens into the coffee shop, Jeff saw a ghost; a woman. We then went into to main kitchen area, and just past the room where the small fridge and Super-Bake oven are (this is where I always get nauseous) Mike heard a noise like a cat meowing back the way we came, but through a different hallway. He goes to see, and Matt and Camille follow him. Jeff, Allison, Blanca and I didn’t hear the noise, so we stayed put. Jeff sees something in the oven room, and tries to take a picture, but his flash won’t go off. I take two and get nothing. Allison gets a face looking in the window at us. Mike and the other two come back; there was nothing found. Jeff and Allison decide that the Hotel wanted Mike away so we could see the activity. Blanca’s videocamea battery is dead already, she had just changed it at dinner, and she does so again. We decide to go to the basement, which means going back up to the mezzanine to access the stairs.

The library is here on the mezzanine, and there was activity here as always. It always feels so good in here!

On the mezzanine, Jeff sees a woman on the stairs, and I get some orb photos there. Jeff wants to go to the basement, but feels he is also pulled to the Brazos Room. We head to the Brazos Room, which is just off the Lobby, first, and catch all sorts of orbs there. There’s a large one in the raised dining area, and at one point Mike is surrounded by a black mist. We spend a while here, and head back up to the mezzanine, and then down the stairs to the basement.

The stairs open to where the elevator crushed Douglas, the bellboy, and it’s just a creepy feeling right there. We’re not ten steps in when I hear echoing voices above, like from the Lobby. Jeff hears it too, so do a couple others. We decide those are the living voices of vandals, a common find there, and head up. We get back to the mezzanine, and there’s nothing. Not a voice or a footstep. We go down to the lobby and check the Brazos Room. Nothing again. We decide something is trying to distract us or keep us out of the basement; something doesn’t want us to find what’s there. We’re about to head back up so we can go back down, but stop for a bathroom break, as the only bathroom that works is on the mezzanine. Allison, Matt, Camille and I are in the Lobby, and the others are upstairs on the mezzanine. Allison sees a black figure, as in robed in black, in the doorway to the Brazos Room. She points, I see it too. It looks like the figure I got a picture of on the sixth floor on the 28th of December and it doesn’t feel friendly. Up we go! While this is going on, Blanca has taken off like a woman possessed up the stairs to the Spa and guest floors. Jeff chases her up, and it takes us a few minutes to find them. I’ve never met Blanca before, but Jeff is amazed that she would go off alone and ignore his calls. Not a good sign, in my book.

We forego the basement for the time being, and go up the stairs. We don’t stop on the Spa floor, but go up to the third, the first guest room floor. Blanca is leading, and she takes us to the blue carpeted are where gambling went on and Bonnie and Clyde stayed. These rooms all interconnect, and can be closed off from the rest of the floor. The blue carpet is in the rooms; the hall beyond the doors is tiled, so you could hear footsteps if someone uninvited got past the door. Allison tells us that at some point in the Hotel’s operation, this carpet was supposed to be replaced, but the workmen painted it instead, and as she nudges the floor with her foot, paint dust comes up. It’s the brightest cerulean blue I’ve ever seen; ghastly in here. There are two rooms on one end, then a common room with a wet bar, and three or four more connected rooms. Two of these last rooms have beds and curtains; one has an old suitcase and clothes on the floor. Blanca immediately goes to a window is a blue carpet room, and stays quietly put. She looks somber. This goes on for awhile, and she tells us, after some prodding, that there’s a little boy there looking for his Mom. He didn’t die here; he came in from the vortex in the Brazos Room. Blanca is entranced, at one point asking if she can take him home with her. Allison and Jeff take over, Allison convincing her to tell the child to go to God, go to the Light, and we all concentrate on helping her accomplish this at Jeff’s request. After about five minutes, you can feel a release. He’s gone. Jeff tells us he was afraid to go, but that he was looking for his sister who was waiting for him on the Other Side. Jeff says Blanca reminded the child of his sister. Allison tells us the child’s name was Matt.

In another one of these rooms, the one with a bed but without the suitcase, Allison feels a man on the bed. He’s in pain, he’s dying. She says he has stomach cancer, and Jeff can see he’s curled up fetal style on the bed. The man is holding Allison’s hand, she can’t let go. This goes on for five or ten minutes, Allison getting visibly agitated, yet not able to let go. At one point, her breath becomes visible. It’s cold, but not that cold. Beads of sweat form at her brow, and her face is pained. She keeps saying, “I can feel his pain, I can feel him dying.” She’s really shook up. She asks us to help her remove her hand. Mike tries, but she tells him the man says “No, not him.”. Allison is tall, and she’s been almost doubled over at the bedside. The mattress does look lower there. Someone grabs her from behind and pulls her back, and she lets go of the man’s hand. She’s been wearing gloves against the cold; she takes them off and her hands are sweaty. I also have been wearing gloves, and I remove one so Camille can feel my hand to compare to Allison’s. Mine are warm, hers are hot and sweaty. Mike touches the mattress, it’s wet with sweat. Allison never touched the mattress. Mike is visibly freaked out. Jeff and Allison agree that this is a residual haunting, the act of this man’s death repeats itself here over and over as if in a time loop. I get one picture here, and my camera refuses to work the rest of the night. I had changed the battery at dinner, and the battery is still showing a full charge. There’s a very, very faint orb in the curtains.

We go up a floor to the fourth. Immediately, Jeff picks up on activity here, down both ends of the hallway. It’s bad down one end, and OK on the other. I think this was the floor where Jeff and Camille had encountered a vomiting spirit before, and we go down his end of the hallway. Not much happens. We head the other way. Jeff, Allison, Matt and I linger near the stairs. Blanca feels drawn down the hall; Camille and Mike go with her. They’re gone for a while, and don’t say much when they get back. We still linger here. While they were down the hall, we could all hear a tap-tap- thump noise in the stairwell. Jeff says it’s an old man with a cane shuffling down the stairs from above. Matt suggests it only happens when the wind kicks up, and a moment after he says this the wind dies and we hear the noise again. A few minute later Jeff takes a flying leap straight backwards. The ghost of a woman has surprised him in the stairwell landing. We move down the hall, and we’re about halfway down that end, when Jeff and Allison feel like we’re being surrounded by something bad, as if it’s trying to trap us here. Jeff wants to go up a floor NOW, and we take the other staircase up.
Mike’s wife has been waiting in the car since dinner, and it’s now almost 9:00 PM. Mike leaves, and tells us to be wary in a half an hour, as things always pick up in activity a half-hour after he’s left.

We’re on the fifth floor now, and Jeff leads us to two connecting rooms. Allison and Camille both get pains in their abdomen, and I think Matt felt a cramp as well. I don’t know where Jeff ‘s gone, but Allison intuits that a woman gave birth in each of these rooms. I think this is a plausible statement; after all, this was the end of the hallway the prostitutes frequented. It takes several minutes here to come up with this. Allison tells us that the woman is the right hand room, where we are, died in childbirth, and so did her infant daughter. My chest gets tight; I’m having trouble breathing. Allison says she gave birth in the bathtub with no doctor in attendance, and bled to death. There were complications. My chest is very tight now. I put my hand up to my chest, and Allison looks at me and says, “The baby had the cord wrapped around her neck, she couldn’t breathe.” Camille agrees, Matt says his chest is tight. I walk out of there and take a few very deep breaths and I’m fine again. We got into the left hand room. Allison tells us this woman had a boy, and the birth went fine. The father of the child, though, drugged the mother to sleep and she died of an overdose, and he put the baby in an incinerator. Someone calls Jeff to the room, Blanca is already here and says she didn’t hear incinerator like Allison did, but agrees that this account feels like what happened. Jeff walks in, and we’re silent. He says something about an incinerator.

Jeff is unaware of this, but on December 14th, 2002, Don was here and as he walked by the incinerator in the basement, he audibly heard the word ‘baby’ over and over again. I’m dumbfounded, and I tell Jeff, Blanca (who also had no way of knowing) and Allison, who had heard that story. We walk down the hall to the laundry and incinerator chutes, and the incinerator chute is hanging wide open. It’s decided this is the one the father dropped the baby down, and Jeff tells us the child was alive at the time.

This horror of this has us all silent.

We decide to make that trip down to the basement now, but first Jeff wants to go up a floor to the sixth and check on the room he keeps there. We linger here for a while, it’s warm and comfortable here, and the change is welcome. We talk about how haunted Fort Wolters is up here, and Allison tells him I live there. He tells us he can probably gain access to the old hospital, something I’ve not been able to do. Someone realizes that we will be in the basement at 9:30 PM, a half hour after Mike has left, and we decide to go up to the seventh floor instead.
We visit Virginia’s room; she was the mistress of Mr. Baker. Some say it was T.B. Baker, and some say Earl who was her lover; I don’t know which it was. Mike earlier had said it was Earl, Allison feels it was T.B. Allison also feels she was pregnant once. Jeff tells is that if this is so, the ghost of Virginia does not want that known. We make a stop in room 702, which is the room where Donna and I on the 5th of December 2002, had made contact with the ghost of a woman who was pushed from the window in that room. I’d tried to get EVP here on the 28th of December, and got nothing. The room still feels empty; Jeff feels nothing here. He thinks there may have once been something, but not now.

It’s nearing 11:00 PM by this time, and I decide I’ve had enough. It’s late, I’m tired, and my hamstrings are killing me. We go down to the mezzanine, and sit in the camp room for a little while. We talk for a little while about how the ghosts of the Hotel don’t like Mike Fiedler, how they hide from him and make him tired. Mike had a friend named Joe who used to frequent the Hotel, and now won’t come near it. I ask if anyone knows why, and Allison asks Jeff. He looks reluctant, but he begins to tell the story.

About six months ago, Joe was almost seduced off the Cloud Room railing by the evil ghost of his former girlfriend. They were in a Satanic cult together for ten years, and when he became Christian again, the relationship ended. She was here, and Jeff and another psychic named Donna witnessed her beckoning to Joe, and both Jeff and Donna held Joe back. They lost two hours in what felt like ten minutes up in the ballroom that day, and when the ghost was not successful in luring Joe, she shapeshifted into a skeletal figure, and other forms. Her eyes glowed green to Jeff, red to Donna. Both Jeff and Donna knew that she was evil, Joe was oblivious. Later that night in the Brazos Room, they felt her again. Jeff could see her walking the length of the lobby in front of the doors. Jeff, Donna and Joe started praying to God at this point, and the evil ghost laughed at them. She sat Indian style on the floor and summoned other evil entities to the hotel to serve as watchers, guardians of a sort. Jeff said something about seeing them, black wisps or mists, flying in through the Bell Tower. I then told him about the pictures I took in daylight on the 28th of December of this very thing. I’ve yet to show them to him but I will. Allison saw these pictures just hours after this conversation, and thinks that’s what I caught in the photo. This story has every hair on my body standing on end, and it’s absolutely time to leave. Allison mentions that maybe she should too, she’s wary now, but Jeff assures her that if this woman were there tonight, he’s be leaving too, and he’s not sensing her. We walk down to the mezzanine, and Camille and Blanca leave with me. Blanca has been quiet ever since her little boy incident; I hope I’ll see her again to ask her about that.