Haunts Abound

Imagine this: You're in a pitch-black wine cellar with dirt walls, below the basement of an old mansion. You and your four counterparts are holding hands and prompting some sort of paranormal, or ghostly, activity. All of a sudden, three blue lights appear behind you and, as you're watching, gradually disappear. It couldn't be the other people in the room, and there is nothing on the ground when you turn the lights back on.\nHaunted houses are always a source of intrigue and bone-chilling excitement, especially around Halloween. Images of bloody masks, missing human limbs, monsters with chainsaws and the notes of eerie musical interludes are commonly associated with the term "haunted house." But in reality, the scene in the wine cellar is a much more accurate account of a real haunted house. \n"People like haunted houses because of Hollywood," says Dr. Dave Oester of the International Ghost Hunters Society. Oester has been traveling the country studying paranormal activitiy. "They've distorted what ghosts and haunted houses are. It isn't reality at all. Because of Hollywood, we want to see the worst we can find, something out of the ordinary."\nAny experience in a truly haunted house is bound to be out of the ordinary. Footsteps, banging doors, faucets and lights turning on and off, ghostly voices and missing objects that turn up later in a different spot are common paranormal occurrences. These strange activities are what lead people to bring in a ghost hunter, who will then determine whether their house is haunted. \nGhost hunter Kimberly Hall-Moore, an Indiana representative for the American Ghost Society, receives one to two emails each month about suspected paranormal activity in Indiana alone. Once the cases are investigated more closely, however, a lot of them lead to dead ends. \n"I usually do an interview process before actually going out to a site, just to make sure that it isn't going to be a waste of time for the person or for myself," Hall-Moore says.\nThe interview consists of questions concerning the nature of the event, the weather at the time of the event, how often the event occurs and the people in the house when it happens. \n"It's very important that we know the ages of the people in the house because -- and this might sound really weird -- a lot of times if there's a girl just entering puberty, that can be one of the reasons the events start happening. They can be unsettled and start unknowingly moving things with their minds."\nThere are three kinds of hauntings, according to Hall-Moore: a poltergeist, a residual haunting and an intelligent haunting. The poltergeist happens as a result of a human agent, an example being the teenage girls going through puberty. Residual hauntings are events that occur over and over; the site of a man in a black cloak walking across a bridge once every month would be residual. But it's the intelligent haunting that everybody wants to hear about. The ghost will try to interact with a person or thing and is most commonly a person who died tragically and doesn't realize it. \n"A lot of spirits don't know they're dead," Oester says. "Many cases, when you see something like a young, transparent boy walking and he sees you and screams and runs away, it means that he doesn't know he's dead. He is seeing you in his house."\nOester says a house doesn't have to be old to be haunted, either. A new home may be haunted because the ghost feels attached to the land. Or an older home may be built by an owner who lived in the house all his or her life and didn't want to leave when they died.\n"At their dimension, they still live there and they may not even know you're there," Oester says. \nPhysical and spiritual dimensions and the line between them plays a large part in the study of hauntings. \n"With haunting," Oester says, "you have a question of parallel dimensions. Are we seeing a ghost or are we seeing people from another dimension? We really don't know."\nCommonly haunted places include houses, businesses that have been the site of tragedies, and hotels. Cemeteries, which are usually at the top of the list for creepy places, are also recurring haunted sites. \n"One story is that Abraham Lincoln haunts his grave because he isn't actually buried there and he tries to tell this to visitors of his gravesite," Hall-Moore says. "It could be that a ghost haunts his or her grave because there is something wrong with either their body or their grave."\nBloomington's Step Cemetery, which isn't used anymore, has a tale of its own. \n"There's a tree stump in the shape of a chair," Hall-Moore says. "A woman's ghost has been spotted there grieving for a child who was hit by a car."\nHall-Moore also says that schools are popular haunted places. \n"Every state in the U.S. has at least one haunted school," Hall-Moore says. "Indiana has four or five, and they're usually universities."\nIU has its own collection of haunted tales, including a story about Read Hall involving a medical student who murdered his girlfriend. \n"I think Read Hall being haunted creates a fun legend about IU and IU's history that's kind of cool," says Maria Fragnoli, a freshman.\nWhile most won't be venturing into any real haunted houses this Halloween, there are some Hollywood-style haunted attractions in the area. College Mall has the Creep Factory, with two separate walks: one for the brave and one for the less courageous. The cost is $4. There's also the Bakers Junction Haunted Train on South Fairfax Road, open from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights. The train ride costs $5.\nSo if you find yourself in a room with no windows this Halloween, or anytime, and the temperature abruptly drops about 20 degrees or the pictures start falling off the walls, you may have found the real thing without even looking for it. \n"Ghosts are everywhere," Oester says. "Suddenly you're in their home and they're in yours"