Peoria Journal Star - Sunday October 25, 1998 Story by Valerie Lilleyi Photographs by Fred Zwicky of the Journal Star BARTONVILLE -- It was a warm Thursday night. Few stars pierced the sky's royal-blue blanket reflecting the city's ambient light. Three former Marines were hunting ghosts at the old Peoria State Hospital, where the population had grown into the thousands after it opened in 1902. Thirty years of neglect left it a ruin, but the main building's gothic structure still towered three stories high behind weeds and vines. Rob Canover, a paranormal investigator, said the place was full of spirits. Could be: Numerous people who live and work Late at night around there report odd occurrences. There is the Legend of Bookbinder, who appeared in front of 100 nurses and 300 spectators, according to the medical journal of Dr. George Zeller, the physician who brought psychiatric health care out of the dark ages there. Conover, Winsley Durand Jr., the building's owner, and I walked to the rear around 7 p.m. and entered through one of the basement's doors. Durand lit up the basements hall spanning the building's length with his work light powered by a generator. Each end had a door leading out to the back side and hollow rooms lined each side of the doublebrich walls of the hall. Solid wood doors stood open, stuck in the dirt-covered floor. "This thing won't fall down in a hundred years," Durand said. We peered into the first room where stacks and piles of asbestos tubes had been crumbllng with time against the field-stone outer walls. Du- rand, who recently bought the building and is waiting for the title to clear, wants the state to clean them up. We didn't see a thing, spookwise. No lights No eerie foot steps in the next room. It was early. Then again, we weren't listening or looking for anything, We were too busy pointing out architectural elements and admiring the craftsmanship that went into the thick walls. Conover's flashlight danced around the walls and litup entire room. After about two hours, Durand left and Conover and I went back in through the other basement door. We walked halfway down a hall and stood at the bottom of the steps that lead to the first floor. Conwer said he felt spirits there and on the third floor. We stood there in the pitch black We identified the weak light peeking in from the far door from the outside, where we had first entered earlier and the light leaking from the door Conover and I just walked through. Nothing. Black "Can you feel it?" he asked. The temperature is dropping. They're here." Yes, it was colder. But we were in a basement and of course my feet would be cold, I reasoned aloud. He sensed the spirits In the far room across from the first door -- a bunch of them in there, talking and Laughing, he said. I didn't hear anything. We stood there and stood there. I strained to see what Conover was seeing. "They're getting closer," he said. "Here, put your hand out." "Well, yes, it's a Little colder, but we've been standing here awhile,"I said. I felt the coldness above my knees now. I studied the darkness through the hall. I don't know how much time passed. A piece of glass fell on the first floor. "That could be the wind blowing out a broken window,"I reasoned. Then at the end outside the room where Conover said he heard them, there was a light greenish glow the size of a marble. I blinked my eyes. My pulse quickened. Were my eyes playing tricks? Had I been Looking into nothingness too long? Whatever it was, it began to grow larger, to the size of a pingpong ball I described It to Conover,who said it was Al, his nickname for this spirit. Conover has been in this building many times and nicknamed two spirits, Al and Ed, because they travel together and usually show themselves to him As Al grew closer,his light didn't grow larger. Rather, it began to ooze a green glow as if it were trying to sparkle. He looked like one of those pictures of the sun where the sun is black and orange bursts out of it. Except Al's bursts were light,glowing green like the light stichs kids carry on Halloween. I was constantly asking myself, "Am I really seeing this?" I couldn't believe It. Conover said he could hear Al mumbling and the others in the far room were saying something, too, along with laughter. I didn't hear a thing. His greenish glows shook as if it were of an older person with palsy. Conover said AL was an older person when he died. Conover flicked on his lighter because his flashllght batteries had gone dead. The little flame lit the hallway and I couldn't see AL. Conover turned it of and there was Al "If Al is here, Ed's got to be around." he said. Conover turned around to face where we'd walked in My heart pounding in my chest, I turned too. In the far corner, near the glow we'd identified earlier as that coming from outside, was an almost transparent white gentle radiance the size of a baseball. It was much stronger than Al. It was Ed, Conover said. As Ed grew to the size of a soceerball Conover again flicked on his lighter. Gone. I couldn't see anything, though where I had been looking was only 10 feet away. We turned back around to look at Al. Al moved behind a door 10 feet from us. Conover said the situation wasn't good, so we headed up the stairs to the first door. I led and he followed. When we got to the top, Conover asked me if I'd heard Al behind him, chasing us up the stairs. No. I didn't hear another set of footsteps, but my heart was beating so hard it hurt my chest and pumped in my ears. We stood in an adjacent administration room. I still couldn't believe what I saw. My heart calmed some. Conover said he could hear them in the hall. Then a howl spouted through the room by me at waist level. "That could be the wind," I said, hoping I believed myself. When we got outside, we sat on the porch steps and talked about Al and Ed. About an hour had gone by since we`d gone in. Conover said he could hear others inside laughing at us because we were talking about them. Conover didn't want to go back inside because his instincts told him not to. So we didn't. I went back Saturday night with three other people. The second time Saturday night, four of us from the Journal Star went to the old state mental hospital. Jerry McDowell, metro/city editor; Paul Gordon, business editor and his son; Eric Gordon; I met Durand at 6:3O p.m. to sign some legal papers and get the nickeltour. The Gordons skipped the tour, left and returned around 10 p.m. McDowell and I set up lawn chairs on the third floor, where Conover had said he'd felt spirits before. The basement spooked me too much. Pretty much nothing happened, except for a few kidds breaking into the first floor. We couldn't hear them through the building's massive structure, but we heard their playfull screams echo from outside below the broken windows. It stayed uneventful until around 11:30 p.m, after the Gordons returned to meet us at our third floor camp-out. We were very quiet when a thump rang out from the far room at the other end of the hall. Then it did it again. It sounded like a door slamming or maybe a board slapping wood. Paul Gorden and I went to investigate. There was a hole in the floor at the end, so we went down the stairs to the second floor. As we walked to the other end of the hall, we heard the thump again. My heart beat faster. We went up the far stairwell towards the sound and searched every room studied every door. Junk was piled in front of most of the doors and the wind was much stronger on that end of the hallway. There were only two doors that had been recently opened. One was Latched shut and the other was in a room where the constant wind pressed it closed.It was also located on the opposite side of the hall from where we had all heard the thumps. No rational explanation. Paul and I continued our exploration, and that's when we both walked into the colder cube of air. We were walking under the first floor just about directly below our third-floor camp out point when we felt a wall of colder air. We checked back to where we'd come. It was warmer less than 10 feet back. We walked into the cold section al the hall again. The wind was no stronger there than behind us again,we couldnt come up with a rational explanation. Once we were back up on the third floor, Paul stayed at the stairwell and stared at the landing leading up to the attic. I stopped and spotted a faint, white glow He said he saw it,too. I shined my flashlight onto the landing where this thing sat. Gone. Nothing. I turned it off, and then we could see it. Eric Gordon came over and saw it too. It was a white transparent glow on the corner of the landing. Then it faded away. I looked away and back. It was gone. Total darkness. Paul and I went up on the landing and looked for any way an outside light could reflect into the black stairwell. We found nothing. I want to go back. There is an explanation Brushes with these kinds of unexplained phenomena fall into two categones: There are ghosts and there are hauntings said Randy Liebeck, an internationaly known research specialist and investigator in the field of ghost and poltergeist phenomena, based in Totowa, NJ. The spherical balls of light are the most common sightings and are usually ghosts of people who have died. They act and behave just as when they were alive. If they were mute when alive, then that's how they are as a ghost. Liebeck said. They can be seen because the entity is sending a mental picture of what he wants to be seen," he said. "That's why they always have clothes on. No one ever reports seeing a naked ghost." Frequently, ghosts will appear in full human form said Auerbach of the Office of Paranormal Investigations in Pleasant Hill Calif., which uses scientific methods of investigation. OPI staff investigate the problems reported, first looking for any and all "normal" explanations before assuming a paranormal one. They also are hired by scientific researchers to consult an stage magic and psychic fraud or investigative techniques. "It's not uncommon that people report pockets of gas," he said. "But then there could be other things going on thats real paranormal phenomena. Most ghosts appear 24 to 48 hours after death and they're seen by a close family member. Ghosts can be in denial that they're dead, and sometimes theylust don't want to go. "Not everyone believes in heaven and hell," he said. They also go where they feelmost comfortable and are more active between midnight and 4 a.m. The old state hos~itl was the onbr home many of the patients ever knew, Canoversa~d. You're most likely to see, hear or even smell the unexplained at night because that's when the day's activities have calmed down enough. Ghosts, hauntings and spirits are always around during the day, but if they do something in the middle of a party, you're less likely to notice, Auerbach said. The bets are off when dealing with the mentally distuibed," Auerbach said. If they were unpredictable or criminally insane when they were alive, they're that way when they're dead, Liebeck said. But most often, it's your own fear that hurts you, you get scared and run and trip smack into a wall, Conover said. Auerbach added that ghosts also are attracted to people --otherwise, they get bored. Kids and teenagers constantly trespassing in the hospital's buildings, which have a notorious reputation for being haunted, and the Bartonville police department is arresting them all the time, according to a police department spokeswoman. The other kind of phenomena is the residual haunting, where in a certain place emotional energy has recorded itself "It plays Itself back like a videotape replaying over and over." Liebeck said. The popular example is of a woman who walks up a stairwell and looks out a window every night, he said. Footsteps heard are often hauntings, Auerbach added. There are also rational explanations for some hauntmgs or ghosts that are governed by the laws of physics, Auerbach said. The building can be located in a naturally high-magnetic field,which tends to chase away wildlife. The magnetic field itself combined with an electrical storm can cause some people to increase their psychic ability, he said. "Earth's magnetic field shifts everyday and animals will change their patterns." Auerbach said. Older buildings also tend to have methane gas and pockets of other kinds of gas which will move in the air, he said. One thing I wondered as I saw the two glows was whether it was all in my head. WasI seeing them because I wanted to? "Unless you have a pathological malfunction, you're not going to suddellly start spontaneously seeing a hallucination," Liebeck said. Liebeck explained that the block of cold air Paul Gordon and I walked into could have possibly been a sign of a nearby ghost. "All of those things require a tremendous amount of energy." he satd."It's getting ready to do sometlllng. It has to draw energy from a battery or air molecules." Our batteries didn't go dead, but Conover's new ones did when he and I went the first time. Drained batteries happen so often, it's not a coincidence." Liebeck said. Perhaps the scariest thing about ghosts is that they can be livig with you and your family and never reveal themselves until they want to. Emotional traumas or even a renovation on the house will bring them out a lot of times, Conover said. And as far as Halloween goes, the only things that came out are people's Imaginations, he said. But then again, maybe not.