"Come out, come out, wherever you are Henry. Oh Henry!"
I'm saying this in my head, but really, I don't want to find Henry in this dark, abandoned basement of an old asbestos factory.
- Jared Neumark
- Jason and Julie from N.C. Paranormal investigate a grave at Settlers Cemetery, alongside CL staffer Heather Desmond (sporting a cap).
You see, Henry's been dead for many years and, for whatever reason, he's decided to hang around the N.C. Music Factory -- home to Creative Loafing and a host of other businesses.
So, in the spirit of Hallows Eve, I've invited a team of professional paranormal investigators to find him.
The conditions for a ghost investigation couldn't be much freakier. It's Friday the 13th, and for the first time this autumn, the temperature is seasonally brisk. And it wasn't a gradual temperature drop either; it was more like someone turned down the thermostat just for the occasion. Julie, the founder and lead investigator of N.C. Paranormal, excitedly remarked on the phone beforehand that "colder weather tends to be better for paranormal activity."
A faint streak of light from the street creeps into the long, narrow factory room. Still you can barely make out your hand in front of your face. Infrared flashlights, periodically activated by members of N.C. Paranormal squad, save us from running into the skinny, toothpick-like columns spaced less than 10 feet apart in three even rows along the floor.
"I'd be surprised if we don't see a shadow ghost here," Julie says. In the paranormal community, Julie is considered an expert on shadow ghosts. She's been interviewed on the subject for paranormal radio shows and written articles on it for magazines. Like the name suggests, shadow ghosts look like shadows. Usually they are six to seven feet tall but can also appear in a "Mini Me" version in the three-foot ballpark. They are exceptionally quick, some have red eyes and many, oddly enough, have been spotted wearing top hats.
The eyewitness accounts of supernatural activity in our building, though, haven't been for shadow ghosts but for the most rare form of paranormal manifestation: a human specter with a body and face. So if we are about to see a shadow ghost, like Julie says, then it's going to be a ghost party up in here.
We come to an enclosed office that hasn't been used in 40 years, though it looks like it's sat dormant for twice as long. It's the kind of design that you don't see anymore in the current era of teambuilding and executive/employee egalitarianism -- an unwelcoming box with tiny panes for windows.
One windowpane, amid others made opaque from half a century of dust, is shattered, offering a glimpse (for anyone brave enough to take it) into the desolate office. I peer inside, expecting to see unknown horrors: Henry's maimed face or the skeletons of the people he's killed (maybe he's sticking around to protect his secret grave). Instead, an undead human voice breaks the silence, causing me to jump out of my skin.
"Kill the flashlights. Don't move. Don't talk." Julie says to us.
Julie is middle-aged with blond highlights and would look perfectly at place carpooling to soccer practice. Her husband Tony, also in the group, used to be in the military and still has the short-cropped hair and muscular build associated with his former profession. Both Julie and Tony work in law enforcement and opt not to give their surname because of the stigma attached to paranormal investigators.
Julie became fascinated with the paranormal growing up in a haunted home in Wilmington, N.C. Almost everyone else in her neighborhood (including the adults) had personal ghosts tales. Civil War battles were fought in the fields and woods around them (kids often found Civil War-era swords nearby), which Julie believes was the catalyst for all the ghoulish activity.
As a teenager in Wilmington, she began doing investigations and became hooked after seeing the legendary Maco Light. The story goes that in 1867, a railroad conductor named Joe Baldwin was in the caboose of a train that suddenly became unhinged. Another train was barreling towards him, and Joe began to swing his lantern feverishly trying to catch the attention of the other conductor -- but to no avail. The train slammed into poor Joe and decapitated him. His head, which was believed to have rolled into the surrounding swamp, was never found. Julie first thought the decapitation part was just lore, but upon doing research, she found a newspaper story that confirmed it.
At the spot by the tracks where it happened, a light can sometimes be seen swinging back and forth (supposedly it's Joe, lantern in hand, looking for his head). Many people other than Julie, including President Grover Cleveland, have claimed to have seen the Maco Light.
In Wilmington ghost investigations are almost the norm -- but not so in Charlotte. "Around here, we've hit a lot of brick walls," Julie says. "Charlotte is one of the worst areas for shutting the door in your face. It's the Bible belt; they think it's devil worshipping." That's why Julie and her team were excited about the investigation of the Music Factory, especially considering all the reports of hauntings.
A cleaning crew comes to the offices a few nights per week. Typically, a man named Shane cleans alone. He has seen the apparition on two occasions. The profile Shane gives for the Henry specter is as follows: the ghost is in his 40s with dark brown hair. He wears a long frock coat characteristic of the early 20th century, fancy shoes but no hat. When Shane spots him, Henry stares back for several seconds before dematerializing.
The copy machines and other electrical devices inside the CL office will often power up and run by themselves when Shane is cleaning. Other times, he hears footsteps on the wooden floors. "Sometimes when I come here I don't really feel nervous. Sometimes when I'm in here, I just want to hurry up and get done because it doesn't feel right," says Shane's aunt who helps him clean.
"You get cold chills," adds another member of the cleaning crew. Both say they've never experienced anything like the N.C. Music Factory at other businesses they've cleaned.
An architect, whose office is also in the Music Factory, joined our investigation because of unexplained encounters he's had in the space. While trying to unlock his office in the dark one night, he saw a white orb light up and dart across his field of vision. He looked around for a surface that could have possibly reflected light in such a manner but found none.
Creepier still, on more than one occasion, the architect has walked down the long runway-like hallway and heard chattering voices when he's reached the part of the corridor that is the original concrete floor of the old asbestos factory. He first assumed that some CL staffers were in the loading dock around the corner playing ping-pong. But when he rounded the corner, the loading dock -- as well as the rest of the building -- was empty.
Kaleena Peck, an employee of Limelight Events located across the hall from CL, says that the company's espresso machine turned on by itself one day and shot water all over the place -- a malfunction that had never before occurred with the machine when turned on normally.
The cleaning crew was so spooked that they brought in a Ouija board after hours to ask the spirit its name. The dark forces of the board guided them to "Henry."
Incidentally, N.C. Paranormal does not condone the use of Ouija boards. One reason is that any evidence found by the board can't be scientifically proven. Julie does, however, acknowledge its effectiveness in contacting spirits, as she writes in an editorial on her Web site: "I tend to look at using the Ouija in the same aspect as a séance, automatic writing or any other form of open spirit communication. You are giving spirits an easy means to reach you and anyone else in the room, oftentimes with disastrous results." Julie once knew a preacher whose daughter summoned spirits with the Ouija Board. After a glass screen door suddenly and mysteriously shattered, the preacher fled and sold his house.
Julie and Tony roll in two double-stacked plastic trunks and spend the first hour setting up thousand of dollars' worth of equipment. They place three infrared cameras at various points around the office and set up a desktop computer with a security program that can pick up and display as many 16 camera feeds. (The most they've ever used is eight.) A beach ball lying around the office is placed as a prop in the center of a stretch of flooring. If any activity or force passes by, the camera can track the movement of the ball. In some investigations, their fully charged video cameras have drained of power, which when coinciding with other paranormal occurrences, is about as much proof as they can hope for.
- Jared Neumark
- Papers dating back to the 1940s are sprawled across a desk inside the N.C. Music Factory.
Paranormal activity is typically accompanied by an acute temperature drop, so most investigators carry an infrared thermometer that shoots out a red led laser beam to measure surface temperatures. "A spirit needs to have energy to manifest, so to get that energy it pulls from the air around it," says Julie. "You'll feel an overwhelming numbness. It's nothing like the cold you feel from an air conditioner. There's no mistaking it." While investigating a bed and breakfast in York, S.C., Julie felt a paranormal presence behind her. Tony recorded a temperature of 75 degrees at her feet and 60 degrees directly behind her.
Another tool in the ghost investigator's utility belt is a handheld electromagnetic field meter that beeps like a gold-panning detector as it takes readings. The EMF device operates on the same theory as the infrared thermometer: spirits draw energy to appear. While conducting a private investigation in the kitchen of an old home in Staley, N.C., Julie says she felt a strong male presence in the corner. Anything over a 4 is rare, and the EMF spiked from a baseline reading of .2 to a whopping 6 in the corner where she suspected activity. Once she felt that it was gone, she took another measurement and the reading had returned to the low baseline.
The CL offices consistently recorded EMF measurements between 4 and 6. Although the readings were off the charts, Julie says the computers and metal piping in the space were probably responsible.
Back on the search for Henry, we pass by rooms that look like they've just been vacated. An old, dirty shovel leans against a column in one empty room. Opening another ancient office, we find folders and inspection reports dating back to the 1940s spread across the desk. The members of Julie's team are shutterbugs, snapping photos every few seconds in hopes of catching an orb or ecto mist (a smoky fog that accompanies ghosts like exhaust from a car). When Julie stops us to stand in silence, I stare at the little ray of light at the end of the room until my eyes get tired and I see splotches everywhere.
Paranormal activity had also been reported in the bathroom, so we return to the developed space to investigate the "loo." Shane says he's heard the manual toilets flush themselves, and his aunt claims to have heard a female voice moaning while cleaning the bathroom one night.
Julie sets up a camera as we sit in the dark and run an Electronic Voice Phenomenon test. A digital recorder can be set to filter out human voices and to pick up only nonhuman frequencies. Investigators ask questions like "What is your name?" and "Do you want us to be here?" then listen to the EVP later to see if anyone or anything answered. Julie says she is particularly picky with EVP evidence and doesn't use anything she must strain to hear. A ghost-investigating friend of hers sent Julie a recording of an EVP she conducted in a Knoxville, Tenn., house where a little girl had died. The recording, Julie says, made the hairs on her head stand straight up. A little girl can be heard humming and singing and then asking the investigators to "come play with me."
In the bathroom, I'm the first one to point out an odd noise that sounds like a laugh track on a TV sitcom or a cheesy game show. Others acknowledge they hear this bizarre noise. The office complex is behind a rail yard, far away from any residential area. And since it's approaching 3 a.m., it isn't likely anyone else is around outside with a radio or TV. I'm convinced that something fishy is going on, but Julie decides that the noise is probably the combination of a running toilet and the sounds of cars coming from Brookshire Freeway. (She has yet to review the EVP to make sure, but this served as ghost investigating lesson No. 1 for me: Your brain can turn nothing into something very quickly while sitting in silence and darkness.)
Before we leave the bathroom, Julie makes a final appeal to Henry, "If you are here, touch my hand." The tactic has worked in other investigations, she says, but not this time.
Despite the promising reports of haunting, we find no concrete evidence of paranormal activity. "It's really like fishing," says Jason, a member of the team. "You're sitting around waiting and waiting and waiting and nothing happens, but then you get something exciting and it makes it worthwhile."
If and when they find some activity, there's no ghost-busting device to capture a spirit. The most they can do is ask the ghost to leave, but the spirits rarely listen, says Julie. So, then, why even bother?
Jason says he joined the group because religion didn't have all the answers, and an experience he had at the school where he teaches in Monroe convinced him there was more out there to explore. Early one morning when the school's doors were still locked, he heard a "clip-clop, clip-clop" sound of multiple women walking in high heels. It was so loud, he turned around to say something to the ladies but no one was there. He searched all over the building and parking lot but couldn't find any real people. Custodians at the school also confirmed hearing phantom footsteps on stairs and voices calling their names. Even the principal reported hearing voices arguing while working late one night. Later, Jason discovered the school was built on top of a graveyard.
"It was such a realistic experience that I became obsessed with finding out more," he says. "I'm not doing this to capture proof; I want to see for myself." Jason joined another paranormal group, but they weren't as ethical; the goal wasn't to first try and rule out the paranormal explanation. A healthier balance of believers and skeptics exists at N.C. Paranormal, he says.
Much of Julie's motivation is to help people not feel crazy. She doesn't ever charge for private investigations and takes just as much pleasure when she can rule out a paranormal explanation, and conclude, for example, that a window is opening and shutting because of poor construction.
Still, she admits, witnessing the supernatural is what drives her. "I'm the kind of person that if something's happening and I can't explain what it is, it will drive me crazy until I see it," says Julie. "I've got to go after it. I've got to see what this is. I've got to see what else there is out there."
See also Charlotte's Most Haunted Places.