coming down.”
“Any idea what she could have been feeling?” I asked.
John then told us about a murder that had taken place in front of the main building in 1986. A woman who had been involved in several domestic disputes with her ex-husband followed him to Observatory Place where she shot him three times, leaving him lying on the ground between his motorcycle and a large rock. She got in her car but then got out again and shot him two more times before finally driving away. The man died at the scene, and the neighborhood kids nicknamed the rock “Blood Rock.” The rock was moved from in front of the building to a side lawn, where it stands today.
Had the observatory visitor detected the ghost of the murdered man? DaShane set up an in-depth investigation at the observatory for a few weeks later. Maybe we would find out.
We all came together again on a bitterly cold night in February, minus my wife, who had sense enough to stay home in a nice warm house. The temperature was below twenty degrees, and snow flurries danced in the night sky. This would be a tough investigation since the rooms in which the telescopes were mounted were not heated.
Before we began, we all sat in the lecture room to discuss how we would proceed. DaShane is a young guy and has not been ghosthunting all that long, but I was impressed by his knowledge and thoroughness; he would call the shots for the investigation. He surprised me when he took a photocopied newspaper article out of a folder.
“Got something for you,” he said, a satisfied grin upon his face.
I read the brief article from The New York Times, dated September 30, 1943: Cincinnati, Sept. 29 – Dr. Elliot Smith, aged 68, astronomer at the University of Cincinnati, was found hanging from the telescope mounting at the observatory late today. Coroner Frank M. Coppock issued a verdict of suicide.
“Holy crap!” I said, impressed by DaShane’s research. “How did you find this?”
“Good job,” John Ventre interjected.
“You knew about this?” I asked John.
“Yes, but I wanted to see if you would find out about it in your investigation.”
“Have there been ghost stories connected with the suicide?” I asked.
“No one has ever seen anything,” John said, “but there is a story about a woman who called the observatory at a time when no one was in the building. She got a garbled man’s voice on the line. She couldn’t understand the voice and thought maybe it was a malfunction in the phone’s answering machine. The problem was that the answering machine had not been turned on. She happened to be calling on September 29, the anniversary of Smith’s suicide.”
I looked at DaShane. He just smiled, pleased with himself.
John went on to explain that Smith had some health problems when he received word that his son was missing in action against the Japanese in the Pacific. That may have been cause enough for Smith to take his life. Ironically, his son survived World War II.
Robert, DaShane, and I began our investigation in the main building while Lori, Crystal, and John Ventre worked in the Mitchel Building. We walked up the stairs to the domed room that housed the telescope from which Dr. Smith had hanged himself. Walking into the circular room was like walking into a freezer. Our breath condensed in the frigid air.
In the center of the room the huge telescope pointed skyward, easily twenty feet above our heads. Nearby was a tall ladder that looked more like a narrow set of bleachers mounted on wheels. Astronomers used the ladder to reach the eyepiece of the telescope. Or to commit suicide.
“Imagine,” I said, to DaShane. “He would have climbed up that ladder, swung a rope around the gearwork on the telescope, placed the other end around his neck, and simply stepped off.”
The three of us stood there for a moment, and that’s when we heard a low growl from somewhere in the room.
“What was that?” Robert asked. “Did you hear that?”
We had our cameras and voice recorders going and DaShane asked aloud for the growl to repeat itself, but nothing happened.
“We all heard it, right?” I said.
Robert and DaShane said they had. We agreed that it was a human sound, rather than an animal, and that it had definitely come from within the room. At that point, DaShane tried provoking the ghost by speaking aloud in the room, taunting the spirit for its cowardice in committing suicide.
I am not a big fan of provocation, as I believe we cannot understand the thoughts or motives of those who have passed on, and so we should treat them with respect. I had been on other investigations, however, in which spirits were provoked, with mixed results, so DaShane wasn’t doing anything different from what other investigators have done. In any case, it didn’t work.
“What do you say? Should we try the dowsing rods?” I asked.
I use dowsing rods not only to uncover areas of high energy but also as a means of asking ghosts simple “yes/no” questions. I ask them to move the rods for “yes” and to leave them be for “no.”
Robert and DaShane filmed me while I held the rods. When DaShane asked if there was a spirit in the room, the rods slowly crossed one over the other—“yes.” We tried to determine the identity of the ghost and received a “yes” response when we asked if it was a brother of Dr. Smith. We also received a ”yes” answer when we asked if there was more than one spirit present although, oddly, none were identified as Smith.
After a while our team switched places with the other team. We hurried down the sidewalk in the freezing air to the slightly warmer Mitchel Building. In the telescope room, we all heard far-off music, in an old-fashioned style, although it was too indistinct for us to identify the tune. Considering the isolated location of the building and the fact that it was late at night with nearly subzero temperatures outside, we could find no logical explanation for the music. We heard it for a little while, and then it was gone.
In a small circular office in the building we detected a hot spot on the floor that fluctuated between 90 and 100 degrees. We used a remote thermometer that shoots a laser at a given point and measures precisely the temperature at that point. Everywhere in that room, except for the spot on the floor, measured in the low 70s; even the heating vent was only in the 70s.
Intrigued by this hot spot—haunted locations often have cold spots—we went down to the basement. There, we found pipes running below the floor of the office upstairs and thought that we had discovered the source of that high heat, but the pipes were only in the 60-degree range.
After several hours we concluded the investigation and packed up our gear. We briefed John Ventre on what we had found and told him we would meet with him again after DaShane and his team reviewed the many hours of audio and visual data they had collected. I did ask John, however, if Dr. Smith had had a brother. John said he did not.
A few weeks later, we met one more time with John for the reveal, as some ghosthunters like to call it. Before we started, John told me that he had been wrong when he told me that Dr. Smith did not have a brother; apparently, he had a half brother. Aha, I thought. Was it the spirit of Smith’s half-brother that had answered my question that night?
DaShane presented his findings, which were much more extensive than I thought they would be. There were several EVPs (electronic voice phenomena) recorded that night, including
