Nick on the Town

Something Strange in the Neighborhood

October 3, 2008 at 3:45 pm 5 comments

It’s a great time for ghosts in Sacramento.

Not only is Halloween right around the corner, but in just a few weeks Sacramento’s very own Amy Bruni will make her first appearance on the Sci-fi channel’s Ghost Hunters.

If you haven’t seen it, the show consists basically of a group of folks who visit haunted places and see if there are ghosts in there. Sometimes crazy stuff happens. Other times, not so much. Such is the life of a ghost hunter.

The window of time between learning she was going to be on the show and her leaving to do the show was very small, so I quickly invited her on a Sacramento ghost hunt completely skipping the part where I would have gained permission to access some of Sacramento’s haunted spots.

Anyhow, Amy agreed to take me on a mini ghost hunt in Old Sacramento.

Luckily for her, my ghost knowledge is pretty extensive.

Casper, Ghost Dad, Mr. Boogedy – I’ve seen’m all. Plus, I played a whole bunch of Pac-man when I was a kid.

Remember that movie with Tony Danza and Allyssa Milano where they move into a haunted castle? Ghosts and “Who’s the Boss?” are two of my favorite things, so you can bet I saw that one.

And how good was Ghostbusters?

Normally, I’d include a Patrick Swayze joke here, but I’m not cold hearted enough to pull one off right now.

I think my favorite ghost ever is probably the Ghost of Christmas Present. He’s just so awesome with his velvet robe and intimidating torch. And he’s like 100 feet tall and never stops partying. That’s the kind of ghost I wanna be.

So, going in to my ghost hunt with Amy I was feeling pretty confident in my paranormal knowledge…but maybe that was just the gin. The first rule of ghost hunting is that you can’t drink because if you find something awesome everyone will discredit it by pointing out that you were drunk. And they’d be right to do so.

Amy told me this very important rule repeatedly the night before during my quick ghost hunter orientation, but I still managed to completly forget it while I was waiting to meet her. Whoops!

Amy has been working with a group called TAPS which is how she got hooked up with Ghost Hunters. She has been hunting ghosts for a while and claims to have grown up with a ghost in her house. I’m not saying she didn’t.

The way her ghost hunts usually work is that she goes, with her ghost hunting posse and a bunch of recording equipment, into a haunted house, cave, boat or whatever. They will stay in the haunted spot all night attempting to talk to any spirits which might be wandering around with nothing better to do.

They use a bunch of these little digital recorders that hold like 30 hours of audio. So they’ll sit there, in a seemingly empty room asking questions to no one. The list of questions is a bit like filling out your MySpace profile.

“How old are you?”

“What’s your favorite song?”

“Do you have any hobbies?”

“Who are you friends with?”

So they ask all these questions, being sure to insert pauses for answers, and then they go back and listen to the recording and sometimes, this is what they tell me, there are answers in the pauses! For some reason ghosts prefer to cut out the middle man of audible verbalization and just put their voices directly on the recording. It’s called electronic voice phenomena (EVP).

And it’s more than just “Boo!” and “Whooooo-oooo-oooo!” it’s stuff like “Leave me alone!” or “Where’s mommy?” and other real disturbing stuff.

That’s just part of what they do, but you get the gist.

So, after I polished off my cocktail as Amy shook her head disappointedly at me, we headed out to the dark streets of Old Sacramento to track down some ghosts.

Oh and if you want to sound like an expert when you’re shuckin’ the jive with paranormal investigators, you call them “entities.” The ghosts, that is, not the investigator. Oh, and you call them “paranormal investigators” not “ghost hunters”…even though that’s the name of the show. And this time I’m talking about the investigators, not the ghosts. This paragraph has really spiraled out of control. Let me sum up: Ghosts are called “entities”, ghost hunters are called “paranormal investigators.” Got it? Let’s move on.

The problem with hunting for ghosts in Old Sacramento at like 8:30pm on a Thursday is that there are lights and people and noise everywhere. Again, I take the blame for not planning ahead. We forged ahead, resisting free candy samples and olde tyme photos, to our first ghost hunting grounds; a creepy section under the wooden Old Sacramento boardwalk where you can catch a glimpse of the city’s original level (they raised the streets up 1o feet to avoid flooding like 125 years ago).

I conducted a pretty thorough search.

We found nothing.

Then we moved on to the Riverboat Delta King which has long been rumored to be haunted. The Delta King used to offer luxury cruises between SF and Sacramento back in the 1920s. Today it’s permanently docked on Old Sacramento’s waterfront and it houses a cool hotel, restaurant and a couple theaters…at least one of which is supposed to house a ghost…errrr entity. Unfortunately, since I didn’t call ahead, I couldn’t get into the theater. So we just milled about the boat until we found an open room.

We turned off the lights and Amy started her recorder and the list of MySpace-esque inquiries.

Our problem was that we only had about two minutes in the room whereas Amy is used to spending about 10 hours somewhere. We were just hoping for a really accommodating ghost.

“We have to leave in about a minute so if you could let us know if you’re out there we’d really appreciate it.” Amy begged.

Alas, a review of the tape provided nothing.

One of Sacramento’s best ghost stories involves a little girl. I stole this from some website:

“Sacramento’s favorite ghost has to be May Woolsey, whose gravestone at the Old City Cemetery is said to emanate a positive energy. The 12-year-old girl died in 1879 from encephalitis, then appeared to her parents and told them she was not yet dead but just “waiting” for them on the Other Side. A century later, in 1979, a trunk of her toys and other “secret things” was found behind a wall in her former home. The contents of May’s trunk are now on display at the Sacramento History Museum.”

This is probably what she looks like:This story compelled us to visit the Sacramento History Museum which recently changed its name from the Discovery Museum Gold Rush History Center. Our thought was that if this ghostly little girl’s stuff was at the museum then maybe she was hanging out there too…like just staring at her stuff or something.

Of course, by this point the museum had been closed for hours so our big idea was just to stand right up against the exterior wall and beckon the ghost out. Not sure if you’ve heard, but ghosts can totally walk through walls.

So we gave it another shot, but once again we were shot down again, doomed to be EVP-less for the night.

I’m still pretty sure there are ghosts in Old Sacramento and if I had followed the simple rules which Amy laid out for me we would have had a much better shot. My bad.

Anyhow, I’d like to send out a big thank you to Amy for helping me out and I encourage you all to watch her Ghost Hunters debut on the Sci-fi channel on October 29.

I recommend just sticking around the Sci-fi Channel for a while to enjoy some of their other high-quality programs.

If you like ghosts, but don’t have access to your own ghost hunter, you might want to check out the official Old Sacramento Ghost Tours.

Also, the Old City Cemetery hosts “Lantern Tours” each year, but they have already sold out. Try to think of it sooner next year.

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