Beatrice and Gertrude
“Oh, great names for girls,” Jill Thompson said.
She quickly corrected herself.
“Oh — sorry, sir,” she said. Then, apologetically: “Watch, 50 years from
now they’ll think we were all weird.”
She was speaking with a thin man, wearing a handlebar moustache and his
hair slicked back.
His name is “Dan,” or “Stan,” and he is in his 30s or 40s.
He is no longer living.
Thompson, vice president of Washington State Paranormal Investigations
and Research (WSPIR), was conducting an investigation in a train car
outside the Issaquah Depot Museum Saturday, communicating to a spirit
through one of the group’s psychics.
A minor faux pas excluded, her objective is to treat any spirits that
the group encounters with the utmost respect.
“We feel that good energy promotes good results,” said Thompson the day
after the investigation. “They know we are not there to do any harm, to
be disrespectful.
“Because we are respectful, because we all get along so well and have
the same goals in mind, they recognize that.”
Paranormal investigators
WSPIR, which draws its members from around the Puget Sound region, uses
both technical means and the psychic sciences to gather evidence of the
paranormal in investigations and assessments throughout the state.
Eight members of WSPIR (pronounced “whisper”) and a guest had gathered
inside the Issaquah Depot Museum after 7 p.m. to conduct Saturday’s
investigation.
With special permission from the Issaquah Historical Society, WSPIR
president Darren Thompson had arranged for the group to conduct an
investigation in three of the society’s properties. (Darren and Jill are
husband and wife; the couple lives in Sammamish.)
To ensure the integrity of the investigation, Darren Thompson was the
only member with prior knowledge of the locations of the assignments,
which included two rail cars at the depot and an auto repair warehouse
west of Gilman Town Hall.
Before the investigation started, the group gathered in a circle to
conduct an opening.
Jill Thompson began by asking for cooperation from the spirits, then
told the spirits that the group would be taking audio and video
recordings and photographs.
“Some members can hear you without benefit of the recorder — please feel
free to speak with them. They will try to respond to you,” she said.
“We’re not here to change anything, we just want to know what’s going on
with you. Thank you.”
The group then divided into two psychic teams and a technical team.
Each psychic team consists of a psychic to describe the contacts and
observations that he or she might make during the investigation, a
psychic observer to record what the psychic reports and a videographer
to document the investigation.
The technical team uses high-tech devices to measure changes in
electromagnetic energy and temperature that could suggest the existence
of paranormal phenomena.
Darren Thompson directed the team of psychic David Vacknitz, psychic
observer Jill Thompson, and videographer Terry Cranston to begin the
investigation in the U.S. Army Transportation Corps rail car outside the
depot.
He then led the second psychic team to an undisclosed location, marking
the last time the two psychic teams would interact until the
investigation was finished.
Riding the rails
Vacknitz’s psychic team entered the rail car, which has been converted
to a small museum layout, with examples of mining and logging equipment
and a model railroad display at the rear of the car.
Outside the sun was setting, casting inside the car a faint glow that
gradually faded as dusk progressed.
Once inside, Vacknitz made some initial observations.
“I see a group of guys playing cards, or some kind of game,” he said. “I
keep seeing pictures of things, but I don’t know what they are.”
Jill Thompson recorded Vacknitz’s comments in a logbook as Cranston
paced up and down the car, alternately shooting video and snapping
photographs.
When Cranston felt a flash of heat on the right side of her face, Jill
Thompson recorded that, too: Anything that goes undocumented during an
investigation is inadmissible once the teams regroup to wrap up the
assignment.
Several minutes into his time in the car, Vacknitz said he began sensing
a spirit named “Dan” or “Stan” (for convenience, the group ultimately
settled on Dan, but apologized if they were addressing the spirit
incorrectly).
Vacknitz then said he saw a large mirror, and then a boot with metal
over the toes.
As he described the items, Vacknitz bristled slightly, self-consciously.
“I feel stupid saying the stuff,” he said.
Vacknitz then described a picture of Dan’s wife, wearing a full-length
dress and her hair pinned into a bun.
Jill Thompson asked Vacknitz if Dan had any children, and the psychic
responded immediately with two.
“Does he have boys?” Jill Thompson asked, through Vacknitz.
“No, girls,” he responded. “Elizabeth…Beatrice. Either Beatrice or
Gertrude.”
The spirit also confirmed that it’s dry in the afterlife.
“He wants a drink,” Vacknitz said. “He wants some brandy.”
Shortly before 8:45 p.m., Vacknitz took a seat on the floor, across from
an old scale. Thompson sat in a chair to the left of the scale, and
Cranston stood on the other side of the scale, videotaping.
Vacknitz had just asked Jill Thompson about the age of the rail car, and
how long it had been in use.
Then something unusual happened.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, did you touch that?” Vacknitz said, pointing to the
balancing arm of the scale.
Jill Thompson replied that she heard something tapping.
The scale arm had moved, Vacknitz said, rising and falling on its own.
Then it happened again.
“There it goes,” he said, calmly. “Up…down. Up…down.”
The psychic team and a reporter watched as the motion continued, slowly
and steadily, for several seconds.
Then it stopped.
Vacknitz requested that the scale be moved once again, but whatever
force or action had done so would not oblige.
“I can’t believe that — I mean it’s like it takes a while to sink in,
but — something’s — going on,” Jill Thompson said, moments after the
action had ceased.
In years of paranormal investigating, Jill Thompson said she’d
experienced a similar phenomenon only twice before, and both times
during an assignment in one of the largest homes of New Orleans’ Garden
District.
While touring the home, Jill Thompson said that she and several other
people, including the building’s historian, saw the counterweights
strung from a chandelier swaying in different directions. The weights
themselves were out of reach of the people in the room, she said.
In the same house, she and several other people were in a different room
when the lights from another chandelier suddenly came on.
The scale in the train car marked the third such occurrence.
But rather than celebrating what might have been an extraordinary event,
the group quickly set out to debunk the event: bumping and prodding the
scale platform, swinging the weight that dangled from the arm that moved
and lifting the arm up and down manually.
Each test failed to reproduce the motion as the group had witnessed it.
“Darren drilled into all of us: Try to find the natural cause of
things,” Jill Thompson said. “And I don’t know what else we could have
done.”
Darren Thompson, the self-described “dream crusher” of the group, said
after the investigation that seeking a natural explanation is an
important component of WSPIR’s work.
“The way we go about it is we try to find any reasonable means to
disprove it,” Darren Thompson said. “You can never actually prove
anything is paranormal phenomenon, all you can do is prove that it
isn’t.”
What is left — what can’t easily be proved as natural phenomena — goes
into a file called the “phenomenon report.”
Darren Thompson said he sees the contents of the phenomenon report not
as indisputable proof of the existence of the paranormal, but as “fodder
for discussion.”
Corroborating evidence
The experience inside the rail car certainly made for lively discussion
when the group convened its investigation shortly after 11 p.m. inside
the Issaquah Depot Museum.
At the wrap-up meeting, Vacknitz’s team learned that the second team had
a similar but unique encounter with the scale in the U.S. Army rail car.
In that instance, psychic Regan Vacknitz, psychic observer Julie Whitman
and videographer Nikki Henderson all said that the weight suspended from
the scale arm had begun swinging back and forth, without the arm itself
rising and falling.
Video taken by David Vacknitz’s team proved inconclusive, but Nikki
Henderson’s video shows the weight swaying back and forth, Darren
Thompson said.
That both groups experienced variations of the same phenomenon makes the
evidence even more compelling, according to Darren Thompson.
It’s also a more gentle type of occurrence than the stuff of scary
movies.
“It’s not horrifying: It’s something that people can kind of grab their
minds around,” he said. “If someone can come up and say, ‘You know, this
is what happened,’ that’s great. Then it’s explained.”
He likened the brief but thrilling encounters, wrapped within a
five-hour investigation, to watching a sport fisherman land a trophy
bass.
“A paranormal investigation is like a fishing show,” Darren Thompson
said. “It takes a lot of editing to make it look exciting.”
|