The Case of the Baby in the Basement

My favourite episode of Ghost Cases.

Paul Kimball

The Algonquin Hotel ghost case

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In this short excerpt from the July 11, 2010 episode of the Paracast, which was our first show on GCN, I discussed perhaps the strangest and most compelling incident from the 13 episode of Ghost Cases - the Algonquin Hotel case from St. Andrew’s, New Brunswick.

To hear the entire episode, which also featured host Gene Steinberg and my fellow co-hosts Greg Bishop, Nick Redfern and Chris O’Brien, check out the Paracast.

Paul Kimball

Paul Kimball on Dark Matters Radio, 29 June 2010

A couple of days ago, on Tuesday, June 29, 2010, I returned for a 2 hour appearance on Dark Matters Radio, hosted by the one and only Don Ecker. Don and I covered a lot of ground, and in this episode of The Other Side of Truth I’ve excerpted the two parts that I found the most interesting. In the first, I discuss why I think the discovery of who we are as indivduals is the really important journey to be had in paranormal research. In the second, Don asks me to describe one of the strangest experiences Holly Stevens and I had while filming Ghost Cases in 2009.

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To hear the entire episode, and all of the other great episodes Don has done since his return earlier this year to live radio, check out the Dark Matters Radio archives.

Paul Kimball

Ghost Cases - conclusions

Ghost Cases wrapped up a few months ago, and I won't be doing another season (moving on to new projects). That doesn't mean that I won't continue to investigate reports of hauntings as the opportunity presents itself - it just means that I won't be doing it on television.

So, what conclusions have I come to after a season of "hunting" ghosts at thirteen supposedly haunted locations ?

First, I'm firmly convinced that after careful investigation the vast majority of ghost stories can be explained without reference to anything paranormal. Coincidences, tricks of light, fear, environmental stimuli – all can play a part in creating the appearance of something otherworldly.

There is also an element of wish fulfilment – for a variety of reasons, many people want to believe in the paranormal, including ghosts, and as a result they often find what they are looking for, usually by interpreting information to fit their own pre-conceived conclusions.

However, as with most things allegedly paranormal, there are some cases which seem to defy easy explanation. As I see it, there are two possible explanations for this.

The first is that the investigation may have been flawed, or incomplete, so that a non-paranormal answer is available, but just hasn’t been found yet.

The second is that there really is something paranormal happening.

Now, whether that means it’s the dead speaking to us from beyond the grave, or whether it perhaps represents some sort of natural phenomenon that our science doesn’t have the vocabulary to explain yet, I don’t know.

But we should always be conscious of the fact that there are a great many things about our universe, and ourselves, that we haven’t even begun to understand yet. To close ourselves off to the possibility that there might be more to heaven and earth than our current science can explain would be foolish, and… unscientific.

In other words, my conclusion about ghosts coming out of Ghost Cases is the same as it was going in, and can best be summed up by the motto I apply to all things, whether normal or paranormal:

Don’t believe.

Don’t disbelieve.

Think.

Paul Kimball

The Case of the Haunted Cell

Ghost cases that rely on single witness testimony are a dime a dozen. Without corroboration of some sort, as any good lawyer will tell you, it’s hard to prove that something anomalous might have happened. At the old jail in St. Andrew’s, New Brunswick, in February, 2009, Holly and I had the kind of encounter that every ghost investigator is looking for, where you have more than one witness both experiencing something at the same time, and that experience is backed up by independent “hard” data.

Sergeant Tom Hutchings was a 21 year old Royal Air Force armourer who was convicted and hanged for the brutal rape and murder of a local girl, Bernice Connors, who was just 19 years old, while he was stationed near St. Andrew’s in the Second World War. Hutchings, who was the last person hanged in Charlotte County, spent his final days in a small, dark, cold cell in the jail, within earshot of where his executioners constructed the gallows.

By all accounts, Hutchings was a model prisoner in his final days, passing the time quietly. He made his way to the gallows without a struggle, and had nothing to say by way of a final statement. Unfortunately for him, however, the gallows had not been built correctly. Instead of the quick death that he might have been expecting, it took Hutchings eighteen minutes to be pronounced dead, a hard way to go, even for someone who deserved it. Ever since, people had reported strange occurrences in the jail, and in his cell in particular, which led to speculation that the gruesome nature of his death had somehow trapped Hucthings’ soul in this spot, destined to haunt it for all eternity.

Given the circumstances, it seemed to me that his old jail cell would be an obvious spot to try and make contact with Hutchings, although in hindsight I have to wonder what I was thinking. Making contact with benign spirits is one thing, but should a person really be trying to meet the spirit of an executed murderer who might still hold a grudge?

Just for good measure, and on the theory of “in for a penny, in for a pound,” I came up with the bright idea of trying to antagonizing the spirit of Tom Hutchings by bringing along a noose on display at the jail as a trigger item. For a laugh, as much to amuse Holly as anything else, I placed the noose around my neck as we were locked in the dark cell by the crew. Holly and I sat next to each other on the remains of Hutchings’ old bunk, with an EMF meter beside Holly, but out of my sight, and we waited to see what would happen.

After almost thirty minutes Holly and I had not experienced anything other than the winter cold and some pleasant conversation. It was at this point that I decided to turn off the low-level camera light we had set up in one corner of the cramped cell. I thought that perhaps this would encourage Hutchings to come out and say hello. I took the noose off of my neck, and plunged us into almost total darkness, with only the barest, almost imperceptible hint of moonlight coming through the slit of a window in the wall of the cell. Little did I realize what I was getting Holly and I into.

Within minutes, something happened. I felt Holly shudder beside me, and then she exclaimed, “oh f-ck.” Now, Holly is about as level-headed as they come, and doesn’t frighten easily, so for her to utter a profanity out of the blue was an indication of just how shaken she had been by what she had just seen – a feeling of something moving in front of us. My response to her was, “that’s weird,” by which she thought I was responding to what she had experienced, but I wasn’t. Instead, while she was sensing something in front of us, I had felt a tightness wrap around my throat. I turned to Holly and said, “I was sitting here and all of a sudden I felt this cold go around my throat, like colder than the cold, the freezing bitter cold that it is in here anyway. I haven’t felt that since I was in here, and it went right around my throat.”

Holly and I had both experienced something at the same time. That was interesting enough, and a step beyond a single witness account in terms of reliability. What made it even creepier, however, was the fact, unknown to me until she told me, that Holly had glanced at the EMF meter at her side as soon as she sensed the “presence” in front of us, and it was spiking above the baseline readings that she had taken when she first entered the cell.

A presence in front of us, at the same time as I felt a deathly cold wrap around my throat, at the same time as the EMF meter spiked well beyond baseline readings. We were both pretty spooked, but we decided to stick it out in the cell a bit longer to see if anything else would happen, although we weren’t quite courageous enough to do so in continued darkness, as I turned our camera light back on.

And then, just a couple of minutes later, it happened again. Holly looked down at her EMF meter and said, “It’s up again… it’s up again…it’s up….and it’s gone.” She hadn’t noticed what I had been doing, but the camera definitely picked it up. I turned to her and said, “I cannot see the EMF thing. There will be camera confirmation on that, that just before you said that look where my head went, back down, I felt the same…” I couldn’t finish the sentence, because I was so shaken – it had been the same sensation of deathly cold wrapping around my neck.

Holly knew exactly what I meant. “Are you serious?” she asked. “Yup,” I replied. “I went, the camera will confirm, before you said it, I went like this…” at which point I recreated my head pushing down into my chest so that my neck would not be exposed. I kept my neck there as I said, “I don’t actually want to expose my neck at the moment.” Holly was genuinely concerned. “I don’t think I’ve seen you like this before, Paul,” she said. All that I could say was, “Yeah, well I have this thing about strangling and necks throats and stuff. Maybe in another life I was hanged. The noose was funny, because the noose was no threat, but this - who knows?”

We were both scared, and we called out to the camera crew that we wanted out of the cell. They obliged, and we made our way out of the cell block and back to the offices in the building as fast as we could. It wasn’t any warmer there, but it sure felt a lot safer. As we recounted what had happened inside the cell, one of our witnesses, Elaine Brough, who works as a guide on tours of the jail, told us that what we had experienced was pretty much exactly what other people had reported happening to them when they went into the cell. She hadn’t mentioned this to us before we went in, because she wanted to see if we would have the same experience without knowing what to expect. The only thing that I could think of to say to her was “mission accomplished.”

Holly and I would often talk, sometimes seriously and sometimes for a laugh, about how when the season was done we would hop on a plane, fly down to Peru, journey up into the rainforest to a village where a shaman would conduct a traditional native cleansing ritual, so that we could clear ourselves of any residual “bad energy” that might have attached itself to us. If there was any one case that brought us closest to booking those tickets, it was the old jail in St. Andrews, where neither of us could shake the uncomfortable feeling that we may have run across the spirit of a very, very bad man. For our sakes, I hope Tom Hutchings is still in that cell, still suffering for the horrible crime he committed forty-five years ago.

Paul Kimball

Paul Kimball - ghost investigation at the Waverley Inn

From my new podcast The Other Side of Truth:

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Ever wonder what goes on during a ghost investigation? Well, for me, it always involves, among other things, trying to make contact with the spirits (should they exist, a point on which I am definitely a sceptical agnostic) through whatever means necessary. In one of the episodes we filmed for the Eastlink TV series Ghosts Cases which I co-hosted in 2009, Holly Stevens and I investigated an old hotel in Halifax, N.S. that is supposedly haunted by the ghost of two spinsters who once owned the place, as well as the ghost of Oscar Wilde, who stayed there whilst on a reading tour of Canada. At the end of the evening, Holly set herself up in one of two bedrooms where allegedly paranormal activity had taken place, and I set myself up in another - a room with an old painting on the wall of three rather attractive young women playing music, which had fallen a couple of times with no explanation. What you will hear in this episode are excerpts from my investigation of that room, culminating in what had to be one of the most unique tactics I had cooked up in the entire 13 episode run to make contact!

Paul Kimball on Coast to Coast with Ian Punnett - Oct. 31, 2010

Last year I was lucky enough to be one of the guests on Coast to Coast AM's "ghost to ghost" Halloween special, which was cool. I like the cut of Ian Punnett's proverbial jib as host, and it was fun to chat about ghosts and Ghost Cases with him, and to hear some of the stories from the listeners.

Paul Kimball

Part I:



Part II:

Ghost Cases - opening title sequence

Tune into Eastlink TV on October 18, 2009, at 8 pm to see the premiere episode!

Paul Kimball

Quinan, Nova Scotia

In one of the strangest episodes of Ghost Cases, which we're editing right now, I found myself alone in the basement of an allegedly haunted farmhouse late at night, camera rolling, waiting for something to happen.

Holly and the rest of the gang were upstairs, in the kitchen, conducting what amounted to a seance.

As I review the footage, most of which consists of me talking to myself, at least until it happens (and to find out what it was, you'll have to wait until the broadcast), here are a couple of moments.

"I'm uncomfortable. This is not a comfortable experience. I don't have any funny, Paul Kimball wisecracks. This is uncomfortable. Assume for a moment that maybe there are spirits here, or whatever - upstairs, even if you do, you have that cameraderie, safety in numbers. There's something inherently completely idiotic about doing it on your own. There are places and times when I don't like being alone, and I have to admit, this is one of them. This was a completely stupid idea on my part. And yet, its like my friend Peter, who jumps out of airplanes for no good reason - he parachutes, which I would never do - but sometimes I think you just have to try it out, confront your fears, and hope that the chute pops, so... (nervous pause as I look around) - I hope the chute pops."

Then...

"As a kid, I used to sleep with the door open to my room, I couldn't sleep with the door closed. I used to go out of the room and go across the hallway, and stand outside my brother's room in the hallway. He'd keep his door mostly open too - sometimes I'd even go in his room and sleep on the floor. I didn't like being alone. It makes you wonder - as a kid, do you see things, and then as you get older, you sort of become more in tune with this world and less in tune with whatever other worlds there might be, or maybe it's just that your imagination is more active as a kid, or maybe it's both. I think maybe it's both. I feel like that kid right now, and I wish my brother's room was right over there, and I'd go stand out in front of it."

Scariest night I've ever had... coming to Eastlink TV this October.

Paul Kimball

Ghost Investigation Field Report #1

Much of my time these days is spent shooting a ghost investigation television series for a Canadian network. In each episode, I head out with my co-host Holly Stevens, shown above in front of the old Charlotte County Jail, to an allegedly haunted location where we interview first-hand witnesses, get the history of the place, and then investigate the stories ourselves. It's all a great deal of fun, and quite interesting as well... particularly when one comes up with an experience that is difficult to explain.

One such experience happened this past weekend, in St. Andrew's, New Brunswick, at the old jail. Built in 1832, the jail was where people sentenced to death would serve out their time until sentence was carried out, which was done on a gallows right next to the jail. The last person hanged in St. Andrew's was Tom Hutchings, an RAF sergeant convicted of murdering a local girl in 1942 while he was stationed in the area. According to witnesses, Hutchings has never left the jail, and continues to haunt his old cell.

As with all things paranormal, I'm an open-minded skeptic. I don't believe in ghosts, and I start any investigation by looking for logical answers to what people have seen or experienced. However, I'm unable to explain to my own satisfaction what happened to Holly and I this past Saturday evening in the jail.

In each episode, we tape a segment that we call "spooky hour", where Holly and I hang out in a particular spot in a haunted place, with the camera rolling but with the crew sent away, to see if we can experience anything. We have audio recorders and EMF meters with us, as well as the HD camera and a stills camera. In the first five episodes we filmed, there may have been some things caught on audio or that happened which will require further analysis, and Holly felt some things, but nothing happened to me personally.

That changed on Saturday night, as we sat in Hutchings' old cell, with the door locked and the lights off (except for the camera light and a small blue light). It was cold in there, because the building wasn't heated, and it was about -20 C outside, so we were bundled up, but my neck was not. As the hour went along, Holly and I were joking about Hutchings (well, mostly I was joking), and I was "challenging" him to appear if he really was there as a ghost. For several minutes, I had even hung a real noose around my neck as I sat there. Then, all of sudden, in one of those moments when Holly and I were being quiet, I had this feeling that the air around my throat had gotten noticeably colder - much colder than the room even. It was as if, to borrow an old song lyric of mine, the night wrapped around my throat. There was no choking sensation, but it was definitely an abnormal feeling.

Just as I was about to turn to Holly and say something, she whispered, "Holy f***" - at the same time as I had been experiencing the cold sensation wrapping around my throat, she had seen a shadowy shape against the wall - and the EMF meter had gone from its base reading of 0 to full, and then returned to 0 again. Now, there is no way that my feeling could have been influenced by either Holly or the EMF meter - I was looking away from Holly when it happened, and couldn't see the EMF meter in any event, as it was blocked from my view by Holly's body.

We immediately started to talk about what had happened, and decided, as "spooky hour" time wasn't done, to stay in the cell. About seven minutes later, the same sensation wrapped itself around my throat again - the camera caught me bundling up my coat against my throat... at the exact same time as the EMF meter spiked again!

Holly and I stuck it out for a few more minutes, and then had the crew release us from the cell. Once outside, we related our experience to one of our first-hand witnesses, a researcher who gave tours of the jail and the courthouse next door. She smiled, and said that she hadn't told us anything about what people reported happening in the cell, because she wanted to see if anything happened to us and she didn't want to influence us, but one of the experiences that had been reported is cold air wrapping around people's throats.

What makes this incident really interesting to me is that both Holly and I had a weird experience at the same time as the EMF meter spiked, and then my experience was repeated shortly thereafter with another EMF spike. We have yet to review the audio or video recordings to see if anything was picked up by those devices, but I can't help but feel that I may have had a brief meeting with Sergeant Hutchings, over sixty-six years after he was dispatched from this mortal coil.

Paul Kimball