Private Residence - Oshkosh, WI

Investigators present on the March 25th investigation: Matt from Midwest Preternatural Research, Katie and Keith from Fox Valley Spirit Hunters, and Kurt and Mark from HPI.

Investigators present on the June 10th investigation: For the follow up investigation, we did two shifts. For the daytime shift (about 1PM to 6PM), Matt from Midwest Preternatural Research, Mark, Rhonda, Kurt and Barry from HPI were present. For the nighttime shift, Katie, Keith and Jody from FVSH were present.

Also present: Client (H)

Equipment used: Trifield Standard EMF meter, Cellsensor EMF Meter, Digital Cameras, Sony camcorders w/ nightshot, Digital Voice Recorders, Temperature Reader, Motion Sensors

Report written by: Matt

Background: This was the second of two investigations for this family (you can read about the first here). First we investigated the Daughter L's house and now we were investigating her Mother H's house. L and H had experiences in the previous five houses they lived in together. Now that L is moved out, she is having experiences in her house while H who lives a few blocks away is experiencing something similar in her own home. The house is a two story w/ basement, built in 1886; at the time of the investigation, H and her husband live on the main floor with a son (age 16) and daughter (age 9) and two cats, and a separate tenant lives upstairs. For the investigation, H talked to the upstairs neighbor and asked him to step out for the day so we could minimize noise contamination.

H moved in in October 2005. She said she didn't come in with any ideas. The previous occupants moved out suddenly, but they could have had any reason. She doesn't know if they had experiences or not. The activity was sporatic at first (day and night), then mostly during the day. She was in the kitchen when she thought she saw a wisp of black hair out of the corner of her eye. Her first thought was that it was her daughter, but her daughter doesn't have black hair and was playing outside at the time. She also reports seeing shadows in the hallway that connects the kitchen to the living room. She had her husband drive by the house a couple times with the headlights on to see if that would recreate it, but it didn't look the same. H's daughter L, whose house we investigated before, also reported seeing black shadows in her house.

H said she doesn't feel comfortable sometimes, like something is behind her or the air is thicker. She said she gets these feelings from the pantry in the kitchen and when she's sitting in a chair in the living room. Sometimes when she's in the bathroom cleaning it's like someone's watching her. She said it feels female. She has been poked, and has had something she calls a "heat slap" where she can feel the heat on her face. The physical touching happens on a constant basis. She's also heard footsteps and reports hearing a child's voice.

Her youngest daughter, 9, has reported seeing a man in 1800s clothing with short black hair. They haven't talked about ghosts in front of her because they don't want to scare her or influence her.

H also says she saw the front door handle turn. The door was shut tight and nobody was on the porch.

Our investigation: Matt arrived early to interview H. The others got there a little later, and then we set up and started the investigation at about 1PM. We began by treating it like any other investigation. We set up video cameras and motion detectors, and then we went room by room as a group and asked EVP questions and took pictures and EMF and temperature readings. We spent about a half an hour in each room. After about 3 hours, since nothing was happening we decided to try something different.

So we all went in the living room (the client, too) and sat down and just talked normal like we weren't even on an investigation. We think L and H could be experiencing poltergeist activity, and since psychokinesis is unconscious, we thought we might get better results if we stopped waiting for something to happen. And that's when we all heard this sound. Matt immediately went outside and ran around the house to see if there were any people outside, and the only people were some kids playing across the street and down the block. Kurt went in the kitchen (where it sounded like the sound came from) to see if maybe one of the cats was in there. There wasn't. However, we didn't have anybody sitting outside or in the kitchen at the time we heard it, so we can't say anything with 100% certainty.

We went back in the living room and sat down again and continued to talk normal to see if anything more would happen, but nothing else did. We wrapped up at about 6PM. We came back for a follow up investigation a couple months later and tried the same method, but we didn't experience anything more.

Findings: Besides the sound that we heard, when Matt was interviewing H right before the first investigation, his voice recorder shut off right at the part in the interview where he first started to suggest that it may be her causing the activity to occur through psychokinesis. The batteries did not run out, and Matt did not accidentally turn it off himself because both he and H remember him turning it off later. However, it could have just been a glitch.

Final Analysis: I think H is an intelligent woman. I don't think she goes into each of her houses expecting them to be haunted, or that she has an overactive imagination. I think what could be going on is H and her daughter L could both be poltergeist agents. This could explain why they've had experiences in every house they've lived in, and how they can be living in two separate houses and both be seeing some of the same things like the shadows. In theory, they're not two separate cases, they're both experiencing the same thing.

Contrary to what you see in the movies, poltergeists don't actually have anything to do with ghosts. It's an unconscious form of Psychokinesis called Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK). Sometimes when a person is under a great deal of stress, they can unconsciously do things like make banging sounds on the wall or make their own bed shake because they're rebelling on a subconscious level. They don't know they're doing it and they're not trying to hurt anybody. Physical things like a door handle turning could be Psychokinesis, and things like hearing voices or seeing shadows could be something projected from the subconscious of the person who's causing the activity. Or there could be a normal explanation. Since RSPK is caused by stress and trauma, and families often share problems, it's not unlikely that two members of the same family living in separate houses could both be having experiences.

H said that her family has a lot of trauma in their lives, and when I asked her she said that the activity does always seem to happen when she's home and when she's having a bad day. She said she doesn't know if her husband has experienced anything or not while she's out of the house. If he does, she says he doesn't talk about it.

The activity at L's house started the night she brought home her first baby. She had been in labor for a long time and was stressed out. That night she experienced sleep paralysis (which is also caused by stress) and saw shadows in her room. The shadows were a hallucination caused by the sleep paralysis. But she thought they were coming for her baby. She wanted them to get out and says she saw the bedroom door fly shut. This was probably Psychokinesis. After that, that's when she and the other occupants started seeing black shadows in the house all the time. In theory, L was so freaked out by the sleep paralysis and thinking it was real that she started telepathically projecting her fears to the other people in the house, and that's how they were able to see it too. This is of course all just a theory only.

I think some of it has a normal explanation too. We found high EMFs behind the chair in the living room where H said she felt uneasy. That could also explain some of the feelings of being watched she said she gets in the kitchen and when she's cleaning the bathroom. However, it would not explain H's claim that she saw the front door handle turn.

The only time we experienced anything was when everybody was sitting in the living room talking like normal. However, maybe if we had continued to go around asking EVP questions, etc. and acting like we were on an investigation we would have heard the voice anyway. We were only asking EVP questions and taking pictures and EMF readings for three hours, so we don't know if hearing the voice really had anything to do with trying a different method or not.