Ethnography

It was a cool fall day as the four of us walked around this old, forgotten place. There were so many buildings. All the buildings were about five to seven floors high. There was a hospital, a bowling alley, and even an old ice rink. The roads were long and the buildings looked so old and beat up. Windows were broken and boarded up, doors were missing, and vines grew up the brick walls. As we walked around more, we were in awe of how forgotten this place was and it seemed that time just stopped.
The subculture I’m doing this paper on is on a paranormal group. I am interested in this because it’s different and noone really does this kind of stuff.
We were the only ones in the whole area. We decided to walk into one of the buildings. Inside looked worse than the outside did. The walls had huge holes in them, parts of it were burnt and it smelled of dust and sulfur. There were still old saws, shelves, cabinets, sinks and toilets inside. Now it really looked like time just stood still, as if people were coming back to use them.
Being as curious as we are, we continued walking, going further in the building. One of the group members had brought a camcorder and a tape recorder to see if we could catch something. Then they started asking questions aloud to see if they could catch a response from something that wasn’t even there. They asked “If there is somebody here, could you please make a noise for us?” They also had reassured to what I thought was nothing “That we aren’t here to hurt you, we just want to know who you are and why you are still here.”
As I stood there chuckling to myself thinking why they were talking to air. At that moment we heard footsteps from the floor above us as clear as could be. Knowing that we were the only ones there, and we were standing still together, was strange. It kept on going to. As we were walking around more it got cooler and cooler, as if you were to walk into a freezer. Then we heard more footsteps, but this time it sounded like it was running back and fourth upstairs.
More intrigued, and in my desire to figure out what this actually was I started walking ahead of everybody else. As I walked further and deeper into the building I felt like somebody was following me, and it felt creepier as I ignored it and continued on. Getting to far ahead of the rest of the group, they told me to stop and wait for them, for nobody is to walk alone, but to always be with somebody else.
As I waited for the rest of the group to catch up I felt someone over my shoulder. A little bit scared to move I just stood there. Then it actually whispered something in my ear. I didn’t know what it said, because it didn’t even sound like English. But I know it whispered something because I felt the breath and heard the sound, as if someone would whisper into your ear.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, my heart beating out of my chest, and the goose bumps I got made me turn around as quickly as I could. When I turned around there was absolutely noone behind me. Seeing how fast I had turned around and how petrified I was, the group asked me what happened. So I told them, and they started to ask more questions aloud to the scary nothingness.
“If you’re still here can you please make another noise for us, or gently touch one of us?” they asked. We heard nothing after that. They had asked me if I was okay and comfortable enough to keep going. I said, “Yes, I’m fine now.” I was still stunned on what had happened but still intrigued at the same time. They reassured me that if I felt uncomfortable at any time that we would leave.
We finally went upstairs to see if we could hear the footsteps and running again. To try to figure out where exactly it was coming from. As we investigated the upstairs some more me and another person in the group had seen a dark shadowy figure walk to a corner. We stopped and looked at each other asking, “Did you just see that?!” The figure looked like a bulky, tall man, and he was wearing a uniform of some sort. So we know that it wasn’t any of our shadows.
We asked more questions aloud. “Can you tell us your name?” “How old are you?” “Can you show yourself again?” We did not see him again but we did hear a couple of bangs. Like someone was frantically trying to get out of a room. As I expected, we had to go check that out to. Asking more questions. “If you’re still here can you make that noise again please?” Again we came up short on the responses back from the noise that came from nowhere.
After that we headed back to the first floor. We went back through the rooms we had once been in, except it wasn’t so cold anymore in those certain spots. They had told me “Something was definitely there then.” “It always gets a bit cooler if something is present in the room.” A few moments later we heard a distant but clear laugh. A little girls laugh. We looked outside to see if anyone was out there. There was noone in sight. However we did see an old, broken, rusty playground, in the direction of the laughter.
They now wanted to go into the basement. At the top of the stairs leading down to the basement, one person heard a noise, he asked, “Did you hear that?” The rest of us didn’t hear anything, so we replied with a “No.” As two members of the group started to go down in the basement, another group member said, “I have a weird feeling about this.” I had asked “What kind of feeling?” He replied saying, “Like we shouldn’t go down there, they (meaning the active nothingness) don’t want us to be here anymore.” Respecting the rule that someone was feeling uncomfortable, we left the building.
We went back to the groups meeting place where they review their evidence. We reviewed the video and recordings. We also did a search on the history of the area and buildings we were in.
The history we researched stated that it was first a prison camp in World War Two. Prisoners of war stayed there, which explains the dark figure we saw wearing a uniform. After World War Two it became a facility for mentally disabled children whose parents did not want them. The history also told us some of the paranormal findings many people have caught. One being the little girl on the playground laughing. Some have actually seen her. It described her as a six or seven year old girl with blonde hair, wearing a dress. Another report stated that you can hear screams and banging at night.
Reviewing the evidence we had caught on video and tape recorder, we caught the footsteps coming from the floor above us, the little girls laugh and the frantic banging from one of the rooms. We had also caught the noise one investigator heard from the top of the basement stairs. The noise sounded like a light switch, one of those chain ones. We remember not seeing any lights at all throughout the whole building. Also right after that noise we heard a stern “Get out!” Then you hear a member of the group saying that he was uncomfortable and felt like we should leave.
This experience has definitely made me a believer of the paranormal. Everything we heard and saw came from nowhere, just from thin air. Noone else was around or in the building. It’s all definitely unexplainable, intriguing and a bit scary at first. I also enjoyed working with the group. They made me feel comfortable, safe and as if I was already part of the family.