I look for ghosts, but none will force
Their way to me. 'Tis falsely said
That there was ever intercourse
Between the living and the dead."
-William Wordsworth
The Affliction of Margaret
William Wordsworth published his poem The Affliction of Margaret in 1807. It was always seen as a "missing persons" poem, that is, the main character is a mother lamenting her lost son and wondering "what happened to him?" Because the character of the mother has no closure about her missing child, she conjures up a lot of "what if?" scenarios which range from "what if he's just snubbed me?" all the way to "what if he drowned when his ship sank?" It is the precisely this uncertainty that gives the mother her grief. Her son, we learn while reading the poem, has been missing for seven years.
Now, before someone points out the tragedy of a mother losing a child, we must be clear that the son is not a child. He is an adult, and she at first worries that her nagging over him getting a job and earning some money might have driven him away, but she doesn't really worry about him as long as he just gets in touch with her. This doesn't happen, and she is grief stricken that he is gone. No cards on Mother's Day, no flowers, nothing. The son just...is gone...
Here's the point. We expect communication, and when it doesn't happen, we feel frustrated. We think it is an easy thing, i.e., you tell me something, and in response, I reply. You get the answer (whether it's the one you want is irrelevant) and the communication is complete. When the communication cycle is one-sided, we feel...well...
So, this brings us to our latest investigation. Wheeldon Manor in Central City, Kentucky.
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| Wheeldon Manor |
When one thinks of the word "Manor" a huge gothic house probably comes to mind. This building, however, sits on a quiet street and could pass for any other large, relatively non-descript industrial structure. You could drive by it every day on your commute and not notice it, even though it is rather large. There is nothing on the outside to indicate it's anything special.
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| Wheeldon Manor storefront stretching down the street |
It is, in fact, a 23,000 square foot building that dates back to the 1920's. The upper floor (with the rounded windows) contains 11 apartments and the lower floor is a more open space, divided up for mixed purposes (like shops and such). Through its history, this building has been used as housing for railroad workers, a saloon, a newspaper office, and even a brothel. It has a long history, and the inhabitants who passed through all had their own histories and stories to bring with them.
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| A wider view of Wheeldon Manor. The railroad tracks are to the right of this photo |
Even though our group has been on other investigations since our last blog posting, those investigations were never written up in blog form (which is my fault...so...) Nonetheless, when we go somewhere large like this, it's important to get it documented (as well as we can).
Wheeldon Manor is used as a haunted house attraction during the fall of the year, and there were a lot of props and such lying around the building (so if you see a creepy clown or a severed hand in any of the photos, don't panic.) After a quick tour of the building, we decided some of us would stay in our makeshift "command room" while the others would go out into pairs into different parts of the building. Most of these were for E.V.P. sessions because while the voice recorder is running, you don't want another group banging around with their footsteps and conversations which would interfere with your recording.
So, Wheeldon Manor is divided into three distinct sections: the apartments, the boiler room area (where the large store front area is located) and the "maze" in the basement (constructed for the haunted house attraction).
The maze is a series of dead ends and corridors the owners of the building had constructed out of plywood. In the dark, it gets quickly disorienting down there.
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| The stairs leading down to the "maze" |
So after exploring the maze and bumping into a few walls, we explored the apartments. Most of the apartments are set up as "themed" rooms for when the building serves as a haunted house attraction. Some of the rooms are staged like crime scenes, others are simply empty rooms. The "staged" rooms are a little disconcerting until you get used to walking into a room and seeing, say, an evil clown standing in the corner.
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| Pay no attention to the clown in the corner... |
The apartments are odd-sized (there are 11 in all). It would be hard to imagine a person living in them, let alone a family, but nonetheless, they are all intertwined through a series of doors and passageways that are hard to navigate in the dark without some difficulty.
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| One of the apartment rooms. It was quite dark, but the flash from the camera lit everything up. |
Some of the apartment rooms were said to have more activity than others. Most of the activity from Wheeldon Manor was reportedly in the form of E.V.P.'s. We placed our stationary cameras and voice recorders in the spots we thought were the most likely to have activity.
Then...we...waited...
Note: We'll post part 2 of this update after all the evidence is shifted through, so stay tuned! Don't worry. I'm going to tie in the Wordsworth poem so everything will make sense in the end.
