STRAWBERRY HILL MUSEUM

INVESTIGATION ALBUM - Part 1 (of 2)


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All of the photos in the Investigation Albums (parts 1 and 2) are captured from the video we taped during the actual investigation. They aren't of as high a quality as the images taken with our film and digital cameras and larger versions of them are not available, but they give a good feel for what it was like to be there. Browse through...and read what interests you.

When we first arrived at the Strawberry Hill Museum at 7:00 PM on 1-18-06 we were greeted by Francie Sachen, a member of the museum staff. As a young girl, Francie worked in the building when it was the St. John's Orphanage. Francie worked in the orphanage's laundry room in the basement... operating the huge industrial washers and dryers located there. Francie grew up in a house just a few blocks from the orphanage, and talking with her you become certain of her connection and loyalty to the Strawberry Hill Museum and the neighborhood that surrounds it.
With Francie's help we picked out a good location to set up our base of operations. Then Francie told us a little bit about her own paranormal experiences in the museum and took us on a full tour of the building from top to bottom. Due to the large size of the museum (42 rooms) and the level of detail that Francie was able to provide us about the building and all of its rooms, in was necessary to take pages of detailed notes. The information from those notes was used to build the History and Background sections of this investigation report. In this photo Mike Cross is taking a portion of those notes.
This is the Children's Room on the 2nd floor of the museum. When the orphanage first opened, this was one of the primary children's dormitories. Over the years as additions were added to the orphanage, a series of other dormitory rooms were added. As is mentioned in other sections of this investigation report, much of the museum was heavily decorated for the Christmas Holidays...making the location extremely beautiful. Another feature of the house you will see throughout these pictures are the dolls and mannequins that are part of the museum displays. These were fairly unsettling in the dark.
One of the hardest things we encountered was trying to sketch out maps of all four floors of the building. Due to the building's vast size and a series of somewhat confusing building additions added to the orphanage over the years, creating the maps was a two-man job. In the picture on the right Chris is adding the Children's Room to the maps on which he was working. At the same time, I was taking notes that I would later use to create my own maps. A week after the investigation, I combined Chris' maps with my maps to create the floorplan maps found throughout other sections of this report.
Francie has been giving tours at the Strawberry Hill Museum since 1988, and we could not have asked for a better guide. She loves the beautiful old building, she knows everything about the location on a room-by-room basis, and we found her to be extremely patient, good-humored, and generous. Consider that she was there on her own time, at odd hours, answering an endless series of questions by a group of paranormal investigators. And through all of that she made us feel extremely welcome...well, you can understand why we have nothing but nice things to say about her and her professionalism.
In the picture on the right, you can see Shawn moving through the room with a thermometer. Shawn's using a digital thermometer with two different probes for measuring temperature. This investigation made it clear to us that this simple piece of equipment was extremely lacking. This motivated us to search for a piece of equipment that can give air temperatures on a "real-time" basis and we found the TIF 7000 thermometer/pyrometer. It is far superior to a standard thermometer probe or an IR temperature gun...and Mike put forward the money to purchase this new piece of equipment for Ghost Vigil.
Each member of Ghost Vigil Investigations brings different talents, experiences, and knowledge to the team. Several of us have experience conducting investigations and gathering evidence professionally in other fields, others have experience with digital images and photography...or an interest in audio processing and recordings. But we are not scientists. We are not experts. We didn't go to school for this and this is not our career. Ultimately, I think we are all motivated by an intense interest and curiosity about the unknown...and we are seeking to understand these reported phenomenon.
Here Dave is taking EMF readings with an Electromagnetic Field detector. Many things give off EMF...power lines, transmitters, batteries, light fixtures, microwave ovens, etc. Over time, paranormal investigators have found a correlation between unexplained EMF readings (EMF not coming from an obvious source) and the presence of paranormal activity. No one is sure why this is or how it works. One of the major pitfalls of using an EMF detector is the wide range of electronic items that give off EMF. In this picture, Dave is holding his EMF detector closer to the light fixture to determine if its the source of the EMF he is detecting.
This photo was taken in the Master Bedroom. Ghost Vigil investigators are extremely serious about our methods of collecting evidence, our in-depth and grounded analysis of the materials we gather, and providing a comprehensive and detailed investigation report. But we never lose sight of the fact that we are doing something that we enjoy...something that can really be a lot of fun. In this picture, Francie has just said something that got everyone to laughing. I think some people see paranormal investigations as grim or morbid, but I would not agree.
While the Strawberry Hill Museum has a brand new boiler in the basement, the pipes that run the steam heat to the house are extremely old. The pipes in this picture run along the walls underneath the bay windows in the Master Bedroom. Pipes like these can be seen throughout the house. The boiler and steam heat are so noisy and loud, that Francie turned them off during our 4 hour investigation. I felt these pipes 2 hours into the investigation and they were still warm and providing heat to the room. The bed of the Master Bedroom was placed into the bay window, placing steam pipes on three sides of the bed.
This picture was taken in a larger room that was created for the museum by removing the wall from between two thin dorm rooms. During the Christmas Holidays the room has Christmas trees decorated by different ethnic groups and organizations in the area. I think I speak for all the other Ghost Vigil investigators when I say that we couldn't get over the beauty of the museum. The building, its woodwork, stained glass, and antiques are beautiful enough...but with the addition of Christmas decorations almost everywhere...it was really something to see.
This picture was taken in what is called the Girls Dormitory. It is a large museum display room that was created by tearing out walls between the Girls Dormitory, part of the Boys Dormitory, and a bathroom area. It is filled with family heirlooms brought over from the Old Country, traditional ethnic clothing, and family photos showing generations of families that built their lives in this area. A couple of our investigators felt cold spots in this room. For a full discussion and analysis of this phenomenon, see the Strange Events section of this investigation report.
  Besides exhibiting some cold spots during the investigation, the Girls Dormitory was also the site of some reported paranormal activity that occurred over the 2005 Christmas Holidays. Some straw under a Christmas tree was strewn across the floor, the wooden manger in the nativity scene was rotated around 180 degrees, and a 2nd baby Jesus was added to the nativity scene. And all of this took place over night when no one was in the building. For more details on this story, see the Background section of this investigation report.
In the older portions of the Strawberry Hill Museum...the portions that were part of the original family household...things got a bit cramped in tight hallways and cramped servants' stairways. The image on the right was taken in the hallway directly outside the servant's quarters on the 2nd floor of the museum. Our five investigators and our guide would sometimes crowd into a little hallway or room in the attic or the basement, and then we'd have to work our way back out of it. In the background Shawn is getting ready to check out a small hallway off the main 2nd floor hallway.
  The picture on the left was taken in the hallway of the 3rd floor (or attic) of the museum. Dave can be seen in the reflection of the mirror attempting to take EMF readings with an EMF detector. This hallway was so full of wiring conduits (some of which can be seen in the right half of the photo) that it was impossible to get reliable readings. This was our first investigation with the EMF detector along, and Dave did an excellent job getting readings and taking detailed notes throughout the house. To see his readings, check out the Strange Events section of this investigation report.
In the picture on the right Dave, Mike, and Shawn check out the Ballroom on the 3rd floor of the house. When the original family household was built, it was the style of the day to include a 3rd floor ballroom into the layout of a new house. When the house became an orphanage, the nun's eventually converted the ballroom into a classroom. Since the orphanage has become a museum this room has not been remodeled. The large chalkboard is still on the wall and the carpet is still a strange green color. At this time this room is not open to the public.  
In the picture on the left, Shawn can been seen in the Ballroom taking base temperature readings for each room of the museum. This room, like the rest of the rooms in the building, is heated with steam heat. But you can see in the background of this picture the radiator that replaced the original series of horizontal pipes that exchanged heat into the air. We were able to locate the holes in the woodwork and the empty metal brackets where those original pipes used to be. At this point the pipes have been completely removed in this room in favor of this "modern" radiator.
In the picture on the right, Chris and Mike continue taking notes recording details from Francie's room-by-room tour of the building. Unlike the popular notion of paranormal investigation (from pop culture sources such as the movie Ghostbusters, and the television shows Most Haunted and Ghost Hunters), in the real world an investigation means a lot of research, note-taking, and long hours of examining the wide variety of potential evidence you manage to gather. Its an enjoyable field to get into, but a fair number of people who try it out eventually quit once they figure out how much work it can be.  
In the picture on the left, Dave continues to take EMF readings. And once again, he carefully tracks an odd reading on the EMF detector back to a light fixture. Visible behind Dave is one of the ballroom windows that provide an excellent view of the West Bottoms of Kansas City and the tall bluff upon which downtown Kansas City is built. The woodwork in the ballroom was very interesting to us. It appears to be sort of a 1960's style design, but Francie believes its the original woodwork put in when the house was built in 1887. The original steam pipe holes and the metal brackets that held them support her belief.
The image on the right is shot from inside the 3rd floor of the museum's tower...out into the large empty room at the center of the 3rd floor. Shawn, Dave, and Francie are visible in the camera shot. Francie is telling us that before building additions were added to the orphanage, the nuns used to sleep tightly packed into this large 3rd floor room...and even put a few beds inside the tower room as well. The same woodwork, which we believe to be original to the house, is visible behind them in this room also. The closet where an apparition is reported to have appeared is located in that large 3rd floor room.  
The picture on the left is a picture of Francie opening a closet on the 3rd floor of the museum. This closet has quite a paranormal history to it. Reportedly a female caterer for the wedding of the Mayor of Kansas City, Kansas took it upon herself to go on a "tour" of the museum while she was setting up for the event. When she got to the 3rd floor, she opened this closet to see what was inside. And that's when a full-bodied apparition of a man appeared and chased her down the stairs. For the full details on this story see the Background section of this investigation report.
In this picture, Francie is leading us down from the top floors of the museum towards the basement for the final portion of our tour. This particular stairway runs from the 2nd floor to the 1st floor and is outfitted with a mechanical lift chair donated to the museum by a generous benefactor. We took an interesting photograph in this stairway, but upon further analysis...the photograph had a natural explanation. For the detailed analysis of the photo, see the Unusual Photos section of this investigation report.  
Early in the night, Dave found what seemed be an unexplained Electromagnetic Field in the Children's Dining Room. His EMF detector was registering off the scale, and moving it back and forth was not helping us locate a natural source (wiring, an appliance, etc.) for the EMF readings. Finally Dave moved downwards with the detector, and discovered the source was wiring conduits running under the floor. The picture on the left was taken in the basement...and shows the wiring conduit running along the ceiling (above the water pipes)...directly under the spot that Dave detected the EMF.
This is the orphanage's basement laundry room where Francie worked as a young girl. The large black cylinder is a huge gas-powered clothes & bedding dryer. An even larger barrel-shaped washer was on the other side of the room. The breaker boxes on the back wall are an incredibly strong source of Electromagnetic Field readings. Throughout the house, there were natural unshielded sources for EMF, making the EMF detector very unreliable as a detector of unexplained energies. There were mannequins everywhere in the museum...even down here in the laundry.  
Francie stopped us in the Big Kitchen in the basement of the house to tell us a story about the "Lady in Red." Sometime in the mid-1990's some ladies were preparing food for an event at the museum, when a lady wearing 1940's style red clothing came in through the door in the picture and asked, "Where is the Priest's House." When she received her answer...she turned and left. This is the second time the "Lady in Red" appeared at the museum, the first being in the 1940's. For more details on this paranormal story visit the Background section of this investigation report.
Click here for Investigation Album Part 2 (of 2)

And check out the sections of this investigation report listed under the category of "Analysis" for detailed discussions and analysis of the evidence we gathered during this investigation...

-Mark Stinson


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