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Shekinah in the Media>
The Republican American covers the Warner Theater Investigation
Did We Film a Ghost?
Waterbury, CT --
Aug 31, 2008 --
Here is the link to this article, with photos...
http://www.rep-am.com/articles/2008/08/31/lifestyle/363009.txt
Here is the text of the story...
Jeff Messenger bounded up the basement stairs, toward his mother's shouts emanating from the dark theater's auditorium.
It was after midnight. The theater sat deserted, save for Messenger, his older brother, their 72-year-old mother, a theater staffer, and possibly, they hoped, a ghost.
Hours into the late-night survey by ghost-hunting brigade Shekinah Paranormal Investigators, the matriarch of the Messenger family thought she saw something "snow white."
From the catacombs of the 77-year-old Warner Theatre, the Messenger brothers negotiated a confounding labyrinth bringing them backstage, down a few stairs and through a narrow doorway that dumped into the auditorium's shadowy blackness. Amid rows of empty seats, the viewfinder of a strategically placed infrared camera shined a solitary beacon. On rear walls, the subtle red glow of signs above doors implored: Exit.
"I watched it float out of sight," Cassandra Messanger's gravelly voice peaked in excitement as her breathless sons arrived by her side.
Jeff rewound the infrared-equipped video camera — one of three stationed around the Torrington performing arts center — and announced that he felt something.
"Literally, guys, something just tugged on my camera," he said, waving his hand.
Bam!
A bang sounding like the slam of a metal door echoed. Maybe Murph the rumored resident "presence" had decided to play along in the ghoulish game of cat-and-mouse, after all.
A man who seems to vanish into thin air. Pockets of unusually cold air. Lights that turn on and off by themselves. Performers who see something in the balcony out of the corner of their eyes.
Theaters accumulate their share of superstitious stories, and the art deco, 1931 former movie palace, is no exception. Just look at the ghost light, a single bulb left burning into the night on stages worldwide to ward off ghosts or to avoid fumbles over props and set pieces, depending on who you ask.
Eight years ago, the Warner turned its ghost light off after it ignited a fire that damaged the stage and orchestra pit. Reports of strange occurrences persisted, most blamed on Murph. According to lore, Murph was a drunk vagabond who broke into the theater one night to sleep and tumbled down the basement stairs to his death.
"I don't know where the story came from," said Carol Klapp, the Torrington Historical Society's librarian who researched spooky local lore last year for a Halloween cemetery and ghost tour. "That's not to say it's not true. Most of these stories do have some basis in fact."
Fact, as you may determine in the curious case of "Murph," often proves stranger than fiction. And despite "Ghostbuster"-like qualities of the Shekinah team's tools — the hand-held EMF meter measures electromagnetic energy and emits sounds like an AM radio between stations — fact is ultimately what the Messengers and two other paranormal teams investigating the Warner this year are after. They want proof.
Leaning on a gnarly wood cane, Cassandra Messenger explained how she came to not only believe in ghosts, but to hunt them through arthritis and aging: "I figure, if there's a God, there's a devil. In my mind, I want to prove both sides."
A longtime school employee, Cassandra raised her three adult sons in Barkhamsted, where they attended an Episcopalian church. Shekinah means presence of God.
Jeff, a University of Connecticut graduate, grew up with a grandson of the Warrens, a Connecticut couple famous for their investigations of haunts like the horror house in Amityville, N.Y. A scrawny, artistic kid, Jeff so feared ghosts he slept with a night light. Outings with the Warrens' grandson intrigued him enough that, four years ago when he met demonologist David Considine, Jeff signed up for a paranormal class.
Though he said he has attended a few exorcisms and seen some "pretty creepy" things, Jeff and the year-old Shekinah specialize in friendly ghosts, like Murph. Members of the nascent ghost-hunting group work by day at courthouses and casinos, among other places.
Holding a digital voice recorder, Jeff called hauntings unpredictable.
"You can go 99 percent of the time with nothing happening," said Jeff, eyeballing the black-and-white night vision images on the back of one High-8 camcorder. "It doesn't occur every night. It doesn't occur on cue."
Just as infrared technology "illuminates" a realm of spiritual activities the naked human eye can't see, Jeff said, so can sound recorders pick up EVP, or electronic voice phenomena.
A few hours into their search, the Messengers and Steve Criss, marketing manager for the Warner, piled into an elevator to try to detect whispers or utterances from Murph in the upper balcony — supposedly a favored hangout. The group stood in silence as the elevator gears hummed, pulling them upward. The door slid open, and they took seats in the back of the house. It was so dark you could hardly see a hand in front of you.
"If there's anything here, if it can turn that flashlight on, it's a small button on that flashlight," Jeff said, setting the light in the aisle.
Minutes ticked by silently. Jeff, a solidly-built bald man with a pale, almost ghostlike complexion offered: "It's been my experience generally that ghosts don't do requests."
It was time to give the spirit recognition, said Jeff, explaining the more recognition given a spirit, the more it is empowered. But there would be no "Murph are you here?" Provoking a spirit or addressing it directly invites it to bind itself to you, said Jeff, and that would not be good. Instead, they needed to talk about Murph and hope that he might later be heard on the recorder. They established a code word — Simon — to be uttered in every sentence so that if a voice from another dimension manifested on the recorder, it could be distinguished from those of mere mortals.
Jeff hit the record button and asked Criss, a four-year Warner employee, about Murph's tendencies. Talk turned to the graveyard-shift guy who locks the building, sometimes with his wife in tow.
"Simon ... his wife hears various voices here?" Jeff asked.
"Simon, yes," replied Criss.
Criss recalled feeling as if he wasn't alone while working late at night on a few occasions.
"I don't know what the term is, but you just get the willies — let me get out of here quick," he said, the group's flashlights dancing on the star-adorned ceiling as they left the balcony. "You feel the hairs on the back of your neck rise."
A woman from the box office reported seeing a haggard-looking old man who was there one minute, gone the next.
"We've sort of embraced the possibility that, yes, there is someone here," said Criss. "I haven't been sold on it ... If he is here, he's certainly more of a positive energy."
When a light bulb blows or ladder crashes, it's standard for folks to shrug and say, "Oh, that's Murph."
"We've got a little orb," called Jon Messenger, a former B52 Air Force crew chief, emerging from behind a black curtain obscuring stage left. He pointed to a fleck on a digital still camera's LCD screen. "Oh, there's two."
"Two?" said his mother, approaching.
Orbs, or circles of light seldom detectable to the naked human eye, Jeff explained, are considered controversial even among ghost hunters. The phenomena could easily be caused by a cloud of dust, an insect, a refraction of light. But to believers like the Messengers, they also could be a spirit's energy field, precursors to a full-blown apparition.
"They can sparkle like a lightning bug and they can appear as big as a basketball," said Jeff, who is writing a book about Connecticut hauntings. "They come, they flare and they fade."
Cooed Cassandra: "They're beautiful."
The "holy grail" of footage, as Jeff called it, would be an actual form. Jeff attested to accumulating video footage and photos that could cause pause among nonbelievers. They depict objects flying through the air, vaporous shapes and faces. The Messengers say they have seen "undeniable things," including a spooky figure that emerged from a grave in one of the cemeteries they've surveyed.
Ernest Cedar, Torrington's municipal historian, never heard of a real, living or rumored spiritual vagrant living or dying near the Warner.
"We have other ghost stories flopping all over the place," he said, adding he believes none of them.
It turns out, someone did take a life-ending tumble down basement stairs at the Warner 74 years ago. It made front-page news in the Aug. 2, 1934 Waterbury Republican: "E. Frost Knapp Torrington, Hurt; Retired Merchant Seriously Injured In Fall Down Theater Stairs." Attending the movies with his wife, Knapp left his seat to go to the men's room. He perilously mistook the door to the basement stairs for the men's room. After a conspicuously long absence, his wife and theater staff launched a search. They found Knapp at the bottom of the stairs, suffering from a fractured skull. He died four days later. His obituary noted how, curiously, Knapp was among of a trio of close friends from Torrington to suffer falls in the course of a week. One of those falls also resulted in death.
Knapp's death was the closest story to Murph's that the local historical society's librarian could find.
In the darkness after Cassandra's sighting, the group awaited the instant reply. The bang in the flurry of action, they discovered, may have been her cane falling. The tiny screen showed the theater moments earlier, in hues reminiscent of "The Blair Witch Project."
"You see it? I was shocked. It started in the back. It was a big, white orb. It came from the back and it descended into the dark. I heard two bangs against that wall before it happened," said Cassandra, showing her flashlight in her pocket, where she said it remained the entire duration of the so-called "light anomaly."
The men rewound the tape over and over, marveling. Too big to be an insect catching the light, or a dust particle, the voices in the dark determined.
"From what we witnessed so far there's definitely something," said Jeff, calling the giant orb on film unlike anything he's filmed so far. As the clock struck 1 a.m., the group wrapped up its ghost hunt, satisfied at the sight. Before exiting onto Main Street, they each uttered a so-called binding prayer, intended as a safeguard against spirits following you out the door.
Jeff recited his: "In the name of God, I command all spirits to remain here, and be at peace."
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