IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?

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IS THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE?
January 24, 2010
By ANGELA BRANDT
Independent Record

Blood drips from the faucets. Crimson-colored stains reappear after being scrubbed. An apparition of a student with his head split open who died after slipping and smacking his head on a sink can be seen in the mirrors.
Carroll College is home to many ghost stories. A few of these tales center on the fourth story bathroom at St. Charles Hall.
St. Albert’s Hall also is supposedly haunted by a nun who jumped from a window to her death. People who work in the building have reported that they can hear someone walking up and down the hall.
“Sometimes people working at night have a feeling of someone ushering them out and saying ‘go home,’” Scott Forthofer, assistant director of community living said.
Paranormal investigator Christopher Moon recently came to campus with his “telephone to the dead” for a presentation. He chose St. Albert’s Hall, which now houses offices but was previously a nunnery, to attempt to communicate with the spirits.
Moon said he purposely does not want to hear the stories surrounding a reportedly haunted place because it could sway his impression of the location.
“I’m going in with a clean slate to see what we find,” he said before leading about 60 students into the building.
Moon’s phone, which resembles a wooden radio, consists of a random voltage generator, which is used to tune an AM receiver. That audio is then fed to an echo chamber. Moon said he is able to communicate with ghosts with the aid of his “spirit technician” Tyler.
The sounds coming from the phone sounded like the rapid twirling of a radio dial or static, some of the students said they heard the voices of their loved ones loud and clear while others were more skeptical of the device.
Moon, president of “Haunted Times” magazine, said he was communicating with a nun named Matilda Sebastian. Carroll College staff sent out emails all across the country to see if there was any record of such a person staying at the campus, there was not.
While many students believe the fourth-floor bathroom has been boarded up because of the reported ghost, college staff say it was put out of commission after a remodel in the 1980s. Decades ago, a student did strike his head in the bathroom but he did not die at the campus, as the legend says, but of pneumonia in a hospital about three months later.
Every other year, the bathroom is opened up and used as a haunted house.
“That way students can come up and check out the myth,” Forthofer said.
“Either it’s good entertainment or there’s something to it. I like staying right in the middle of the fence with this,” he added.
Moon said he gravitates toward doing presentations at colleges because students are generally more open to the paranormal.
“It seems students are always interested in what might be there,” he said.
The ghost hunter travels from his home in Colorado to about 40 campuses each year.
He usually holds his events at night because people are more likely to become spooked in the dark.
“Spirits are around us all of the time,” Moon said.
Moon said he has traveled to quite a few Catholic schools.
“We all agree there’s something out there,” he said.
According to Moon, the best people to take along on a ghost hunt are open-minded skeptics.
“They’re usually the ones with the most profound experience,” he said. “Some people are harder to convince than others.”
Reporter Angela Brandt: 447-4078 or angela.brandt@helenair.com