A night at the haunted opry

A night at the haunted opry
March 14, 2011
Judy Sheridan
Weatherford Democrat

It is 10 at night . . .

My 17-year-old son Ian and I arrive at the Texas Opry Theater in Weatherford where we will join a paranormal team who hopes to find evidence of ghosts.

I am willing to be open minded; he is much less so, and I wonder if his skepticism will cast a pall on the night’s activities.

But as we pull into the parking lot on York Avenue, we find we can agree on one thing.

The Opry, built in the 1800s and the former site of both a hotel and a church, is kind of creepy.

Ian and I are a few minutes ahead of the North Texas Paranormal Trackers, who initiated this investigation — their third — and we slip into the building like mist as the crowd disperses after the final show.

An older woman in red leather fringe and rhinestone-studded cowboy boots is rising from a table in the lobby where she has probably been selling CDs.

We hear loud, prerecorded country music and enter the auditorium — once a church sanctuary — to find a man removing parts from a sound system on the stage.

We sit down and look around. It is big and empty and kind of musty.

Soon the half dozen trackers, dressed in matching black T-shirts bearing their logo, arrive.

One is Leslie Alford, who once worked at the Opry for owner Jerry Carter. Another is Susan Irvin, the group’s fearless leader.

They have an amazing synergy, Irvin tells me. Spirits seem to show up when the two women are together.

Neither seems unusual, yet both say they are mediums, meaning they believe they can talk to the dead. They have a gift.

It is a claim that makes me a little nervous.

I believe that spirits exist — the Holy Spirit for one — and I don’t think you should count something out just because your five senses cannot detect it.

On the other hand, they are all that most of us have, and we tend to go with what they tell us.

The trackers want to prove that ghosts exist, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

They hope to hear voices, feel bone-chilling cold temperatures and see objects defy gravity and move across the room unaided.

In addition, they will rely on a battery of equipment to catch things that their senses cannot.

To gather evidence, the ghosthunters have come equipped with high frequency voice recorders to capture ghost voices, electromagnetic field detectors to locate and track their presence, and video and digital cameras to document their appearance as “orbs” or apparitions.

One team member carries a “ghost box,” a handheld radio that scans every frequency and, according to the Paranormal Research and Resource Society, is believed to create white noise and audio remnants from broadcast stations that ghosts can manipulate to create words.

My son is unimpressed with the quality of the equipment. I have no clue.



First up is a tour. As a group we assess the stage, where witnesses have reported hearing unexplained voices and footsteps, and we check out the ladies’ dressing room, where a voyeur ghost is rumored to exist.

We peer into every room on every level, from the basement to the balcony, and the trackers “sense” things: a heaviness, a spirit of fear, different levels of energy.

Behind the stage I think I feel the heaviness, but it is only a little, and I do not mention it. Most likely I am imagining it. Probably.

The tour complete, the trackers regroup to set up their tools and gadgets.

I have a Coke and chat with Opry owner Jerry Carter, who sports a flashy, sequined jacket and carries a blind man’s cane.

Carter purchased the building in 1991 and first heard the ghost while he was remodeling a year later.

A rapid succession of unexplained cracking noises across the ceiling frightened him so much that he left the building, convinced that the ceiling was falling.

He and his wife Marilyn have heard footsteps on more than one occasion; once they sounded exactly like Marilyn’s walk.

“It scared the hell out of us, and we went home,” he said.


Carter tells me a story about thousands of black spiders that once emerged from the old church’s baptistry. As they crawled up the walls, he said, his hands began to itch.

“I said, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan, and stay there,’ and the itching stopped,” he said. “The next day all the spiders were gone.”

Over the years Carter has experienced a pushing, a pressure so insistent he has talked to it.

Others have felt it, too. One of them was a health inspector, he said, who described the feeling as unbearable, and refused to come back.

But Carter is quick to point out that the ghost has a friendly side.

“This thing is also spiritual,” Carter insists in a phone interview. “At the same time all this weird off-the-wall crap has happened, spiritual stuff has happened.”

Carter describes how affordable contractors have miraculously come to his aid as needs have arisen for sheetrock and a new roof.

“Whenever I needed anything, I could go in the auditorium and ask for it,” he said, “and it would come to me.”

“I don’t know who I’m praying to,” he confesses. “I want to believe it’s a higher power. It’s got to be that way. It makes you wonder what the ghost is about.”


The trackers, ready to begin, cut my visit with Carter short around 11 p.m..

They give me a small flashlight and then shut off the lights and the air, the better to see and feel the energy emanating from the spirits.

I choose to follow Irvin and another member of the team, and we enter a storage room behind the balcony.

“I don’t feel wanted in this room,” Irvin calls out to the darkness. “Do you want us to leave? Someone is hiding in the corner here. I have a feeling of fear.”

We walk to other rooms, while the ghosthunters listen for beeps from the EMF meter that would indicate the presence of a lot of energy, they say.

They sweep the rooms with the digital camera, usually taking two photos in succession of the same place, which sometimes show images that include small white globes. The trackers call these globes orbs and believe they are the spirits of the dead.

Others — like Troy Taylor, author of the Ghost Hunter’s Guidebook — say that most orbs are simply refractions of light on the digital camera lens, created when the camera flash bounces back from something reflective in the range of the camera.

“Can you give me a name,” Irvin questions. “Can you make something move?”

“I don’t believe you are here,” she taunts, “but you can prove me wrong. Can you talk into my red light?”

During the course of the investigation, Irvin feels both cold and heat “like a furnace.” She and another member of the team smell the stench of decay in a room below the stage.

But I feel and smell nothing. My son wants to sneak off and pretend he is a ghost, but I rein him in.

After all the rooms have been investigated, we gather in the auditorium and try to guess the ghost’s identity.

“Are you a church member,” Irvin asks. “Did it bother you when they took the church down and built an opry?”

As we close on midnight, the appointed hour for my son’s and my own departure, the trackers believe they hear the ghost identify himself as Mike on the handheld radio.

“Are you comfortable with us being here, or do you want us to leave,” Irvin asks.

The answer, they decide, is leave, and so Ian and I comply and head home.

But the ghosthunters stay until 3 a.m., disclosing by e-mail later that they received “lots of audio, names given when asked and several pictures of various apparitions” in the wee hours of the morning.

Unfortunately, I was unable to learn more.

A second e-mail from Irvin reported that Carter is unwilling to release the information that was gathered, and so the story ends shrouded in mystery.

To tell the truth, it would have ended in mystery anyway.

Because who can prove the existence of ghosts?

And who can prove that they don’t exist?

I remain open minded, and my son is still skeptical.

Maybe you should visit the Opry and decide for yourself.