In 1993, when Steve and Elizabeth Clapper purchased the historic McCloud Century House, they had no idea that they would be getting a little something more than they bargained for.
Finally, after what they call “repeated reports of suspicious and mysterious activities,” they decided to call the Redding Paranormal Investigations team, which came to town last week.

Located on the corner of Lawndale Court and Colombero Avenue, the beautiful building built in 1903 was the first hospital in Siskiyou County and served as such until the late ’60s. There are a number of people still living in McCloud who were born or had parents or grandparents born there.
After purchasing the Craftsman Style building, the Clappers began restoring it, turning it into a luxurious Bed and Breakfast Hotel Retreat.

From the beginning the Clappers said they experienced strange things happening… like footsteps in the hallway and stairway, a dark figure standing in the hallway one moment, then gone the next. Guests over the years have also reported strange occurrences.

“One lady in particular, reportedly made up her bed, and left her room,” said Steve. “Upon returning she noticed the wrinkled up place where someone had been sitting.”

Recently Clapper saw a Redding Paranormal Investigations Team ad on Craig’s List and contacted them.
Last Wednesday night, Nov. 5, the team arrived, took a tour of the historic facility, then set up their equipment, including cameras, camcorders, video equipment, computers, EMF meters, and various scientific gauges used in electronic fields of study, such as paranormal investigation. The team lingered until about 4 a.m. the next morning gathering evidence.

Team members, according to a press release, reported not only seeing shadows, but a dark figure going up a staircase and footsteps in hallways which had nobody in them.

They reported that as one of the team members was leaving a room, someone was heard to say, “I’m
alright,” and according to the team member, “nobody else was in there.”

“Strange things started happening from day one,” said Steve. “I occasionally heard footsteps in the hallway, but when I looked, no one was there. Sometimes late at night when I was working upstairs, it sounded like an active hospital going on downstairs. You could hear muffled voices of people talking, and things rolling on the floor, and dishes rattling… maybe like a cafeteria would sound. I go downstairs and it’s perfectly quiet.”

Clapper said, “June Bolton, who has lived in McCloud all her life, told me she used to clean rooms here for Dr. Larson. She said Larson told her of a fellow who died here. She asked where, and he said, “in the hospital. When she had completed the cleaning she told Larson she had felt the presence of someone being there in that room. She asked Larson again, where the fellow had died. Being a joker he told her in that room. Bolton wasn’t too happy about that.”

Elizabeth said she has also heard the footsteps in the hallway.
“One day while exiting one of the rooms, I saw a figure standing off to my side; I turned my head, and when I turned back it was gone,” she said.

The Clappers say they have pretty much learned to live with these somewhat, strange happenings and feel that whatever is going on there means no one any harm.

RPI investigators will reveal more of their “evidence” in December, but as far as the Clappers are concerned they don’t have to wait for the assessment from RPI.

“We already know it’s haunted,” said Steve.

Source: http://www.paraurl.com/?ZR3bd

Though she now chases ghosts for fun, Patty Antol never believed in the paranormal before she moved to a 1950s ranch in the Pittsburgh area in 1992. Even after an antique grandfather’s clock that hadn’t worked in more than 20 years suddenly started tick-tocking in her house — and then stopping dead at precisely 1 a.m. — ghosts were the last thing on her mind.

“It didn’t seem right, but I couldn’t put my finger on anything so I just dismissed it,” she recalls.

Then things started missing. She’d put down a hammer, turn around and it’d be gone. Makeup and mail disappeared. And what about those unearthly voices and whispers? It was starting to test her sanity.

“My husband told me I was watching too many spooky movies and to get over myself,” says Antol.

Which she tried her best to do, until about a year-and-a-half after moving in. While talking to a friend on the phone in her kitchen one sunny afternoon, she heard someone coming up the stairs from the basement.

Turning toward the noise, she saw the image of a very tall man walking toward her, his hands clenched in fists at his side. He came so close that Antol could see beads of sweat on his translucent brow and dirt on his white T-shirt.

What really frightened her, though, was that when he walked through her, she could feel his anger and torment.

“It was the most intense feeling I ever felt,” she recalls. She pauses, remembering how her husband laughed when she told him about it. “I thought maybe I was losing it.”

Or was she? A couple of weeks later, her oldest daughter, then 7, was especially grumpy when she got up for school. “Bruce” had kept her up all night, she complained. Antol assumed she must be talking about one of her stuffed animals. But when pressed for more information, her daughter shook her head.

“No, Mommy,” she replied. “It’s the guy who comes into my room at night.”

“What guy?” Antol asked.

“The guy who watches me and plays games with me.

Usually, he just takes the blanket off her bed, she said. But that night, he’d pushed down on her chest “and it hurt.”

Asked what he looked like, the little girl described a very tall man in a dirty T-shirt and work pants — the same man Antol had seen.

“Is he real?” Antol remembers asking. Her daughter responded quite matter-of-factly, “No, Mommy. He’s the ghost who lives here.”

Antol had never spoken to her children about “her” ghost or the other strange things she had experienced. The only explanation was that her house, which was built in the 1800s on the site of an apple orchard, was indeed haunted.

“I just had this feeling that Bruce was stuck there for whatever reason and meant no harm to us,” she says.

Over the next several years, more unusual things occasionally happened in the house, but for the most part, the family just went about their lives.. Antol, meanwhile, became so interested in paranormal activity that she founded a group, Ghost Chasers of Southwestern Pennsylvania.

But she never told many people about her own ghostly guest.

“We were a little overprotective,” says. Antol, who during this time got divorced, remarried and had a third daughter. “We didn’t want to share him.”

In 2005, the family sold the house and moved to a new house in Canonsburg, Pa.. Antol says there’s also been paranormal activity at her new home, though of a happier nature.

About six months after moving in, the Antols threw a birthday party for their youngest daughter. After everyone had left, the 3-year-old went to sleep in her parents’ bed. Sitting in the living room, Antol watched as her daughter’s favorite Mylar balloon started bouncing across the ceiling and into the hallway. Dropping halfway to the floor, it then floated up the staircase.

“Then it turned, mid air, and floated into my bedroom to the side of the bed where she was sleeping,” recalls Antol, who followed it.

She’s pretty sure it was her mother, who died before her daughter was born but with whom the child seems to be connected. After talking about seeing an “angel” in her bedroom, the youngster picked a picture of her grandmother as a teenager out of an old photo album.

“We like to think she’s keeping her eye on her kid and grandkids.”

It’s funny,. Antol admits. Tell a stranger that you investigate ghosts and they look at you like you’re crazy. But almost always, they follow up with a ghost story of their own.

“People might not want to talk about it, but a lot of us have experienced things we can’t explain,” she says.

Source: http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/37523