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PAYSON ROUNDUP
FALL/WINTER 2013
The Haunted Restaurant If you’re yearning to extend that Halloween feeling — you might consider dinner at a haunted restaurant. Leastwise, the ghostbusters say there’s something going on at The Journigan House restaurant in Payson, besides the live music. So as part of our seasonal offering, we thought we’d revisit a recent night we spent after-hours in The Journigan House with a team of supernatural investigators from Phoenix. As the midnight witching hour approached, the team sat expectantly around the glass-topped, redtable-clothed table intently watching a small flashlight with a twist on-off switch — that investigator Ron Holcomb had twisted almost — but not quite — on. Restaurant owner Jimmy Johnson looked on — already a believer. “If you’re there,” said Holcomb, “please turn on the light.” The flashlight flickered on, flared, steadied and shone steadily in the darkness. “Good. Thank you,” said Ron calmly, a computer tech for the state whose hobby involves leading this group of skeptical true believers from one haunted house to another. On the table sat two twist-top flashlights, a temperature and electromagnetic field detector, a beach ball and two little toy cars sitting expectantly on a dusting of powder. “We don’t want to hurt you,” added Rick Cercone, a retired Army helicopter pilot and high school teacher working on his Ph.D. in paranormal science who brings a methodical persistence to the group. “We’re parents. We just want to communicate.” The pause filled up the poignant darkness of the home-turned-restaurant, built in the 1920s, with its long accumulation of dark tales and historic events. Johnson had primed the amateur team with tales of the strange sounds, shadowy figures, whispered voices and chilling touches that have unnerved cooks, waiters and managers. Now, the nine-person team from Phoenix Scientific Paranormal Investigations (PHXSPI.com) hoped to make contact here, as they feel they’ve done at supernatural hot spots throughout the state. On a crisp autumn night as snow drifted down outside, they had set up eight infrared cameras and sound recorders to keep sleepless vigil over every room in the place from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m. It will take a month to review all the recordings for telltale blobs of light or whispered voices. But in the meantime, the ghost hunters wandered from room to room, attempting to make direct contact. “To show us that you’re still here, we now want you to turn off the flashlight,” said Ron. The silence stretched taunt. “Please, just turn off the light,” said Rick. The light flickered. Fades. Brightened. Faded to black.
GHOSTBUSTERS: A member of a Phoenix-based team that investigates haunted houses sets up a flashlight in hopes of communicating with ghosts in The Journigan House in Payson.
BY PETE ALESHIRE ROUNDUP EDITOR
“Good. That’s good,” said Rick. Now the pair worked to coax information out of the assumed specter — not at all discouraged by the lack of a response from the motion sensors to detect electromagnetic fields, motion and temperature changes. Rick also had nothing showing on his motion picture camera, although it recorded both infrared and ultraviolet emissions. “Are you a man?” asked Ron, wondering whether it might be “Mel,” who Jimmy said was a former owner who had died alone in a little room upstairs. Reportedly, witnesses sometimes still see him on a midnight stroll down Main Street. No response. “Are you a woman?” asked Ron, wondering whether it might be the mysteriously missing wife of a former resident who Jimmy swore was likely buried in a mysterious block of concrete poured for no evident reason in the water-heater storage area. No response. “Are you a child?” asked Ron, wondering whether it might be the child several employees have reported seeing or hearing — and who Jimmy swears is the unnamed girl on one of the historic pictures that lines the wall. No response. “Are you neither man, woman or child?” asked Rick, perplexed. The flashlight flickered back on. Ron and Rick exchanged startled looks in the glow of the flashlight. “Now turn the flashlight off again,” said Ron. After a minute, the flashlight flickered off. Well, that’s how it goes in the ghost hunting business: Never quite know what to expect — even in a hot spot like The Journigan House, whose employees wear T-shirts with a ghost and the logo “Got Spirits?” “I know they’re here — and they’re not mean,” said Johnson. “But they throw stuff.” Just about every employee it seems can recount some sort of experience: Pans flying off the shelf; shadowy figures leaning against the bar; odd sounds in empty rooms, sudden chills in the air; footsteps in the night; lights that turn on and switch off when you yell at them; voices from nowhere; a child’s handprint in the morning on the mirror cleaned at night in the women’s bathroom. Manager Kevin Mystrom said one night after he closed up he saw the shadowy figure of a man in a cowboy hat leaning against the bar, which vanished when he turned his head. He’s heard footsteps in the empty restaurant, seen pans fly across the kitchen and received messages on his cell phone with his “ghost detector” app. One of the ghosts is an old man who loves hot chocolate — another is a child who loves cranberry juice, he said. “I can’t wrap my mind around it ... I was a skeptic
when I started, but I’m a firm believer now.” So the PHXSPI team members had high hopes after the restaurant closed last Saturday night and started setting up their gear. The long evening yielded unsettling, but vague evidence of something strange in the haunted restaurant. During the almost six-hour investigation, team members managed three extended flashlight-mediated conversations. However, at least initially, the motion, infrared and electromagnetic detectors found nothing. Nor did they notice movements of the beach balls or other “trigger objects” they arranged in key locations — although someone has to watch all of the video to make sure. They did find a smudge in one of the tabletop dustings of flour that looked a lot like a child’s fingertip — but odd markings in the smudge made them wonder whether perhaps it was actually the wheel of one of their toy car “trigger objects.” They thought they heard footsteps. They also thought maybe they heard voices in a device that turns radio waves into static, which some investigators maintain ghosts can manipulate. The peak moment came when the whole team drifted into the command center in front of the big fireplace off the bar to compare notes — and stare at the nine camera feeds on a huge computer screen. Suddenly, everyone heard a muffled, metallic thump — maybe coming from the kitchen — like a giant mixing bowl being rocked on a hard floor. Ron headed into the kitchen with his infrared camera, but found nothing amiss. Everyone gathered again, trying to agree on the sound — and the source. About 10 minutes later, they all heard it again. Shortly after that, two flashlights sitting on a table near the computer monitor turned on. That triggered an interrogation by Rick and Dave, with muddled results. The flashlights went on and off — more or less on command — for about 10 minutes. Still, the team has hours of sound and video recording to review — looking for that smudge of light, the whispered voice, and the restless beach ball. “We’ve got a lot of data,” said Rick happily. “A lot of times we don’t hear anything while we’re sitting there,” said Dave, with a full set of paramedic shifts in the Valley ahead. “It’s only when we analyze the video that we find something.” As for night manager Kevin Mystrom, who shuts the place down and opens back up all alone, he has all the evidence he needs. “I made a deal with them,” he said seriously of his heart-to-heart talk with the spooks. “During the night, please don’t grab me. And so far, they’re sticking by it.”