“Here’s your problem,” Kimm and Cami Andersen told me when I gave them an update on my night there, “you came off-season. The place is basically abandoned right now. But when we ramp up for Halloween, we get over 30,000 visitors through those doors. That’s when the paranormal activity goes off the charts. You should come back in October.” That made perfect sense to me. “But it’s a long drive out there,” I winged. “One night won’t cut it.” “How about a week?” they countered. “We’ll give you the keys. You can move in.” Needless to say, I was sold. Which is how I found myself leading a team of paramedics, nurses, and paranormal investigators into the Asylum a second time…but this time, beginning from Halloween night onward, we would live in and thoroughly investigate the building, interrupted only for a few hours at night when it was operating as a haunted house. Once the visitors went home again, the Asylum went back to being a…well, a haunted house. A real one. Did we get any activity this time? Oh, hell yes. I encountered what I believe to be the first and only apparition I’ve ever seen in a twenty year career as a paranormal investigator, the ghost of a little girl who is often reported running and playing in the many rooms and corridors. An SB-11 Spirit Box session turned decidedly nasty when the voices made lewd and threatening remarks to my female investigators, and then proceeded to scratch one of them on the shoulder. She only noticed the three angry red lines when she was getting ready for bed the following morning. Having heard a great deal about Asylum 49’s “big bad,” The
Guardian, we decided to confront him on his own turf. This is a part of the hospital that has been converted into a series of mazes, and it is easy to get lost and disoriented in there, even with the lights on. We worked with the lights out, using thermal cameras and night vision to get around. The Asylum’s resident psychic medium accompanied us (albeit reluctantly) and told us that she could see The Guardian as a looming black mass in the same room as us. I proceeded to provoke him, and ended up getting him to leave. “He’s a bully,” she said, “and he doesn’t like the fact that you’re standing up to him. He’s leaving, going back out into the maze.” It would have been tempting to dismiss the entire story as just that – an imaginative story – were it not for the fact that all of us heard the sound of footsteps, slowly receding into the distance. We knew that the hospital was locked up as tight as a drum, because we’d done it ourselves before heading into the maze. An experiment in the old emergency room that involved performing CPR on a simulated cardiac arrest victim backfired, blowing up in my face in a chilling way. After it was over, I walked along the main corridor to go and fetch my portable radio from the security center. On the way back, a door that had been wedged open for the entire week slammed violently – and I really do mean violently – behind me, missing me by inches. A great deal more happened to us during that very busy and active week, and it would take a book to tell you the entire story. Which is why I wrote one, in conjunction with co-author Cami Andersen. The Haunting of Asylum 49 is currently available from bookshops and online retailers, and is published by Career Press/New Page Books. HAUNTED MAGAZINE
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