009 - The Hostel

​One of the questions I get asked most is what's the scariest place you've ever investigated? And it's always hard to answer. I've been to many places filled with stories and history. I've investigated military forts, museums, theaters, even on Navy cruiser. And dozens and dozens of private homes throughout the New England. All had their fair share of scares and thrills, but. None that I would call scary except. For one house that even. I was afraid to go into alone. I'm Tom Stewart and this is my paranormal story. Before I start this episode, I want to thank you for listening. And if you really like my stories and would like to show your support, you can buy me a coffee. Just go to the website buymeacoffee.com/my paranormal and you can literally buy me a coffee and hopefully the caffeine will help me with making more episodes real soon. Thanks again for your support. I'm still astonished with how many amazing places I've been able to investigate during the time I was with rise up paranormal experiences, we all had haunted or otherwise, or moments I'll never forget. And when people ask me which location was the scariest? I always remember back to one of the first cases I booked for the group. A friend of a friend was living in a three story house in Providence that he claimed was haunted. His name was John. And he lived with his husband on the 2nd floor of a normal looking house on the east side. We met with them in their apartment. And they explained to. Us the many things they were experiencing in the house. They were hesitant at first as most people are. But once they were comfortable with us, they told us story after story of things that were scaring them. Doors opening or closing, shadows and doorways, things going missing, voices in the hallway and footsteps on the floor above them. They had so many claims. At first we had a hard time. Seeing them, we sat there in their living room, taking notes and listening to all their claims. When suddenly we all got quiet, she listen, someone said. And right away we heard it for ourselves. Footsteps on the floor above us. It was as if someone was walking around on the third floor, but they assured us no one's up there. No one ever goes up there. Well, we weren't there to do an investigation, just an interview. But we asked if we could see the third floor apartment anyway. So we went downstairs to the first floor with John to get the key from the landlord and we had. A chance to talk with him too. He lived in the house for many years, and he backed up a lot of the claims. That John had told us. He gave us the key to the door on the third floor and said we were welcome. To go up. But he wasn't going with us. John took the keys and he bravely escorted us up there. There was no electricity, but I had a flashlight with me. We walked into the apartment and John slowly walked us around. It was empty for the most part. There were six or seven small rooms all lined up on both sides of. A small hallway. John explained to us that back in the 70s and 80s, way before he had ever lived there, the third floor was used as sort of a boarding house or a hostel where students or transients and travelers could. Rent out one of the small rooms for a day or two or even weeks at a time. We could tell it hadn't been. Lived in for years. Some of the rooms had water stained wallpaper, others had old faded paint and dirty linoleum floors. The communal bathroom had one of those old toilets with the tank up by the ceiling. And in one of the rooms there was one of those old weight loss machines with the big belt that you would strap around your waist and it would vibrate the fat away. We slowly went room to room as John explained more about the houses history to us. Each room seemed to have its own unique look to it its own feel. A couple of the rooms still had some old furniture in them too, like an old chair or an old bed frame. In one room had a creepy old dress on a hanger just dangling from a nail on the wall. Looked like it had been there for years. But the creepiest room of all. Was the one at the end of the hallway. It had an old wooden floor, one window, and a slanted ceiling. And there were strange drawings painted on the walls, some sort of symbols that we didn't recognize. One of them looked like a big red eyeball with long red branches coming out of it, sort of like a bloodshot eye. And in the middle of the eye was a blue iris with three small white stars in it. The other symbol was like 2 arrows in the shape of a cross. Except there were arrowheads on all four ends. They were both black, but the longer arrow had a red Arrowhead on one end and the other Arrowhead was white. We research both symbols as best as we could. But never found out what they meant, if anything at all. You can see pictures of the symbols and some of the other objects in the rooms in my blog section at the website myparanormalstory.net. After our tour of the third floor, we quickly agreed to do an investigation. And a week later we were there on a Saturday night with all. Of our equipment. Cameras, microphones, recorders. Since there was number power up there, we had to plug everything in on the second floor. So along with all. The usual wires. We also had extension cords everywhere. At one point early in the night. I was sent up to the third floor to adjust the camera. Now, I'm not usually afraid to go into a haunted place, but for some reason. This House gave me a weird feeling. As I walked around up there in the dark with only my flashlight to guide me. I felt like I wasn't alone. I'm not a medium or a sensitive, but on that night. I just felt like I was surrounded by spirits. Like if I turned around there would be another face staring right back at me. Before we started investigating, we went around and took dozens of photographs of all the rooms. And there were tons of orbs in all the pictures. White ones, fuzzy ones, weird shaped ones. With the abandoned apartment being so old and dirty, we dismissed all the orbs as dust. It's very rare that we ever consider an orb to be paranormal. But if orbs are spirits, this place was full of them. Our first EVP session was conducted in the last room, the one with the symbols on the walls. As we stood there in the room asking questions, we were amazed at the responses we were getting. If we asked for a spirit to knock. We would knock. If we asked for a spirit to walk down the hallway, we'd hear footsteps, and if we asked the spirit to light up the K2 meter, it would light it up. The activity was amazing. Now K2 meters are devices that detect electromagnetic energy or EMF's. It's a battery operated device with five different colored bulbs on the top, ranging from green to red with red meaning strong electromagnetic fields. It's believed by some that spirits. Will manipulate the electromagnetic fields around us in order to manifest in some way. So we decided to do an experiment with our K2 meters. We placed two identical K2 meters on the floor about a foot apart from each other. We asked the spirit if it would light up just. The left one. And to. And we asked if it would light up just the one on the right, and it did. Then we asked it to light them both up. And they both lit up. So we started using the devices to communicate with the spirits by asking yes and no questions. We'd say light up the K2 meter on the right. If your answer is yes and light up the left one if your answer is no. In all the investigations I've ever done, I've never seen K2 meters do this. Usually if one lights up and both light up. It really didn't make any sense. But we used it to ask a bunch of questions and we were able to determine that we were communicating with the male spirit. Who last remembered being in his 40s and living in that house. We also learned that he wasn't the only spirit in the house. We took a break. And then tried doing an EVP session in the room with the dress in it. And I decided to try and experiment with evps. Evps are electronic voice phenomena. Quite often, paranormal investigators will record audio in a room and ask questions, hoping the spirit will answer. Sometimes the answers can be heard on the recorder. It's believed by some that evps are imprinted onto recording devices using electromagnetic energy, not sound. So I set up two identical digital audio recorders, both with fresh batteries. And pressed record on both of them at the same time. Except on one of them I disabled the microphone by sticking a headphone Jack into the microphone port. With the microphone disabled, the recorder wouldn't be able to record any sounds at all. The EVP session lasted for about an hour. Several days later, when I was reviewing the audio. From both recorders. I discovered something pretty amazing. On the recorder with the working microphone at about an hour of audio to listen to. And at one point I caught what sounded. Like an EVP. It was a faint sound, but definitely a voice couldn't make out what it was saying. But it definitely wasn't one of us in the room. When I reviewed the audio from the other recorder, the one with the disabled microphone. There was nothing there as expected. The entire noise wave in the computer was just tiny little wiggles all the way through. Except for one spot at the exact same time. Right down to. The 2nd that the first recorder caught an EVP the recorder with no microphone had a big jump in the sound wave. There was number sound there. Just an obvious distortion of the energy. On the recorder. At exactly the same moment as the EVP. All night long, during the investigation, strange things kept happening. We must have captured a few dozen evps none that we could understand, but definitely voices trying to reach out both male and female. In the footsteps and knocking continued throughout the night at one point or another, each of us had the hair on our neck standing up at about 3:00 AM we decided to. Call it at night. We started packing up the equipment from room to room. We collected all the cameras, microphones and recorders and started wrapping up all the many wires and cords we had stretched up the stairs from the second floor. And that's when the strangest thing happened to me. As everyone was on the 2nd floor, packing away the equipment I was wrapping up the last of the extension cords. An orange 50 footer. I was at the bottom of the stairs on the 2nd floor in the hallway just wrapping it up slowly around my arm. And suddenly it felt like someone tugged on the cord from upstairs. I figured it was just caught on something so. I pulled a. Little harder, hoping to free it up suddenly it tugged harder. I dropped the coiled up cord on the stairs and just watched as the extension cord was pulled up the stairs like. Three or four feet. And I just stood there frozen, knowing. That there was no one up there. Once again, if you'd like to see pictures from this investigation, I posted them on my website at my paranormal story .net in the blog section. If you'd like to know more about my friends at rise up paranormal, you can visit their website at rise up paranormal.com. My paranormal story is written, produced and narrated by me. Tom Stewart music from this episode, courtesy of [email protected]. If you enjoy my stories and would like to. Support the podcast. You can go to buymeacoffee.com/my paranormal or just click on the donate button on my website at my paranormal story.com. I also have T-shirts and coffee mugs for sale. Unfortunately, podcasts cost money and your support helps me keep this podcast running. Thank you for your support. Please don't forget to subscribe so you'll know when I've added new episodes and feel free to follow me on Facebook and Instagram. Just search for my paranormal. If you have a podcast and you'd like to have me as a guest, or if you would like to ask me a question or tell me your paranormal story, you can e-mail me at [email protected]. Thanks for listening. I'm Tom Stewart and this is my paranormal story.