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Mysteries

The Real Ghost Story

GhostIn 2016 I moved out to the middle of nowhere to renovate a house. As I began to meet people around town I told someone I was on a paranormal show on the Syfy Network and they mentioned that there was a historic mansion down the road from me called “Elm Springs” that was supposedly really haunted. I was intrigued so I found Elm Springs and introduced myself to the executive director of the business that was based at the house.

The house is a beautiful Greek Revival mansion built in 1837 and is known for being the headquarters of a Civil War General in November 1864. Because of it’s history and involvement in the Civil War, Elm Springs has a museum, but they also use the plantation to host weddings and other events. The company working out of the house had a convention for a week during the summer so I asked if I could rent the house for a of couple days to work on pre-production for a new film I was working on. They agreed to let me use Elm Springs as long as their friend Misty could stay on the other side of the property while we were there.

With such an epic location I thought it would be nice to have some behind the scenes footage, so I had a friend come film during the day. I did not let anyone else know about the ghost stories in fear of them backing out.

Nothing paranormal happened the first day. I never even got a spooky vibe, which made me think all the ghost stories were just that…stories. It wasn’t until the evening of the second day that we had our first “encounter.” We had just wrapped up an interview with Abbi, (the actress). We were upstairs talking about what we were going to shoot the next day because Dustin (cameraman) was about to leave for the night. All of a sudden, lights we had hung the day earlier were thrown across the room and shattered everywhere. Both Dustin and Abbi witnessed the event, but my back was turned. All I heard was an excruciatingly loud popping noise followed by broken glass behind me… where nobody was.

After trying to rationalize what took place, Dustin, which was the skeptic, decided to leave and never returned to Elm Springs.

We captured this footage the night Dustin left.

Abbi was a little more curious, which is what kept here there longer. We changed the subject and went about the night but only a couple hours later we heard someone downstairs. The noises were so obvious that I thought it was Dustin joking with us. So I set up the classic Hocus Pocus tape diversion….you know…. playing a tape so Dustin thinks he knows where we are in the house. While we were patiently waiting to jump out and scare Dustin….Dustin called Abbi. He was at home, we could hear his wife and kids in the background.

Abbi and I decided to watch camera footage to see if we could figure out what the noises were. During this time, Misty arrived at the house and informed us that someone had been seen trespassing on the property and that the cops had come. Oh Great!! Are the things we are hearing paranormal….or home invasion?!

That night we were sleeping in separate rooms. In the middle of the night I woke up to the sound of a girl screaming. I walked to my bedroom door and Abbi was standing at her bedroom door. Both confused, we realized that the camera we had turned on earlier to trick Dustin, had just turned on by itself and was playing a really aggressive scene we had rehearsed earlier in the day. The girl we heard screaming, was Abbi in the recording.

Ghost

This is a still frame I captured from the night the camera turned on by itself.

The activity that followed progressed until we finally decided to leave Elm Springs the next night. We captured on camera a full body apparition, a shadow figure, witnessed furniture and doors moving, and more.

Since we were filming most of the time I was able to piece together a lot of the footage. I posted the video under the name “And Then It Goes Dark” on YouTube.

Vermedius and then it goes dark.

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