On the ground (and in the ether) with KC’s swelling paranormal community

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As a kid, Bryan Boehm would sit in his parents’ car and move around the dial on the push-button radio. In the staticky jumps from station to station, he heard voices. Over time, he started talking back to the voices.

“I would get interesting responses back — direct answers to my questions,” he says.

When Boehm was 18, a friend died. He had nightmares for weeks and couldn’t sleep. “About a month later, he [the friend] came to me in the night and appeared at my bed and told me everything would be all right,” Boehm says. “He was right there at the foot of my bed, talking to me. And after that, I slept fine. There were no bad dreams after that.”

Those early experiences set in motion Boehm’s curiosities about paranormal activity. “There are certain things you see, certain experiences you have,” Boehm says, “that you just can’t help but want to find out more.”

To that end, Boehm and his wife, Donna, formed Three Doors Paranormal in 2008. “That’s when we started seriously investigating,” Boehm says. “Before that, it was a hobby. Now it’s kind of a bigger part of our lives.”

From their Olathe base, the Boehms have investigated several of the most notoriously haunted locations in the United States: Mansfield Reformatory in Ohio, Edinburgh House in Scotch Grove, Iowa. They also investigate the private residences of people who believe that their homes are haunted. Generally speaking, they are interested in traveling anywhere they think there’s a good chance of encountering paranormal activity.

On Sunday, October 12, this impulse took the Boehms to the Phoenix Jazz Club, at the corner of Eighth Street and Central in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. They had teamed up with another local ghost-hunting duo, Stephanie Turbiville and Jan Schoeler of Kansas City Paranormal, to see what kind of spirits might lurk in the 126-year-old building, which local lore holds to be a former speakeasy and bordello. (The Phoenix is closed on Sundays; management had given them permission to investigate.)

Cameras were placed on tripods, and computers and digital recorders were scattered throughout the dining area. Boehm built some of the equipment himself. An IT professional by day, he also makes custom infrared and full-spectrum cameras and other pieces of spirit-hunting equipment, such as vibration detectors and shadow detectors. He sells some of the equipment on eBay to other paranormal groups, to help fund Three Doors Paranormal’s operations. Like Kansas City Paranormal, Three Doors Paranormal is for the love of the game rather than a profit-seeking enterprise.

“It’s an expensive hobby,” Schoeler told me that night, “like deep-sea diving or something.”

Around 9 p.m., the teams commenced their investigation. Schoeler and Turbiville held up their video cameras and addressed the possible ghosts.

“Is your name Frank?” (The original owner of the Phoenix was Frank Valerius.)

“Are you trying to tell us something?”

“Is there anyone here that wants to speak with us?”

“What’s your name? Can you tell us your name?”

“Frank, are you here?”

“If you’re near, can you touch someone’s shoulder?”

“Any ladies who worked as ladies of the night? We’d appreciate if you’d tell your story.”

“Do you have enough energy to knock over a bottle on the bar?”

Boehm sat behind a laptop, monitoring a FLUX EVP [electronic voice phenomena] Analyzer, an application that tracks the high and low frequencies at which, spirit hunters tend to agree, ghosts might be trying to communicate. Boehm, who styles his hair in a baby mohawk, wore a black fitted shirt, a black vest and a black armband holstering a digital recorder. He seemed less like a ghostbuster than he did a computer hacker from the 1990s. Donna sat across the room wearing special headphones, listening for low-frequency spirit voices.

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A loud whir suddenly emanated from behind the bar.

Boehm jumped up from his chair, looking genuinely freaked out, and hustled to locate the sound.

False alarm.

“It’s just the pump that cleans the drainpipe,” he said. “It’s set on a timer.”

Boehm went to the downstairs restroom and returned. “There’s an uneasy feeling down there,” he said. “It’s different than it was before.”

“Let’s take a break,” Schoeler said. “We’ve been at it for an hour or so. Let’s go outside, give it 10 minutes and see what it’s like in here when we get back.”

Everyone agreed.

“OK, we’re leaving,” Schoeler announced to the empty room. “We’ll be back soon. We hope you will talk with us. We want to communicate with you.”

Ten years ago, paranormal groups in Kansas City were scarce. “There were maybe three of us in the western Missouri–eastern Kansas region,” says Rob Garcia of Elite Paranormal of Kansas City. “Now there’s probably 20 groups in the metro alone, with more sprouting up all the time.”

Boehm’s tally of local teams runs to about 50. “It’s almost uncountable,” he says.

One explanation for the sharp rise since around 2010 is the proliferation of reality-TV, basic-cable shows aimed at the paranormal: Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, Paranormal State.

Hector Lugo, of 10th Dimension Paranormal Group (founded in 2006), says most paranormal teams fit into one of three categories.

“There’s novice groups — high school kids, college students, beginners who are getting their feet wet,” he says. “Then there’s groups like ours that are experienced and invest time and money into this and do home visits and aren’t doing it to make money. Then there are the TV guys. They’ve got to produce results, find evidence to present on their shows. And if the place isn’t haunted, they’ve got to come up with some kind of drama.”

Schoeler and Turbiville have shot a pilot for a reality show called Full Disclosure and are in the process of putting together subsequent episodes. But they, too, lament the influence of commercialization of paranormal investigations.

“I just don’t think a lot of the TV people are in it for the right reasons,” Schoeler says. “Some shows are doing it in a pure way. I like Ghost Adventures. But many of the investigators on those shows are just trying to get rich and famous. And you can increasingly see that locally. There’s a lot of big egos. With our show, we’re trying to bring a lot of things together. We’re bringing in a woman who does quantum physics, a psychic medium, ordinary skeptics. We don’t want it to be just investigators looking for activity. We want to get everybody’s take.”

Accompanying the uptick in paranormal groups is increased traffic at notoriously haunted spots around town. Dorene Disbrow, who works for the John Wornall House and the Alexander Majors House, says interest has grown significantly even in the past year.

“We try to accommodate it as much as we can,” Disbrow says. “Johnson County Community College has a course on paranormal and supernatural phenomena, and they also have a club at the college that’s connected to it that makes visits to our houses. We’ve had filmmakers visit. We even had a match.com type of group recently that wanted to hold a dating thing at the Wornall House, although that didn’t end up working out.”

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Debra Pickman is a former tenant of Atchison, Kansas’ Sallie House, a place where the dedicated report full-bodied apparitions and objects flying through the air. She maintains a website about the Sallie House and says she hears constantly from paranormal teams.

“Each time a newer TV show airs [an episode on the Sallie House] or after a really good or widely listened to Internet radio show … I get a lot more e-mails asking how to go about renting the house for the weekend,” Pickman says. “On average, somewhere between six and 12 e-mails a month. After a good show, it’s nothing to get that many in a week.”

A sort of haunt circuit exists for local paranormal teams: the Elms in Excelsior Springs; the Belvoir Winery (formerly the Oddfellows) in Liberty; the Grinter Place in KCK; the Oliver Anderson House in Lexington, Missouri; the 1859 jail in Independence, Missouri; the Mine Creek Battlefield in Pleasanton, Kansas. For some groups, the goal is to capture new evidence in these tried-and-true spots. For others, it’s about discovering unknown, highly charged locations. Lugo recently received permission from the owners of Café Verona, on Independence Square, to investigate its subterranean property.

“That building used to be a Jones Store, in the 1950s, and hardly anybody’s been down in the basement since then,” Lugo says. “There’s still a bunch of displays and home furnishings down there. Hardly any light makes it inside. And there was so much activity when we investigated. Our equipment was going nuts. They knew there were spirits upstairs, but we found all kinds of spirits on the bottom floors. It was very cool to go into a really active local place other paranormals hadn’t yet been.”

Legend has it that an underground tunnel once existed between the Phoenix and the Savoy Grill, one block away at Ninth Street and Central, which also went up in 1888. Schoeler and Turbiville have investigated the Savoy several times, with what they characterize as exciting results.

“We always come away from the Savoy with awesome EVP or evidence,” Schoeler says. “There’s a woman who haunts the place. And there was a murder there in the 1980s. That’s why we wanted to come to the Phoenix, to see if there was any overlap.”

There didn’t seem to be on this night. After another hour of investigating, both teams decided that the Phoenix was not an especially active paranormal space. Turbiville thought she heard some faint screams, and Donna Boehm saw a suspicious shadow. Neither was the kind of evidence that investigators hope to document, though they still planned to review video later to see if they’d missed something unusual.

“The way we tend to operate while investigating is, you get a feeling and you take note of when it happened, and you use the equipment to go back and see if it registered anything at that time,” Boehm said. “Basically, our bodies are the tool, and we use the other stuff to try to capture and document what it is we felt.”

Nobody felt much of anything at the Phoenix, but Boehm was philosophical. “It’s a good example of why some of these TV shows aren’t that realistic,” he said. “What we do most of the time is not worth putting on TV. Nobody would watch. Sometimes there just isn’t much activity in a place.”

So why do it? Why go through hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings? Why build or buy all that expensive equipment?

“People want to know what happens when they die,” Schoeler said. “Everyone does. It’s not a religious thing. It’s just a curiosity thing. They just want to know. For us, we want to help do that research. We want to find that evidence. And then maybe 50 years from now, it will be a proven thing that there’s life after death, the way science has proven all sorts of other things people once thought couldn’t be proven.

“People look at us like we’re crazy, that we’re dabbling in the occult,” he added. “I look at it as if we’re fringe scientists. We’re on a quest to document that life exists after death and to show it to the world so it becomes a fact.”