In the Closet: Come and get me, ghosts

On a chilly October night, I stood on the moon-soaked lawn of the John Wornall House Museum, gawking at a tiny window. The Wornall carriage house was the last stop on this evening’s ghost tour of the historic Civil War-era home, and it promised to be the creepiest. Its purported tenant is the surly specter of a man who hated working for the family. But the window I was looking at wasn’t in the carriage house or the museum. It belonged to a private residence facing the carriage house, and on this night, it was filled from top to bottom with crosses, like the world’s holiest game of Tetris.

I had tried to maintain some skepticism, some journalistic remove. But the logical part of my brain was low on excuses. The neighbors’ excessive display of religious paraphernalia was not part of the tour, and it gave some real-world context to what I’d come to as a Halloween novelty. Whoever put those crosses up was properly freaked out, and that sincerity made the window the most unnerving thing I’d seen all night.

One man in my tour group straight-up refused to go into the carriage house. “I just get a weird feeling in there,” he said. “Seriously, go in there and tell me you don’t feel weird.”

I’d been feeling weird for a while. The Wornall House served as a hospital during the Battle of Westport, in 1864, and our tour guides, Denise Seah and Kathy Marquez of Mystic Moms Paranormal — who have been investigating the Wornall and Alexander Majors houses since 2011 — were full of fun facts about 19th-century warfare. The Wornall House had seen its share of stinking corpses and wheelbarrows filled with amputated body parts. It was hard to imagine the place was not haunted.

Assuming there were ghosts, the tricky part was communicating with them. Our tour convened inside the darkened parlor, a grand old room with a piano, a fireplace and gilded candlesticks. Seah held an L-shaped dowsing rod in each hand, like antennae, and on the table in front of her, an EVP recorder crackled and hissed. What sounded like human speech occasionally bubbled out, but it sounded less otherworldly than it did a shitty cellphone connection.

“Does anyone have a question they’d like to ask?” Seah asked us. She had explained that the rods she held would cross if the ghosts said no but would swing open to indicate yes.

An older man spoke for all of us: “Are the Royals going to win the World Series?”

The rods flung open so fast that they smacked Seah’s shoulders.

“Sorry, I did that,” Seah confessed. She smiled.

Our group moved upstairs, to the children’s room. Here we would try a different tack by playing Simon, the light-up pattern-recognition game from the 1980s. Realizing that we were a bunch of grown-ass men and women sitting in the dark staring at an old toy, I felt rather silly but got over it when Marquez said she felt “strong energy” near the closet.

I marched over to the closet and went inside. Then someone closed the door after me.

I didn’t feel anything, other than a desire to get the hell out of the small, dark space. But maybe I was out of tune. A couple of people in the group had ghost-hunting apps on their smartphones — yes, really — and one man said his app had detected something near the closet.

“Every time I put it over there, it turns red,” he said. He opened the door and held up his phone. A bright-red dot appeared. “Oh, crap, it did it again,” he said, and he ran to the other side of the room.

After that, everybody was a bit apprehensive about the carriage house, which had been a prime hangout for soldiers. But we dutifully followed our guides, and Seah talked about ham and blueberry pie to bait the ghosts of people who had perhaps died hungry for one last holiday meal.

“They love Christmas,” she explained.

She let me hold the dowsing rods. This was it. I was going to talk to dead people.

“Are we bothering you?” I said into the room. The rods crossed. I’m not saying it was a ghost. But I’m not saying it wasn’t.

At my next stop, the Court House Exchange in Independence, the spirits were bitchier.

When I investigated the 115-year-old restaurant with Jan Schoeler and Stephanie Turbiville of Kansas City Paranormal, both said ghosts had physically touched them.

“We like to remind people that it’s not all fun and games,” Schoeler said. “If something is strong enough to stay here after death, it’s strong enough to mess with you.”

Schoeler and Turbiville speak from some experience. There was the time when Turbiville woke up with mysterious bruises on her forearm. And there was the time when Schoeler saw a ghost that looked like the little girl from The Grudge. He didn’t leave his apartment for three weeks.

“I don’t like to talk about it,” he said. “That one really got to me.”

While Court House Exchange patrons casually drank beer downstairs, we headed to the third floor, a dark, unfinished space that felt like my grandmother’s attic. Schoeler and Turbiville set up their equipment: an infrared camera; a night-vision camera; an EMF [electromagnetic field] detector; and a homemade “spirit box,” which attempts to contact ghosts using radio frequency. Schoeler switched it on, and it hissed loudly.

“Is anyone here?” Schoeler asked. “Do you remember us from Saturday? We brought a new friend. Can you tell us your name?”

Several clearer sounds rippled beneath the static. I swear the radio said, “Chris.”

“Can you let us know you’re here?” Schoeler asked. “Can you knock on something?”

Moments later, we heard clear, deliberate footsteps. My hair stood on end. No way, I thought — no fucking way this is happening. The footsteps came closer.

“Hey, guys?” a woman said. “We’re getting ready to close.”

It was the bartender from downstairs. She wanted to go home. We broke out in nervous laughter.

“I think you jumped,” Schoeler said. Before we left, Turbiville reminded the spirits not to follow me home, but when I walked out into the street, I thought I saw a shadow dart under my car before dissolving into the moonlight. Here, kitty?