BODIES BURIED IN BASEMENT / GHOSTS 

About six months after our purchase of the building someone involved with the sale of the hotel (maybe a lawyer, maybe a real estate agent, maybe a code inspector, maybe a police chief, maybe a family member) told us a story of how there was supposed to be a body buried in the basement. Wow. We started doing research. 

This is an ongoing investigation. 

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Several psychics, not knowing this story, have stated flat-out how there is a body buried in this hotel basement. 

Chip Coffey celebrity psychic / medium from Psychic Kids and Paranormal State joined Adam Blai and I for an hour in the hotel basement. He said, after considering the space, that we not only had one body, but two bodies bodies in the basement! "A child and a young woman. The woman was a sad story. She died by accident, killed by accident, almost in a kind of auto-asphyxiation. The man who killed her was too important in the community, so she was quietly buried here in the basement."

Chip

Adam


Chip and Blair

THE NINE CADAVER DOGS

A cadaver dog specialist and trainer was brought to the Grand Midway Hotel for an investigation. She had her favorite dog with her. The results were very interesting, especially in the basement. Her dog reacted in a completely uncharacteristic way. She couldn't explain her dog's behavior. Watching him, she felt like he was reacting to "things" in the room which she herself couldn't see. She said she never saw this behavior before in him.

There were two "hot spots" in the basement which he absoluetly did not want to search out. For whatever reason, regardless of the trainers egging on, he shied-away from passing beneath the hotel's stone foundation wall which has a small arch one can travel beneath.

He also reacted throughout the basement as if there was human remains down there. But she said it was too damp or too cluttered for him to pin-point a particular spot. This was unsual because nortmally he could even find a body under water. So, the basement stumped him on this investigation.

So fascinating was her story that a week later the trainer returned with nine other cadaver dogs and their owners. They traveled up from Maryland. The nine dogs were allowed to sniff out throughout the hotel. Interesting and consistant results were found in the Monkey Room. Finally, they all came down into the basement, one trainer after another, with one dog after another, all claiming to experience very uncommon and unusual behavior from their dogs. One trainer said he'd never experienced anything like this from his dog and that he was very freaked out by the basement.

As this investigation is ongoing the further details will have to wait to be posted. It's a good story...

THE SKEPTIC'S BASEMENT ENCOUNTER


Here's a story that was "in house" that happened to one of the biggest skeptics in the hotel this particular season. Our entire group came back from a local bar, having been drinking together for an evening. We sat down back at the hotel on the first floor and began watching an old Twilight Zone episode.

It was actually kind of a creepy show that night. It was Season 5, Episode 139 Twilight Zone Night Call where an old woman keeps getting calls in the night. "Hello? Hello? Hello?" she keeps asking. The silent caller keeps calling back to the woman's dismay. Finally the caller says he wants to speak to her, asking where she is. This is a call from beyond the grave. Later, it is discovered that a telephone wire had come down in the nearby cemetery, with the phone line now resting across the grave of her dead fiance who it turns out was the caller.

This episode was memorable and stood out that particular night because it seemed to almost poetically foreshadow the strange hour in the hotel that was about to come.

There is a similar Twilight Zone episode called Long Distance Call where a little kid gets phone calls from his dead grandmother over his toy phone. The dead grandmother tells him to do things like run out into the street in front of cars.

There is a quick story writer and ghost-hunter Katherine Ramsland tells in her book Ghost about something similar happening possibly for real. Katherine has been to the hotel many times and her book Ghost is a hotel favorite. She writes, "I thought about a story I had heard from author Dean Koontz about how he'd received a call one day warning him to be careful. His number was unlisted, and the voice sounded very much like that of his mother, who had died years before. He did not know what to think. Nevertheless, he became a bit more vigilant, which turned out to possibly have saved him. That day his father had attempted to kill him with a knife."

Anyway, back to our skeptic friend, who had left us. While the rest of the household enjoyed these shows, our skeptic friend wandered off alone. He oddly walked in the door and immediately went down into the basement alone. He never turned the lights on down there (which had to be turned on from upstairs). Instead, he just disappeared into the dark. We could hear him thumping around down there beneath us against the first floor wood floor. There was some commotion in the basement below. Then it got quiet. He stayed down there in the dark for about an hour.

The air of the building for us grew creepier and creepier. This was chalked up to the particular 'ghost calling' television show. It was a weird late night that took on a kind of Part 2...



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Later that night, as we were retiring to our rooms, we found our friend wandering around in the hotel halls upstairs, with stark-white eyes like a deer's eyes locked in a headlight. He seemed really lost.

Almost trance-like, he spoke, "You have to go down there. And I'm not talking about just screwing around. It's something I think you have to do. There's something down there. Something REALLY down there. It pulled my shirt collar."

Instead of just sobering up from all the time that had passed, he looked like he was fighting some wide-eyed state of inner shock. He pulled at his shirt and collar to show us what he thought he'd felt down in the basement, describing it instead as hands pulling at his collar from behind his neck.

Everyone realized there was something really wrong with our friend. He just didn't speak this way. As far as his story, the first thing that came to mind was that he simply got caught on random nails in the pitch black of the basement. But he didn't think this was the case.

Next he talked about some communion with someone or something down there. This was the creepiest part of his story, about the communion. He genuinely seemed to believe it and was wrestling with it as even a possibility. If anyone else had of been telling this tale it would have made more sense, or been seen as just fun. But because this particular person was saying it, it got creepier. His voice was really odd too. It just didn't seem like him. It wasn't him, not the person we all knew.

Then he turned to me directly and spoke with authority, "I think it's important that YOU do this. You have to go down there as well. It's something you NEED to do."

Several people witnessed him lost and speaking in the upstairs hotel halls in that strange somnambulist manner claiming a spirit communion from something down there.

The next day our skeptic good friend did not remember any of his claims to any sort of strange encounter and communion the night before with something in the basement. He was such a skeptic he absolutely denied the night before could have even taken place. He said he never would have said those things. This was true, it certainly was out of character. He didn't even believe that he'd gone down into the basement at all.

Other Un-marked graves have been found in the area like this recent article explains...

Mystery Grave Found!

Expert probes tomb near local cemetery
by Kirk Swauger
(for the Tribune-Democrat)

Forensic expert Dennis Dirkmaat, above, is investigating remains from an unmarked grave discovered in Windber.

WINDBER - A renowned anthropologist is investigating an unmarked grave, which may date to the 1920s, unearthed during construction of a new home across the street from a long-abandoned cemetery.

Dennis Dirkmaat, a forensic expert from Mercyhurst College in Erie who played a key role in identifying victims of hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, is studying partial remains from the shattered grave, Somerset County Coroner Wallace Miller said yesterday.

And locals contend there may be even more burial plots to be found.

The grave was discovered by a contractor moving earth while pouring a foundation for the home, across the street from the old East End Cemetery and just downhill from St. Cyril's Cemetery.

Miller said the skeletal remains have been "impounded" and are being stored at an undisclosed location.

"We don't know who it is," Miller conceded in a telephone interview.

Miller said authorities are uncertain whether the corpse was male or female, or how old it might be.

Dirkmaat could not be reached for comment.

Since the remains were found, a neighbor said, construction has stopped. The identity of the property owner was not immediately available.

"The casket fell apart during recovery," Miller said. "there's all kind of speculation as to how the individual wound up on the other side of the road."

It may not be the only unmarked grave there, said Clarence "Doc" Custer, 83, of Windber, whose two sisters and grandparents were buried nearby before their bodies were moved to a Richland cemetery in 1954.

"Absolutely, there are other graves there. It was part of the cemetery," Custer, who said he once owned the property after inheriting it from his father, recalled in a telephone interview.

"I remember catty-corner from where they found this body, there was a Mrs. Johnson and two children buried there with no markers."

Just behind the home's foundation sits the grave, an eerie jumble of twisted metal casket and its surrounding wooden "rough box."

Custer said he has no idea who may have been buried there. "Who this is is unknown to me," he said.

Through the years, Miller has been involved in the Flight 93 investigation and periodically is called to find plots on family farms.

He admits to being baffled by the latest case.

Tom Petrilla, 70, has lived beside East End Cemetery for 42 years. During that time, there has been perhaps one buried there, he said, shuffling through high grass covered with headstones and orange lilies.

Over there are the Italian families, Petrilla points out. Up there, the Hungarians. Down the hill, the Protestants.

Names on the gravestones, some marked in foreign writing, include those of someone who died in 1913, and Gilbert Chambers, who passed away a year later.

Back in the 1950s, Petrilla said, some of the graves were moved to a cemetery in Richland Township.

"Nobody takes care of it," he said of East End Cemetery. "Once a year, just before Memorial Day, the fire company comes and cuts the grass."

Petrilla walked slowly to the unmarked grave across the street.

"I don't know why anybody would be burired here," he said, noting the area was wooded before construction began on the new home.

"Sometimes, people just dug a hole and buried somebody." Miller said the investigation is continuing.

"It's an ongoing thing," he said. "There's a lot of legal ramifications we're dealing with, as far as the county's responsibility and where the grave came from."

THE LULLABY GHOST

Since spirits can supposedly communicate through electronic devices, many a recording has been attempted here in the Grand Midway by researchers. Perhaps the most dramatic audio recording was the very first attempted where hotel hosts Blair Murphy and Damien Youth were caught off guard to hear a woman singing a child's lullaby in the middle of the night inside the hotel from their small recording device. Then as they continued there were further recordings in this room that night of a young child crying. They dubbed her the Lullaby Ghost.

Of the night Damien wrote this:

There was an odd feel to that old Hotel. One that even, on occasion, unnerved a hardcore skeptic such as myself. Perhaps it was the aesthetics of the place? Upon first arriving, the place reeked of dead relative. So many discarded items. Old clothes, shoes, records, the old guest book. Regardless to what contributed, I knew no other way to react when a strange occurrence took place on one particular evening.

Blair & I were down on the first floor, brain storming, moving things about. I had my baby monitor on, as our family rooms were way up on the third floor. As Blair & I were chatting, I noticed periodically, voices coming through my baby monitor. I didn’t pay much attention at first as, it sounded like Elizabeth & little Starr talking. At one point it sounded as if Starr was upset so I decided to excuse myself & run up to the room to see if Elizabeth needed help with Starr.

When I reached the third floor, I cracked the door & peeked in. I got a deep chill when I saw that Elizabeth & Starr were both in a deep sleep. They couldn’t have dropped off to sleep that fast! Not in the short time it took me to run upstairs!

I shared this with Blair. We were both moved by this. And this opened a whole new door to us for a while. The baby monitor began a ghost busting device! There were a few nights that we set the monitor up, turned on maximum volume. I had a tape deck recording it. Blair had a camera turned on it. And we were determined to capture these voices!

Yes! Me! A skeptic, wandering about those old halls, holding the monitor in different areas to see if the voices could be detected with more clarity. And a few times they were! Blair & I both heard a mother singing an old lullaby to a child! Really!!

(Two early photo's of a woman and child associated with the Midway Hotel)

In retrospect, I can think of 101 reasons why I was picking up voices on that device. But the point is simply this. In the midst of it, with-in the structure of that old building, nothing seemed more feasible than it being the voices of past lives. And getting me to entertain such a thought as being feasible, is an accomplishment all on it’s own!I mean, if you told me it was the government or space alien’s... perhaps ... But ghosts!!!!

...Perhaps?

-Damien Youth

VOXX'S NURSERY RHYME MURDER POEM

Her web page boasts: Voxx is listed in the national best-selling book, “America’s Top 100 Psychics,” where she is featured as the world’s youngest and most accurate Psychic. Voxx is respected as the nation’s leading Love Psychic; however, she also gives amazingly detailed Psychic Readings regarding all aspects of life. Voxx astonishes clients during Psychic readings by literally giving names, specific dates and details that are miraculous. A gifted Trance Medium, Voxx also connects the living with spirits of their loved ones on The Other Side.

Voxx possesses a unique combination of amazing, natural Psychic ability and Metaphysical scholarship. Voxx is the only professional Psychic in the world who is an initiated High Priestess. A lifelong student of the sacred Kabbalah, Voxx is also an esteemed member of several ancient, mystical orders. Voxx was born Psychic, descended from a family of gifted seers, dating back to 10th century scotland. Her Psychic mastery includes: Clairvoyance, Clairaudience, Clairsentience, Trance Channeling, Kabbalah, Tarot, Astrology, Numerology, Dream Interpretation, All Forms of Divination, and Ritual Magick. She's written books on Positive Spellcasting, Psychic Ability, and Astrology. With over 20 years of experience, Voxx is one of the most trusted Psychics in the world. She has proven her talents on numerous television and radio shows, as well as several films, over the last 10 years.

Voxx is the first Psychic to have hosted her own national radio show on KLSX 97.1 FM, where she was the lead-in to the “Howard Stern Show.” Every 2 AM out of Los Angeles, five nights a week, this paranormal show was wildly successful. “The Voxx Show” averaged over one million calls per month! Currently, Voxx co-hosts Love Calls with the Poorman on KMPC 1540 FM.

Voxx and Blair have been friends for years, going back to when he first interviewed her for his film Black Pearls. Being that they were old good friends he wrote her and requested any images that came to mind about the Grand Midway. All she had was a picture. She had no prior knowledge of the hotel, nor of the often-mentioned possibility of a child buried in the basement, only that Blair had relocated from LA and was currently doing something with this old Pennsylvania building.

Voxx's entire response to the question of any potential spiritual activity in the hotel:

Hi Blair,

Re: Spookiness in general ... I see a young girl named Sarah with long hair in spiral curls. She is wearing a white pinafore and holding a doll. She says:

"609, come and see me anytime,
I play in riddle and in rhyme.
My father killed me, what a crime."

That's automatic writing from Sarah in "609" ... sometimes
spirits speak backwards and this could indicate she may
have been born in 1906. You could check it out.

Hope all is well Blair. I might come visit you soon.
Let me know when is a good time.

Blessings,
-Voxx