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October 21, 2007

Paranormal investigators scour college dorm

By ANDREA VanVALKENBURG

PLATTSBURGH -- About two weeks ago, Shirley Yeboah was studying for midterms in the basement lounge of Plattsburgh State's Macdonough Hall when she started getting scared.

"It was like 2 o'clock in the morning and we started to hear someone banging on the piano," the sophomore said Saturday.

"Then we heard little kids' voices and it sounded like someone was coming down the stairs, but we looked and didn't see anything. A little while later, it sounded like someone was slamming the main door, but when we checked, no one was around. We were really scared and just started running. I never believed this kind of thing until I experienced it myself."

Yeboah is just one of many students who claim to have experienced something unusual in the nearly 60-year-old building.

Over the years, several students have claimed to see a young legless boy floating through the hallways while others reported hearing strange noises, music and voices echoing through the popular dorm.

So, when some of the current students asked Resident Assistant Josh Hough to have the dorm investigated, he contacted Northern New York Paranormal Research Society President and Co-founder Merrill McKee.

Friday night, McKee, along with a few other investigators and five students, spent nearly four hours investigating the alleged hauntings.

Equipped with electromagnetic field meters, digital thermometers, cameras, voice recorders, compasses and pendulums, the group walked through the dorm and then divided into groups of two, fanning out to what are allegedly the most haunted places -- the basement, third floor and attic.

Through their work, mixing metaphysical and scientific means, nothing unusual seemed to occur, but when they delved into their evidence Saturday morning, something strange was found in the voice recordings.

Before a packed audience of students and interested community members Saturday afternoon, McKee played the three audible noises on the recording -- all of which occurred within the first six minutes of documenting the attic.

"Nobody heard that and nobody said that. It was a pretty obvious one," McKee said about the first sound, a female's voice that softly whispered a one-syllable word that sounded like "wait" or "hate."

Group members said the other two noises were unusual and out of place, but the exact sounds were indecipherable.

Both Hough and Krystal Oare, who accompanied the crew Friday night, said they never heard any of the noises and were shocked to hear them so clearly in the recording, which they maintained was the one taped the night before.

"I definitely think there's something going on," Hough said.

McKee said that even though investigators didn't get much from their first investigation, it "doesn't mean it's not haunted. It's an inconclusive haunting. We hope that we can come back and do a few more investigations."

Park Avenue resident John Stockman, who has spent years looking into paranormal activity across the northeast, said, "There's so many stories it's hard to believe that there's nothing here."

avanvalkenburg@pressrepublican.com

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