8/15/09-8/16/09
When I received the request from the Natchitoches.net producers back in July about conducting an investigation in Natchitoches, Louisiana to coincide with the official launch of the website, www.HauntedNatchitoches.com, I immediately knew it was going to be a fun trip for the team, even before learning where we would be investigating. After some quick research online, I learned that Natchitoches is the oldest town in the Louisiana Purchase, which was enough to get my interest up. Any town with that much history would make for an interesting visit. It didn’t take much to get the rest of the team to agree to this road trip. We all knew we had to take on this assignment.
Our team consists of Steph Hargrove (Psychic/Medium, Investigator, Vice President), her husband Jason Hargrove (Tech Guru, Lead Investigator), Misti Bennett (Psychic/Medium & Investigator In Training), Josh Hobbs (Thermal Camera Guru, Investigator), Alex Lohmann (Audio Guru, Investigator), and myself, Chris Greene (Lead Investigator, President). The entire team was fully on board with the trip and investigation. Unfortunately, Alex was unable to make it to this investigation as he had a previous engagement.
The investigation was scheduled for the evening of Saturday, August 15th at the Andrew Morris House Bed & Breakfast, located at 422 Second Street in Natchitoches. The plan was to have everyone meet at our hotel in Natchitoches by 3pm on Saturday so we would have time to grab some lunch and take a tour of the area, as none of us had ever visited there previously. The six of us came in sets of two in three different vehicles. Misti and I left Dallas at 8:30am, Josh and his wife were right behind us by about an hour, and Steph and Jason left Dallas around 11am. Of course Misti and I were the first to arrive, so we stopped in to say hello to our good friend, Jason Summerlin and his wife, Angela, along with their children, Haley and Taylor. This gave us time to relax a bit and catch up with our friends after the three and a half hour road trip.
Angela, Misti and myself left to go meet up with Josh and his wife at the hotel around 1pm so we could grab a quick bite to eat and kill some time while we waited for the rest of our team, Steph and Jason, to arrive. We parked in downtown Natchitoches and decided to try out Mama’s & Papa’s for lunch. The food was good, and they have very generous portions. It was quite humid in Natchitoches, so this was a nice place to sit down and cool off. After lunch, we hit a few of the small shops around downtown on our way back to the hotel to see what they had to offer. Steph and Jason were waiting at the hotel for us when we got back there around 3pm.
We still had a few hours before we needed to think about getting over to the Andrew Morris House, so we decided to take a nice driving tour of Natchitoches and some of the noteworthy plantations in and around the area. Angela was a great tour guide as we caravanned around. We got to see the Steel Magnolias House, the Oakland Plantation, the Melrose Plantation and the Magnolia Plantation. Unfortunately they were closed for tours, but we were able to park and get some nice pictures of the outside of the locations.
After our tour, we decided to grab some dinner and cool off a bit more before heading to the house for the investigation. Jason Summerlin met up with the rest of us for dinner and we all hung out there for about an hour and a half for some food and laughs.
From there, we headed over to the Andrew Morris House to meet the owner, John Puckett, and get a tour of the home so we knew what we had in store for us that night. Let me just say that John is quite the character! He had us all in stitches and is quite the decorator to boot. He still had some finishing touches to do before opening the B&B for business, but it was beautiful. The work he had already done was amazing. It didn’t take long for us to make it through a quick tour and get our equipment set up. We were all very anxious to get the investigation started. By 9pm we had all our cameras and EMF meters set up in the appropriate bedrooms and decided to have command central in the small office space attached to the back bedroom on the first floor. There was outside access, and we were far enough away from the rooms we had recording equipment in. It was the perfect set-up.
We made sure we captured all three bedrooms upstairs, as well as the one bedroom downstairs, on our infrared DVR system. We were able to angle the cameras so that we could also capture doorways and hallways. We also had two Sony hand-held camcorders for use in case we needed them. One was used to record off the thermal imaging camera as we made sweeps of the house throughout the night. Now it was a waiting game. A few of us watched the monitor with all four cameras at command central while the others went to hit each bedroom for EVP sessions. We switched on and off throughout the night to see if we could get different responses. Of course, we would not really know what we captured until evidence review the following week.
Once we were finished with all of our EVP sessions and thermal sweeps, we decided it was time to get to bed after a long night of investigating. It was approaching 3:30am, and we were all going to need to pack up the equipment in the morning and start our trek back to Dallas. Luckily for us, John had given us permission to stay the night at the house, which gave us the opportunity to keep the cameras running while we all slept. This was going to give us an additional five hours of footage to review.
The more evidence the better.
I am pretty sure I was the first one up in the house. It was around 7:30am, and the sun was starting to peek through the trees and into the bedroom. I rolled out of bed and headed downstairs to get a head start on packing up equipment. Shortly after I had started packing, one by one, the remaining members of the team were coming down the stairs. Everyone pitched in and we got all packed up and were ready to go by 9am. We made a final tour through the house so we could take some photographs, and we also took some of the outside of the house. It is such a beautiful home, we hated to leave, but it was definitely time and we knew we would be making another trip out to Natchitoches again real soon.
We all made it back to Dallas in one piece and knew we had to get right at the investigation review before we added any further workload with upcoming local investigations. There were hours of audio and video to review, and we managed to get through it all with some great evidence to present. We were lucky enough to capture not only audio clips, but a couple of intriguing video clips as well.
Having gone through all the evidence, I think we can easily come to the conclusion that this home is a paranormally active location. In addition to the audio and video we captured, we did experience some ‘spookiness’ if you will, but there was clearly nothing malicious going on here.