Ghost hunters seek supernatural, find friendship

David Amesquita isn’t afraid of ghosts. After all, he practically grew up in a cemetery.

Raised by his grandparents in an old house that’s since been demolished and replaced by a commercial strip across the street from Westfield Old Orchard mall, Amesquita and his pals would spend hours in Memorial Park Cemetery in Skokie.

They explored gravestones and pulled fish from the ponds amid the plots that would become final resting spots for Brady Bunch dad Robert Reed, Bears great Sid Luckman, newspaperman Irv Kupcinet and landscape designer Jens Jensen.

“We did stupid teenager stuff,” he said. “We didn’t deface anything. We rode our bikes around there and we’d play baseball and football games in the field right next to the cemetery.”

But he never encountered any signs of ghosts until years later. Now a retired postal worker, he attended a Plainfield Public Library program about a year ago hosted by Will County-based Other Side Investigations.

The group was founded by Christine Randall, Lesley Tuton and two other women, all veterans of area ghost hunting groups, who decided in 2022 to join forces and explore their shared interest in what lies beyond the grave. In the years since, they’ve added a few like-minded members, including Amesquita, had some interesting adventures and became fast friends.

That friendship is important, especially when planning to spend a night in a place that’s reportedly haunted and overtly creepy.

“It’s a lot better going to places with a group of people,” Randall said. “It’s cheaper for one thing, plus we love to eat together. … We’re moms so we know how to bring the snacks.”

They’ve traveled to haunting hotspots such as Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Louisville, Kentucky, Thornhaven Manor in New Castle, Indiana, and Farrar Schoolhouse in Polk County Iowa, among other places, honing their investigative skills while engaging in supernatural tourism.

During most of those trips, the settings were spookier than anything they picked up on electromagnetic meters or sound or video recordings.

“At Farrar School, they had a boiler room that looked like what you’d think a boiler room from an old horror movie would look like,” Tuton said. “Some places are creepy, but not like, ‘I’m going to run out of there’ creepy.”

One exception was a trip to Waverly Hills Sanitarium.

“That was our first big ghost hunt,” Randall said. “I was doing fine until some people broke in. And then we thought they might be here to murder us, so, ‘let’s go.’”

“Yeah, I’m more afraid of real people,” Tuton added.

That experience didn’t deter the group.

“We’ve hit up most of the places in a 2-300 mile radius,” Tuton said.

Some of those “known to be haunted” locations have become revenue generators for their owners, who book time slots for enthusiasts looking to discover mysteries firsthand. Some, Randall said, are building bunkhouses nearby to accommodate a steady influx of ghost hunters.

OSI now is shifting focus closer to home, conducting public investigations at places such as the Will County Historical Museum in Lockport and, this past Friday, at the Pleasant Home mansion at the behest of the Oak Park Park District.

The programs are not exhibitions. Members of the group are earnest in their beliefs and in the reality of the supernatural results of their investigations, even if they’re more understated than what’s typically portrayed on television.

“It’s not like the shows,” Tuton said. “We’re not constantly seeing dark shadows.”

Rather, much of their supernatural evidence comes from scrutiny of recordings after visiting a site.

“We’ve gotten some pretty cool audio,” Tuton said. “On one, we have a girl saying ‘gobble gobble do do,’ and I was the only female in the place. That was pretty wild.”

But some phenomena are experienced in the moment. At the Will County Historical Museum, the group was standing next to a workbench in the basement when they heard a loud bang.

“Nobody was next to me,” Tuton said. “We turned our flashlights on it and this huge wrench is swinging. We have it on video.”

Other tools hanging on the pegboard were still — only the heavy wrench had been jolted.

“Even our resident skeptic in the group couldn’t explain it,” she said. “We had someone go upstairs and stomp around, but nothing moved.”

Randall said evidence collected during the investigations is examined from every angle.

“We run it past the whole group, and if there’s any doubt at all we don’t show it,” she said. “We don’t want to be that kind of group.”

Still, there are plenty of skeptics. Some live with them.

“My husband doesn’t believe it,” Tuton said.

“Mine wants to believe, but he wants proof,” Randall added. “And the kids think we’re crazy.”

But they’ve also encountered a lot of people who think they might be on to something.

“Most kind of believe,” Tuton said. “People always have a story — like, ‘This is going to sound nuts, but…’ and then they tell their story.

“A lot of people like having an avenue to talk about this kind of stuff, because it can be kind of taboo.”

Randall said they’ve long gotten past that themselves.

“People don’t say things because they’re afraid they’re going to be made fun of, but we just don’t care anymore,” she said.

Amesquita, Other Side Investigations’ newest member, said he “came in skeptical, and I’m still on the side of skeptical.”

“I try to rule out or debunk stuff that might be just a creaky old house,” he said. “We’ve gone to places that were ‘the most haunted’ and featured on shows, but we get there and it’s mostly just us joking around and having a good time. But it’s great nonetheless.”

That wasn’t the case recently at an old house in Algonquin where strange things were happening, causing the homeowner to reach out to OSI.

“She and her sister-in-law would have a few cocktails and a lot of stuff would go on,” Amesquita said. “Obviously, we were skeptical going into there, but as soon as the word ‘wine’ came up, all of our equipment was going off like crazy — that was the first time I was part of something where I was like, there’s something going on here!

“It was really exciting for all of us.”

As it turned out, the women used to regularly enjoy drinks with a neighbor who’d recently died.

“Our thinking is he’s continuing to come back and jump in and still have fun with them and enjoy the music they’re playing and the good times they have,” he said.

The Algonquin ghost, like most the group have encountered, was benign.

“There are residual hauntings based on energy,” Randall said. “If you live in a place for 50 years and you go up and down the stairs every day, that energy is still there. When we do private investigations, a lot of times it’s just grandma. Grandma is hanging out. That’s a relief to a lot of people.

“It’s not a demon like in all the shows.”

Residual energy sometimes shows up in sounds, like mysterious footsteps the group heard in an empty room at the Will County Historical Museum, or the faint scent of tobacco in a room at Oak Park’s Pleasant Home, a former “party house” in the early 1900s where nobody has smoked in decades.

They’ve encountered ghost cats and had a “conversation” in which an entity responded via irregular electromagnetic pulses happening only after questions were spoken.

At the Will County museum, they believe a late former employee communicated her favorite color, purple, via a device that rapidly scans radio waves. Investigators followed up with current employees who verified the deceased woman’s penchant for lilac-colored dresses.

Amesquita, a self-described rookie, is more attuned to the supernatural now than when he first joined. And the good vibes generated among this group of has him eager to participate in more adventures.

“I would tell people to come into this with an open mind, and hopefully we can show you something that will corroborate why we’re doing it.”

Their enthusiasm for their craft is evident. And it’s evidently contagious.

“Most people think what we’re doing is cool,” Tuton said.

Landmarks is a column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.