BOBBY MACKEY’S MUSIC WORLD is a honky-tonk bar and live music venue in Wilder, Kentucky. In 1991, the Reverend Glen Cole conducted an exorcism on Carl Lawson, the club’s caretaker:
Lawson (growling): “You don’t scare me.”
Rev. Cole: “Well, you don’t scare me, either.”
Lawson (unintelligible yelling)
Rev. Cole: “No, you’re going to leave.”
Lawson (growling): “No, I’m not.”
Rev. Cole: “Yes, you are!”
Lawson: “I ain’t goin’ nowhere!”
Rev. Cole: “Yes, you are!”
Lawson: “I ain’t never gonna leave!”
“Just because we went there and something happened, doesn’t mean something will happen when we’re there this time. That’s a distinct possibility,” Noah Leigh told me over the phone. He wanted to have some frank talk with me about an upcoming investigation I was joining PIM on, at a place he noted “is not your average haunted place.”
He was talking about the notorious and frightening Bobby Mackey’s Music World.
“The other possibility is that a lot of stuff could happen,” Leigh explained. “And we’re being told that if someone gets upset like they did last time, they have to leave. So if there’s a situation where something happens to you, if you feel you need to leave, it’s going to end up in all of us having to leave. And if you’re not willing to go back into the location, you’re basically going to end up sitting in the car.”
I had heard of Bobby Mackey’s when PIM initially investigated the haunted honky-tonk a few months earlier, in July. It was during part of an epic haunt tour, which I heard about at a PIM meeting in Leigh’s rec room basement about a month after the trip on August 11.
Leigh had greeted me at his door, eager to get started, with a notebook in his hand, listing the meeting’s agenda. The majority of the items on the list concerned discussing and reviewing evidence from PIM’s out-of-state expedition in July. While some people use their vacation time to plan trips to Honolulu or Orlando, the members of PIM plot time off to travel to some of the most notoriously haunted hot spots in America.
Stops on their recent ghost road trip, which PIM termed the Expedition, included the Mansfield Reformatory (a historic prison in Ohio), Sedamsville Rectory (a 120-year-old rectory that was once part of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, located in the “armpit of Ohio,” according to Jann) and the Waverly Hills Sanatorium (a Kentucky hospital built to accommodate a tuberculosis epidemic). All of these locations are well known to ghost hunters as being “active,” but the one place everyone was itching to talk about at the meeting was Bobby Mackey’s Music World.
Northern Kentucky Music Legends Hall of Fame member Bobby Mackey wanted to be known for one thing when he opened his honky-tonk in 1978: music. And his venue, Bobby Mackey’s Music World, was well known in the Wilder, Kentucky, area for offering the best of both types of music: country and western. On Friday and Saturday nights, Bobby Mackey’s gravel parking lot fills up, and revelers file into the bar, order beer, and head out to the dance floor. On a busy weekend, upward of a thousand people might come through the doors. Up onstage you’ll often find Bobby Mackey himself, backed by the Big Mac Band.
Over the years, Bobby Mackey’s has become known for something else—it overshadows his country music legacy at times, and it goes bump in the night. Although Mackey isn’t a believer himself, he quickly began hearing ghost stories after opening his doors. First his wife, Janet, who happened to be five months pregnant, reported a malicious spirit pushing her down a flight of stairs. After that, Janet was none too thrilled by the venue but couldn’t convince her husband of the ghostly presence lurking in the dark corners of the club.
Then there was the strange case of Carl Lawson, who was hired as caretaker of Bobby Mackey’s before the doors even opened. He soon moved into an upstairs apartment in the building. Lawson, familiar with local lore on the place, reported having lots of experiences with ghosts and then claimed he himself was possessed by demons. An exorcism, performed on him inside of Bobby Mackey’s in 1991, was recorded on video. With “PM 9:24:42” floating in white letters in a corner of the video, exorcist Glen Cole points at Lawson, lying on the floor:
Rev. Cole: “Yer not gonna do anything, because I’m gonna find you, tonight!”
Lawson: “How you gonna fucking find me!”
Rev. Cole: “Because I got something inside me that tells me I can. You understand me?”
Lawson: “What the fuck you got? He’s on the way. He’s coming and a thousand strong! And I tell you what! There ain’t a goddamn fucker ever can come in this place again and ever try to run any of us off!”
Rev. Cole: “Oh yes—”
Lawson: “There’s thousands of us here!”
Rev. Cole: “I don’t care.”
Lawson: “We’ve been here six thousand years!”
Rev. Cole: “I’m telling ya, ya got to leave tonight!”
Janet Mackey passed away in 2009 at age sixty. Carl Lawson passed away in 2012 at fifty-three.
Bobby Mackey was none too happy about these ghost stories coming from his wife and caretaker … and soon his employees, patrons, and bandmates. He thought if the stories circulated it would damage his business. Who would be crazy enough to hang out in a haunted bar? But the ghost was out of the bag. People continued to talk about Bobby Mackey’s and his ghosts, and they began to weave together a mix of historical fact, speculation, and campfire ghost story.
There are a lot of stories about the land and building that houses Bobby Mackey’s, many of them unsubstantiated. The honky-tonk is built on the grounds of a former slaughterhouse, which was in operation in the 1800s and is said to be the scene of a gruesome murder in the 1890s. Two men—Scott Jackson and Alonzo Walling—murdered a pregnant woman (five months, the same as Mackey’s wife), Pearl Bryan, and cut off her head. Legend says that they threw it into the slaughterhouse’s well as some sort of Satanic rite. The well, although filled in, is still in the basement and is now commonly referred to as a “portal to hell.”
Lawson is the one who discovered the well after ripping up the basement’s floorboards. He claimed spirits told him where to find it.
Although the story of the murder is true, it is unknown where Pearl Bryant’s head was disposed of. Jackson and Walling were arrested and hung for the crime on March 20, 1897, in the gallows behind the Newport Campbell County Courthouse in Newport, Kentucky. Bryan’s headless body was buried in Forest Lawn Cemetery in her hometown of Greencastle, Indiana. It is now popular lore that the ghost of Bryan and the malicious spirits of Jackson and Walling inhabit Bobby Mackey’s.
The gruesome history continues into the Prohibition era, when the property became a speakeasy. It’s said barrels of moonshine were smuggled up the Licking River and through the former slaughterhouse well. Shady dealings are said to have happened in the club over the years, and it’s rumored the basement rooms were where cheats and mob stool pigeons were tortured and murdered.
In the 1930s E. A. “Buck” Brady took over the nightclub and casino and named it the Primrose. He soon found himself in trouble with the Cincinnati Mafia. Brady refused to sell the club to the mob, and violence escalated against him for years. Brady got out of the business in the ’40s and committed suicide in 1965.
After Brady’s tenure, the club was renamed the Latin Quarter and became a popular nightclub. One of the casino’s popular dancing girls was an attractive young woman named Johanna. The story goes that her stern father, who owned the club, forbade her from seeing a club musician, a singer named Robert Randall. (Bobby Mackey’s birth name happens to be Robert Randall Mackey. Coincidence?)
She ignored him, and her father had the young man murdered. Johanna got revenge by poisoning her father and herself. She died in one of the club’s dressing rooms in the basement. Since her death, Johanna’s rose-scented perfume has still been smelled lingering in the air.
Bobby Mackey says his young daughter, who was scared of the place, said that it smelled “like roses on a grave.”
The bar was converted into a Hard Rock Cafe in the 1970s and was reportedly shut down after a fatal shooting on the premises in the winter of 1978.
And then, one day in the spring of 1978, Bobby Mackey and his wife, Janet, pulled into the gravel lot of the building. After looking the building over, Bobby saw his name in neon lights, but his wife just had a creepy feeling.
All of this lore has brought Bobby Mackey’s a new breed of fans—ones not interested in tapping their toes to some country hits but wanting to investigate his premises for proof of ghostly activity. Mackey isn’t a fan of the ghost stories (although he did write a song about one of the alleged ghosts, titled “Johanna”). We can speculate that once Mackey realized these groups were willing to pay a hefty fee to spend the night wandering around his basement, he saw the silver lining in the cloud.
Paranormal investigators began traveling to Wilder, Kentucky, from all over the country, and an investigation at Mackey’s was added to many a ghost hunter’s bucket list. Dozens of groups have conducted investigations in the building, everyone from the Central Ohio Ghost Squad to the Ghost Research Society to the Paranormal Investigations of Wichita.
Adding to the intrigue, the spot has become immortalized on shows like Ghost Adventures and Ghost Hunters, among other paranormal and spooky travel-themed shows.
Ghost Adventures used an investigation of Bobby Mackey’s as its lead episode of season 1 in 2008. The show’s mixture of cockiness, befuddlement, and shock tactics shown in this early episode made it an instant hit and a competitor of Ghost Hunters. The show stars a trio of investigators: Zak Bagans, Nick Groff, and cameraman and equipment tech Aaron Goodwin.
Inside Bobby Mackey’s, Zak did an interview with Carl Lawson, explaining to the bewildered former caretaker that “I want to provoke the hell out of them. I just want to stand up to them. Who are they? Who are these spirits to be bullies and possess you? I want to taunt the hell out of them. I want to provoke them and give them a taste of their own medicine, see what happens when we do that.”
After employing their gimmick of getting padlocked into the building, the creepy experiences started. First Nick went to use Bobby Mackey’s men’s room, when a ghost punched a nearby wall.
“Oh my God, that scared the living [beep] out of me!” Nick exclaimed to the camera.
“That scared me, too, bro. I’m shaking right now,” Zak agreed. After another noise startled him, Nick began to run out, but Zak grabbed him.
“Stop! Stop running! Do not [beep] run! Do not run! Stop running! Do not run from this!” And then to the spirits in general: “We’re not running from you!”
“Do it!” Nick challenged. “Do it again!”
The night became infamous for the group, and they returned twice to investigate it on the show, but they say they paid the price for the footage. On their first investigation, Bagans suffered a long scratch on his back, executed by a demon, he claimed. Afterward, the evil followed them home, they said, damaging their personal lives. Aaron Goodwin went so far as to say the bad energy was a major contributing factor to his marriage being ruined.
Zak ended the inaugural episode by intoning, “If there is a place that houses pure evil, Bobby Mackey’s Music World contains it. We felt it, we saw it, and we heard it.”
In one of the Ghost Adventures follow-ups, they brought along an archbishop to perform a cleansing rite on the building. I thought that before my own visit, it might be good to ask exorcist Father Jack Ashcraft for his opinion on the matter. He didn’t have encouraging words, to say the least.
“First, it is an extremely dangerous practice to go ‘hunting ghosts,’” Father Ashcraft explained to me. “From the viewpoint of the Church, this is necromancy and spiritism, both very grave sins. Additionally, demonic entities will pose as the spirits of the dead, so even if one were to validly make contact (which is extremely rare), one cannot honestly say it is not demonic. There are many dangers to contacting or showing an unnatural interest in such entities, including oppression and obsession.
“My advice would simply be, don’t do it. If many ‘ghost hunters’ put as much effort into seeking God and His Son, I dare say the face of reality television would be quite different.”
PIM’s first investigation of Mackey’s in July 2013 was a memorable one. In fact Leigh said it was “the most stuff that’s happened on any investigation I’ve been on.”
PIM was getting a tour of the basement by Bobby Mackey’s representative Wanda Kay when Leigh noticed PIM member Missy Bostrom fall to the ground. Leigh thought she had tripped, but after seeing the look on Missy’s face, he knew something else had occurred.
“It felt like somebody grabbed onto my arms like this,” Missy described at a team meeting, clenching the air, “then it pushed me backwards.” PIM had not yet set the video equipment up, but you could hear Missy’s reaction in an audio clip, which Leigh played at the meeting.
Missy: “What the hell!”
Leigh: “Are you OK?”
Missy: “What the hell?”
Wanda Kay: “Let’s step outside a minute.”
Missy: “Oh my God!”
In addition to Leigh, Missy, Tony Belland, and Jann Goldberg, PIM members Randy Soukup, Michael “Gravy” Graeve, John Krahn, and Chris Paul were gathered in Leigh’s rec room.
Missy had a second encounter about an hour later in an area of the basement known as the Wall of Faces. Although this was caught on video, someone was standing between Missy and the camera. You can see part of a leg flailing and a shuffle and hear a scream.
“That’s me screaming, ’cause yeah, she was pinned on the fucking wall, hanging there,” Jann said.
“It looked like someone had her by the armpits by the way her arms were positioned,” Leigh recalled.
“That time it felt like it pushed me in the chest, up against the wall, and that’s all I remember, getting a really hard push,” Missy said, still seeming a bit shaken up by the events.
Jann also had a life-altering event that night at Bobby Mackey’s. She was walking around the building doing baseline readings. “I remember thinking how badass I was, walking around the most haunted nightclub in America.” The feeling was short-lived.
“I walked into a wall. Not a real wall, but that’s what it felt like,” Jann told me at a later interview. At this moment, she said, she instantly turned from skeptic to believer. She had spoken to PIM’s member who identified as “sensitive” but didn’t have an understanding of the concept until now. “I can’t describe the feeling. It’s kind of like falling in love: you can’t describe it to someone who hasn’t felt it. It was like instant vertigo. I kept thinking I was going to puke. My stomach was turning like this,” Jann said, clenching the air and twisting. “I almost burst into tears. I called Missy over and she said, ‘Oh, I feel dizzy.’ She got hit with it, but not as hard as I did.
“I’ve never been shaken like that before, never thought it would happen to me,” Jann said. “My motivation [for investigating] was just to go grubbing around in dirty old buildings for something to do on the weekends. I never believed—it wasn’t in my paradigm.”
She said that her new sensitive ability brought her a couple of visitors at Bobby Mackey’s. “I felt like I was talking for two people. One was a girl who, in my mind’s eye, was right here,” she said, gesturing by her right shoulder. “She had golden natural blonde hair, like Elizabeth Montgomery, kind of young Meg Ryan before she ruined her face with plastic surgery. Just kind of … ‘Mmm, I smell like daisies and angel tears’ type, and it seemed to me she hung out there because she liked the music.”
Jann’s face darkened as she remembered the other entity. “Then there’s the guy I referred to as Tony Soprano, because that’s what he felt like. That’s what I felt like. I felt like I had a big beach ball gut, short, bowling ball head. Whenever Gravy would talk, it felt like someone was stabbing a screwdriver into my spinal cord. I just wanted to kill him, and Noah, too. It was a boiling feeling in my gut; it was like hatred, but without the passion, if that makes sense. It was a disgusting feeling because this guy didn’t want to just kill them, he wanted to medieval torture them to death. Not so much blow their brains out as disembowel them. ‘I want you to hurt to death.’ It was like no feeling I ever felt.”
There were times, Jann said, that she felt nagged, compelled to blurt her anger out. “Gravy was standing over by [Bobby Mackey’s] mechanical bull, and I’m telling you, every time he opened his mouth I was just like, Oh … I just wanted to choke the shit out of him because I just thought he was an annoying little pissant! He said something—‘Should I go ride the bull?’—and I was like, ‘How about I take that bull and stick it up your ass?’” Jann laughed. “I had enough control where I told people to stay away from me because I wasn’t sure I could prevent myself from punching someone. I remember going up to Noah, Missy, and Gravy and saying, ‘I hate you, and I hate you, and I hate you!’ Right in their face,” Jann told me, shifting an angry pointer finger through the air.
“It was an interesting investigation,”* Leigh said. “Unfortunately we don’t have good documentation of what happened. We have audio, but the video we have is blocked by someone standing in the way. So we have reactions and clips of body parts moving, but we don’t have an end result.”
PIM immediately began planning a return trip, and when I saw September 22 marked on its online calendar as a “Return to Bobby Mackey’s,” I told them I wanted to go along.
On September 12 I returned to Leigh’s house, a nice house on a quiet residential street in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis. Leigh lives here with his wife, Daphne, a high school math teacher, and their two young children. Leigh and his family had gotten their Halloween decorations out early—cloth ghosts hung from a giant evergreen in the front yard, smiling plastic jack-o’-lanterns and humongous purple tarantulas lined the porch, and a Bela Lugosi–style vampire lurked by a tree. Leigh greeted me at the door wearing a T-shirt with the message I CAN EXPLAIN IT TO YOU, BUT I CAN’T UNDERSTAND IT FOR YOU.
Slowly, the team members returning to Bobby Mackey’s—Gravy, Jann, John, and most bravely, Missy, pulled onto Leigh’s street. They were there to have a “dry run” to see how all of their combined equipment and bodies would fit into Missy’s Chevy Tahoe.
Meanwhile, before everyone was present, there was a lot of joking around at each other’s expense. Jann got a vicious razzing for her penchant for stealing people’s pens and pencils, which the team called “pulling a Jann” or “Janning,” and her missing an upcoming investigation of the First Ward School, an allegedly haunted schoolhouse in Wisconsin Rapids, Wisconsin, because she would be celebrating Yom Kippur.
“What is that, anyway?” Gravy asked.
“Jesus Christ. Haven’t you seen Fiddler on the fucking Roof?” she retorted.
“Anti-Semitic, misogynist assholes,” Jann huffed, turning to me. “Be sure to write that down and quote me on it in the book.”
After Missy and her Chevy Tahoe arrived, a long line of equipment was gathered, and Leigh jumped in the backseat. “Now the Tetris game begins,” he said. There were about nine big plastic cases of equipment, a half dozen duffel bags, backpacks, and tripod bags, and a dozen yellow industrial battery packs.
“We can put this here and this here,” he said as Gravy handed him case after case. After finding a satisfactory stacking method, the group moved down to Leigh’s rec room in his basement, where his kids’ building blocks were spread across the floor. The team grabbed seats on his couch or the giant beanbag chairs on the floor.
There was a lot of talk, sometimes heated, between Leigh and Gravy, about what time to leave and what route to take. With a timeline mapped out, there was a discussion of what trigger objects needed to be purchased.
The motley trigger object list for Bobby Mackey’s included makeup, pills, a single flower (for Johanna), as well as brass knuckles, handcuffs, a copy of Playboy, booze, a bullet, playing cards (for the malicious mob ghosts), and a baseball, marbles, and other toys (for the kid ghosts).
With all the details hammered out, the team called the meeting and started to head out. Everything that could be planned for had been, but what might happen was still unknown.
“Investigating Bobby Mackey’s this early in your paranormal career is like losing your virginity to Jenna Jameson,” Jann told me shortly before I headed toward Wilder, Kentucky.
On September 22 I met up with PIM outside of Wanda Kay’s Ghost Shop, just down the road from Bobby Mackey’s on Licking Pike. PIM rolled up in a perfectly packed Chevy Tahoe a few minutes after me. They had driven a solid six or seven hours from Wisconsin to Kentucky. Wanda arrived shortly afterward and unlocked the ghost shop.
Wanda, a musician herself, had worked for Bobby Mackey’s for a decade. She started as a DJ and had also hosted karaoke and country line dancing lessons. “He didn’t know I was into anything paranormal and I didn’t tell him. But after a while, he said, ‘Why don’t you do a gift shop?’ and three days later he said, ‘Why don’t you start doing ghost tours?’ And then we started doing investigations.”
She would continue to handle paranormal tours and investigations for Mr. Mackey until 2014, when she and his management had a falling-out, and she has written a book on the bar’s haunted history, Wicked They Walk: The Tour Guide’s Book. Her shop offers her books and CDs, ghost detecting equipment, protective crystals, paranormal seminars, and classes and psychic readings.
After paying the investigation balance and signing waivers absolving Bobby Mackey’s in the case of accident (or ghost attack), we drove to the bar. Bobby Mackey has reason to make sure his ghost-tracking guests sign the waiver. Ghost issues came to a head in 1994, when Bobby Mackey’s went to court over a claim of assault … by a ghost.
Plaintiff J. R. Costigan said he entered Mackey’s men’s room when he was punched and kicked by a cowboy hat–sporting spirit in 1994. He tried to sue for $1,000 in damages and demanded a warning sign be put up. The judge opined that Mackey had “no control over ghosts” and dismissed the case. In a different incident, another witness, Ritch Lawson, said he saw a ghost with a handlebar mustache throw a garbage can against the men’s room wall. The room became intensely hot, and the ghost cryptically told Lawson, “Die game.”
At the urging of Mackey’s attorney, for a long time, this handwritten warning sign was placed by the door of Bobby Mackey’s: WARNING TO OUR PATRONS: THIS ESTABLISHMENT IS PURPORTED TO BE HAUNTED. MANAGEMENT IS NOT RESPONSIBLE AND CANNOT BE HELD LIABLE FOR ANY ACTIONS OF ANY GHOSTS/SPIRITS ON THIS PREMISES.
“Eight oh six and eleven seconds, Bobby Mackey’s, September 22, 2013,” Leigh time-stamped as we walked from the gravel parking lot up to Bobby Mackey’s front door. I took a deep breath and walked in.
Jann and Gravy began walking around the perimeter of the dark bar to take EMF and temperature readings, while I strolled around slowly, taking in the layout and details.
I walked past Bobby Mackey’s collection of framed 45 rpm records lining the length of the bar. I stuck my head in the gift shop, which had T-shirts and Mackey’s CDs. Wanda used to operate out of that space, but she had expanded enough to move, which was OK with Mackey. Although he’d enlisted to Wanda to host paranormal groups, he still felt reluctant about promoting ghosts and tried to maintain a separation of his music and the paranormal.
“It’s like pulling teeth,” Wanda said. “That’s why I have the shop up the street; he doesn’t want paranormal here. He wants to be known for his music.”
I took in the stage area; a spotlight illuminated a drum set and guitar amp. A banner draped across the back of the stage proclaimed Bobby Mackey’s as the COUNTRIEST NIGHT SPOT AROUND.
“They’re really good,” Kay said of the Big Mac Band. “Bobby’s had the same pickers for thirty-five years. That’s unheard of. You can imagine how tight they are when they play. He just eats, sleeps, and breathes music.”
Continuing to look around, I crossed over the empty dance floor to an area that had a somewhat creepy-looking mechanical bull and pool tables set up. There used to be a jukebox set up in there too, one that liked to mysteriously play “The Anniversary Waltz” by itself. Sometimes, it was alleged, even when unplugged.
We settled down for the first EVP session of the evening. I grabbed a table near the bar with Jann, while Gravy and John moved chairs and sat on the dance floor. Missy, Wanda, and Leigh sat near the mechanical bull.
“Did someone move a chair over there?” Leigh asked in the dark.
“That was me!” I replied, sheepishly.
“Tea, make sure to tag yourself loudly!” Leigh reminded. Then he heard some noises coming from an unplugged change machine. Everyone was quiet.
“Do you need some money?” he asked the phantom sparechanger. “I have some money here in my hand.”
The incident is time-stamped 8:27:23. Leigh started the EVP session.
“Hello, my name is Noah. I was here, oh, a couple months ago now. We’re not here to hurt you. We just want to find out more about you. If there is someone here who would like to communicate with us, could you please come forward and tell us your name?”
A few minutes later Jann and I heard a faucet running for a few seconds and we went to look in the nearby bathrooms. When Jann turned the faucet on, it sounded like what we had heard. I later found out that the ladies’ room faucets turning on and off has been reported activity in addition to ghostly appearances in the men’s room.
The EVP session continued. “Who is your favorite country music star?” I asked, and I was surprised to see a moving shadow along the bar, before I realized it was a bit of outdoor light from a car coming through a window.
“Can you show yourself to us?” Missy asked. “We want to see what you look like.”
At 8:43:30, we moved up to George’s Apartment, the former residence of the caretakers. Named after a caretaker from the 1920s and ’30s, Wanda said, this was also where former caretaker Carl Lawson lived when he claimed he was possessed by demons. After an EVP session, we moved outside so the team could do a more elaborate setup in the club’s basement.
The team got to work unloading the SUV full of equipment. For the next hour, Leigh and Gravy set up equipment in every corner of the basement and did some EVP sessions with just the two of them while John, Missy, Jann, and I hung around outside. We went for a short walk around the exterior of the bar. We went crunching along the gravel near the railroad tracks, crickets chirping, then we sat down by the van to wait.
“Well, I made it out; Gravy wasn’t so lucky,” Leigh said, exiting the basement about an hour later.
“You capture anything?” Jann asked.
“A gnat,” Leigh said. “All right, these are the people I was telling you about,” Leigh said as we walked through the basement door.
“Hello, hello, I’m back,” Jann said.
We immediately headed to a backroom of the basement known as the Wall of Faces, to start an EVP session time-stamped 11:31:44 PM. The room was so named because of the weird blotchy patterns on the basement wall that appeared to be creepy human faces to an imaginative eye. A chicken-wired wall contained some storage on one side of the room. A coffee table and chairs formed a circle in the room, set up for paranormal investigators. This was where Missy had her experience of being thrown into a wall.
“Is there any negative history associated with this particular area?” Krahn asked Kay.
“Yeah, the whole building,” Wanda said a bit wearily. “Every inch of it. The outside, too. You’re sitting on top of the slaughterhouse and the armory and battery where everyone was massacred. The grounds are layer upon layer upon layer of negative shit, to put it bluntly.”
After settling in to the Wall of Faces room to do an EVP session, Missy had her second terrifying experience in the room—and one of the strangest things I’d witnessed. We were sitting there in the total darkness, throwing out questions, hoping to get a response, when we heard Missy struggling with her breathing. Here’s a transcription of what happened next:
Leigh: “Hey, you’re breathing weird. What’s wrong?”
Missy (through short breaths): “I can’t see anything in front of me.”
Krahn: “That’s because you’re in the dark, Missy. What’s wrong?”
Missy (sounding more upset): “I can’t see anything!”
Leigh (turning on flashlight and shining it in her face): “Is this better?”
Missy (looking blankly ahead): “No!”
Leigh: “Look up. Her eyes are constricting fine.”
Missy: “Yeah, I can’t see anything. It’s like, completely dark in front of me.”
Gravy: “You don’t see the light in your eyes?”
Missy (frightened): “Yes, I’m serious.”
Wanda: “Close your eyes. Close your eyes, foc—”
Missy: “My hands feel weird, like they’re shaking. Like inside, vibrating.”
Leigh: “I don’t feel them shaking, but your hands are cold.”
Wanda: “Try to focus on a number, like twenty, and count backwards to one, and concentrate only on that.”
Missy (breathing heavily): “My hands feel like—oh my God—my hands feel like awful.”
Krahn: “What do you mean?”
Leigh: “Can you see now?”
Missy: “I can see now, but my hands feel really awful. Like they’re numb. Like they’re sleeping.”
Leigh got Missy to move her arms around.
Missy: “I can see now.”
Krahn: “Gravy, you got your EMF detector?”
Gravy: “No.”
Leigh: “I got my EMF detector right here. 3.69 … 4.04.”
Gravy: “Just keep breathing deep.”
Leigh: “3.72”
Missy: “I can still see.”
Gravy: “That’s good. Are your hands feeling better?”
Missy: “No.”
Leigh: “Take off your gloves.”
Missy (after rubbing her hands together): “OK, it’s gone. I feel fine again. That was weird.”
Missy was raised on a farm near Lebanon, Wisconsin, with ten brothers and four sisters. When I sat down to interview her, she told me that her paranormal investigation hobby had made her the black sheep of her family.
“The consensus in my family is, no, they don’t agree with what I do. My side of the family, they think I’m playing with the devil. They just don’t get it. They are very religious. One sister is supportive, one is tolerant. The rest of my family would prefer I didn’t talk about it. My mom will say something once in a while, and it’s always negative. We’re stubborn Germans. Mom and Dad’s family are both German farmers.”
I asked her if her family’s lack of support bothered her.
“I don’t care. I’ve learned with my family to just be yourself and don’t try to live up to their expectations, because you’re not going to,” she said, laughing it off.
Missy moved to Milwaukee to attend beauty school and met her husband, Jim, an engineer, on a blind date on Halloween. They married in 2001, and she says he’s supportive of her hobby. “He’s a very free-spirited kind of guy. He had just rode his mountain bike from Wisconsin to Oregon when I met him. That’s just the type of guy he is. If he decides to do something, he just does it.”
Things started getting supernatural when Missy, pregnant with her first son, and Jim moved into an old farmhouse in Dousman, Wisconsin. “We had some kind of goofy experiences there,” she told me. Missy, diagnosed with high blood pressure and toxemia, had been given a doctor’s order of bed rest. Missy’s hands were swollen, so she took off her wedding ring.
“I went to see my doctor, and when I came home, I noticed my ring was gone. I’m freaking out, calling the hospital to see if they found it, couldn’t find it anywhere. A couple days later, I’m just so distraught, and Jim says, ‘Missy, I found your ring.’” He had seen a glint in the sunlight by the base of a big tree in their backyard.
“I don’t know how the heck it got out there, because it’s not on the path to my car, and that’s all I walked.”
Shortly after that, another incident happened after Missy wrote out a stack of invites to her son’s baptism. “I left them on the nightstand and went to sleep, and in the morning they weren’t there. Well, sure enough, they were found in that same golldarned spot where my ring was found. There’s a couple other small things we found out there, too. And Jim would always get a sense of someone extremely tall standing behind him. His good friend Chad is really tall, so there’s a couple times he’d think Chad was there. He’d turn around and say, ‘Hey, Chad, what are you up to?’ And there would be nobody there.”
Missy added that after they moved from the house, she ran into an old neighbor at the grocery store. He wanted to know if anything strange had happened at the house, because the new tenants were having odd experiences.
Missy, also inspired by Ghost Hunters, got a tip from one of her sisters living in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, that a coworker was a member of a new team there named Stevens Point Paranormal Club (SPCC), led by Valerie Kedrowski. Missy initially joined the team until she found out about PIM, in closer proximity. During her tenure with SPCC, she took a trip to Bobby Mackey’s and Waverly Hills Sanatorium to investigate, but she said both were uneventful.
“Not much happened. Val got scratched on her back; it disappeared almost immediately. But nothing like the times I went with PIM.”
Missy: “Did someone do something scary to you like put something over your face where you couldn’t see? I’m not going to lie, that was a scary thing. Did that happen to you?”
And … silence again.
“It’s quarter after twelve. We should move to the well room,” Leigh said.
In the well room, I grabbed a chair right next to one of Bobby Mackey’s most famous attractions: the portal to hell. I kept one eye on the rest of the team, or where I thought they were in the dark, and one eye out to watch for any demons springing from the well. Gravy sat across the room, also next to the well. Missy sat in a small chamber attached to the room, which Wanda said is a former jail cell, left over from when the building was used as an armory.
“I’m going to sit right here with my back to this opening, which I don’t like, because it creeps me out. But I don’t have any choice. Fight through my fears. Fight through the fears,” Gravy said, smiling. We started the EVP session, and soon the fear grabbed Jann.
“Missy, can you come out of there?” Jann asked, her voice nervous.
“Why?” Missy asked.
“I just really would like it if you would. OK?”
“Why do you want Missy out of there?” John asked. Jann sniffed abruptly, her voice shaking.
“Because I’m afraid she’s going to get hurt in there. Please, Missy, come out of there, please.”
PIM’s cameras positioned near the “portal to hell” in Bobby Mackey’s basement. TEA KRULOS
“Jann!” Gravy said. “Jann, sit and relax. Take a couple deep breaths.”
“Missy’s fine,” John said.
“It’s OK, I’ll be all right,” Missy said.
“She’s not going to get hurt,” Leigh said. “Gravy was in here before. Nothing happened to him.”
“Gravy is exactly the one I would attack,” John said.
“Thanks, John.”
My ear hurts really bad,” Missy said.
“You guys leave Missy alone!” Jann said. “They’re the ones who threw her last time. Leave her alone!”
“No, these are different ones; they don’t come out of there—they’re stuck in there,” said Wanda.
Krahn switched with Missy for a few minutes, but then Missy wanted to go back in.
“My ear feels fine now,” Missy said.
“We brought your gal pal back,” Leigh said.
“Why dontcha just tell them you’re coming to show ’em a good time? See if they treat you different,” Wanda said to Missy.
While the rest of us remained silent, Missy began an eerie enticement session with the male ghosts stuck in the cell. “Yeah, I’m here to show you a good time,” she said. “You haven’t had a woman here in a while, I bet. Any requests?”
Silence.
“Maybe you could start out by telling me what your name is.”
Nothing.
“Do you know what my name is? My name is Missy.”
Nothing.
“Why don’t you whisper something in my ear, instead of making it hurt?”
No response.
“Can you touch me? I don’t care where you touch me, but you got to do it so I feel it.”
Nothing.
“Or maybe you can pull on my hair.”
No response.
“Do you like me being in here? … I feel cold … colder.”
Silence.
The EVP sessions moved from room to room in the basement. We did one near what was said to be Johanna’s dressing room, another one in the entrance of a tunnel—since filled in—that was said to be a former transport channel for moonshine, another in a room that was formerly a kitchen.
We returned to do sessions in the Wall of Faces room and the well room, but no further noteworthy incident occurred.
“Thank you very much for communicating with us if you did. We have to go now,” Leigh said. He time-stamped the end of the investigation at “two thirty and twenty-five seconds.”
“Lights coming on, watch your eyes,” Wanda said. The team broke down equipment while I chatted with Wanda, and around 3 AM, we walked out into the crisp air and the chirping crickets.
PIM always tries to view the encounters they have from a scientific perspective, so although Leigh wasn’t quite sure what happened to Missy, he said one explanation could be some kind of panic attack.
“I think it is possible she had a psychological event that resulted in what she reported,” Leigh said, also noting that the same room was where she had her terrifying previous encounter of being pushed. So was this experience psychological or paranormal? “In the end,” he continued, “we will never definitively know what caused it.”
The incidents at Bobby Mackey’s had affected Jann on a much deeper level than I had suspected at the time. It was the starting point for an ugly falling-out she had with PIM in January 2014. Around the time of PIM’s holiday party, I noticed testy exchanges between her, Noah, and Gravy, and shortly after, she loudly quit the team. This came as a surprise to me, because in my first interview, she had specifically told me how she considered the team to be almost as tight as family.
After PIM’s first Bobby Mackey’s investigation, their next stop was Waverly Hills Sanatorium near Louisville, Kentucky. Jann said she was exhausted and looking forward to a more typical PIM investigation. The group brought along a baby doll as a potential trigger object for a ghost of a woman who, legend had it, killed her own baby in the sanatorium.
“I thought this being able to sense things was going to be a strictly Bobby Mackey’s phenomenon,” Jann told me. She said that soon she had tuned in to one of Waverly Hills’ ghosts.
“I felt this va-voom! You get these pins and needles, not just on your skin, but through your guts. You ever take a Percocet? It’s a feeling like that, like aaaaah. Then I started feeling these emotions—sorrow beyond anything I’ve ever felt, unimaginable, heart-wrenching sadness. I had these nagging thoughts again: Secret baby, secret baby, secret baby.”
Jann said she began to get impressions. The ghost was “smart and funny, like Diane Keaton,” she said, and she was able to tell that the woman had been forced to undergo an abortion by a sanatorium doctor who had impregnated her—the “secret baby.”
“It’s not so much she was mad as she was like, ‘Oh, Christ, another group of fucking idiots with a baby doll.” Jann said that PIM members later hid the doll without her knowledge to rile up the ghost. Jann said her senses led her to the doll and she confronted the team. Noah said Gravy didn’t hide the doll adequately and Jann spotted it.
“One of the things that really set my Irish up was Noah having conversations two or three times where he was grilling me at this point and I’m trying to sort out my own head,” Jann said. “I was like, ‘Look, don’t you get it? I didn’t ask for this! I’m questioning my own sanity, I don’t need your ass to do it, too.’”
Noah countered that questioning paranormal experiences with a skeptic’s eye is fundamental to PIM.
“My understanding is that she’s mad we didn’t believe her. Well, I don’t believe anyone—it’s not a secret,” Leigh told me. “It’s not like I tell people, ‘I believe you 100 percent’ and then behind their back say they are full of crap. I question everything anyone tells me on an investigation.”
The straw that broke the camel’s back was a reality show appearance. PIM was invited to be on the Ghost Adventures spin-off show Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks, to talk about the group’s experiences at Bobby Mackey’s. The show producers told the team they would fly one, possibly two members to talk on camera in Las Vegas.
“Noah calls, and the first thing he says is ‘You’re not going,’” Jann told me. “He said, ‘I think it’s just going to be me and Missy.’” Jann, who talked to people behind the scenes, said she felt “screwed over” by her teammates. Eventually, just Missy was sent for the shoot. An angry storm of text messages followed between Jann and Noah about the show and other topics, and she quit. Another ugly debate appeared online when Jann and PIM fought over control of the group’s Twitter page. Both Jann and Noah point fingers at each other and accuse the other of trashing a friendship over the Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks show.
“There are some members of the group who genuinely hate her for how she treated things and things she said. That is unfortunate,” Noah told me over the phone. He sounded upset, admitting that she had been a useful member of the group. “Very unfortunate. It is the opinion of some of us that her virtual friends on Facebook were more important than the actual people she was associating with here in Milwaukee.”
Not surprisingly, Jann’s summation of PIM consisted of several four-letter words.
It’s interesting that, despite the high level of drama the investigations of the haunted honky-tonk had caused, the allure of the place led both PIM and Jann (with an independently assembled team) to both plot return trips to Bobby Mackey’s Music World in 2014.
* You can read PIM’s report on this investigation (as well as all their other ones) in its entirety at www.paranormalmilwaukee.com. It’s in the “Cases” section and is case #130724.