A haunted asylum, though—that’s another story.

If you close your eyes and think of the absolute scariest place you can imagine, what do you see? Rusted bars covering the entrance to crumbling cells? A dark cemetery, filled with moldering crypts, overshadowed by ancient trees? An old hospital, with dark corridors filled with antique medical equipment and overturned beds?

Whatever your answer is, you’re right. People have their own triggers and their own fears that play into their own personal worst-case scenario. You’d think that a haunted prison would be at the top of the list of places I don’t want to hang out in the middle of the night, but for me, that’s actually not true. They just don’t bother me all that much.

I’ve definitely investigated a lot of jails where I’ve seen plenty of activity. I’ve even spent the night in a cell on Alcatraz. Despite its reputation, that place is one of the least haunted “haunted” locations I’ve ever visited. We investigated there on Ghost Hunters, but my first time was with a group of friends who had all entered into the lottery to get one of the rare and coveted overnight stays on the Rock. We got some interesting EVPs in the morgue, and there was a solitary confinement cell that had a lot of activity in it, but I remember being disappointed that, after all the legends around the supposedly inescapable prison, it wasn’t more haunted.

It’s easy to assume, given the grim nature of a prison, that they’re all haunted and have dark energy around them. The simple truth is that not all of them are like that. Some, like Missouri State Penitentiary, have bloody histories and are very haunted, though.

I’ve seen a lot of activity in prisons, but most of that activity has not been what you would assume when you hear “I talked to a ghost in a prison.” I think people tend to walk into a jail with a preconceived notion of who they’re going to meet in spirit form. We really have no idea who we’re going to communicate with in there, and we can’t know why a person was incarcerated or how they ended up there. I always tell people to abandon all judgment when they go into a jail, and really just go in with the human side in mind. Some of these people had terrible childhoods and made mistakes. A lot of them had drug problems or were abused. With older prisons, you could be dealing with someone who was incarcerated for not being able to pay a one-dollar tax bill. It’s not always going to be a crazy murderer with some really juicy story to tell.

But again, that could be my intention or my cognitive bias. I’m sure many people have investigated grim old halls of incarceration and found much darker evidence and had scarier experiences. Maybe I’m drawing the human side out of these ghosts by trying to empathize with them. That being said, I find that a lot of the spirits that I meet in jails feel like they belong there—as though they’ve chosen to stay behind in a self-imposed sentence. The ghosts I’ve found in these places, on the whole, aren’t mean. They’re sad. That’s why I don’t generally feel in danger of getting attacked in an old prison, and I haven’t been (with the exception of the time I was grabbed in Gettysburg, and a few things being thrown here and there). Those spirits that I’ve communicated with aren’t even looking for help. They’re just like, This is where I belong, so I’m staying. It’s almost as though they feel they don’t deserve to move on.

When we investigated the Old St. Johns County Jail in St. Augustine, Florida, in Season 4 of Kindred Spirits, we knew walking in that the jail had a lot of activity. Founded in 1655, St. Augustine is the oldest continuously occupied city in America, and that jail had a lot of dark history, having housed prisoners for over one hundred years in inhumane conditions. Disease was rampant in the overcrowded cells, and prisoners fought with and killed each other. The men were forced to work on brutal chain gangs, the members of which were called “the product” in the county’s moneymaking scheme to use them for cheap labor. When prisoners were sentenced to death, they were required to build their own gallows, and hundreds of people would come and watch those men be publicly hanged.

“Energy like that doesn’t just leave because you’ve dragged the bodies out,” Stephen, general manager of the jail museum, said. He reported that his staff experienced being grabbed and seeing a crawling dark entity. Stephen himself has been nearly pushed down the stairs, in what he felt was a deliberate way.

The corruption at the prison also meant that some innocent men were imprisoned falsely, and were not able to prove their innocence in life. That’s what we encountered as soon as we started investigating on the first night.

“Is there anybody here, sheriff, deputy, murderer, outlaw, whoever,” Adam said on an EVP session. I’m not a murderer, was the response we got back. We immediately knew that was the work we were meant to do in the jail—but the responses were minimal until I asked, “What was the sheriff’s name when you were here? Was he a good sheriff?”

NO, we heard, in the most forceful answer of the night.

The next day we did some research into men imprisoned in that jail who may have been innocent but were still convicted of murder. One case stood out to us: Jim Kirby and Robert Lee were accused of murder, and both were convicted and hanged in 1901. Even though Kirby was adamant that Lee had nothing to do with the crime, he was not exonerated. On the day of the hangings, both men proclaimed Lee’s innocence. “They are hanging an innocent man,” he said in an article from the St. Augustine Record on the day of the hanging. “As God is my Judge and knowing that I must face Him innocent or guilty in a few minutes, I am innocent.”

In the same article, Kirby said, “I have tried to save Lee but failed. But you can state that he knew nothing of the affair until it was over.”

That night, we asked Chip to do a reading of the solitary confinement cell, which has been an active spot in the jail. He was immediately overwhelmed by emotion. “Whatever I’m picking up says, I just don’t give a damn anymore. No need to even try,” he said. “It’s horrible. Just hopeless. It comes in waves. You don’t even feel like there’s any reason to exist.”

We asked Chip many times if he wanted to leave the space, but he wanted to finish his reading. “It was horrifying,” he said later. “I sat in the chair and I felt such anger and pain. I was frightened, upset, confused, hopeless, helpless—all of those things. I started to shake and I was yelling ‘Let me out of here!’” But it was the prisoners he was channeling, and not Chip himself, who were saying those things. “Chip came through and said ‘No, I don’t need to leave’ but whoever I tapped into, it was just horrifying,” because of all those negative emotions.

“We’re there to help the living and the dead,” he said afterward. “Maybe there are people who are still experiencing that upset. Maybe there had been people who were not guilty who were put in that space, or who were mistreated or abused, and they took that with them beyond the grave. It’s so complex and so complicated when you start dealing with this stuff. It can be very extreme. Sometimes it can be that extreme.”

We eventually made contact with both men, with the help of a staff member of the jail who had had some strong experiences in the space, and told them that we knew the truth about what happened and that we would make sure people knew the real story. Our hope is that by telling the story, and assuring these men that history has set the record straight on what happened, that they’ll feel as though they deserve to leave that place, and their work is done.

I feel like people look at old jails as full of evil, but I still view them as places where people need help—even if it’s hard to get them to talk about it. Even when people are alive in prison, there are still people trying to help the incarcerated. I go into any place with that same mindset, whether that’s a jail or a mental institution or a hospital. When I enter, I always say I’m not there to judge; I’m not there to tell you what to do. I’m not the police or a doctor. I’m just here to talk.

Maybe it’s my maternal nature, but I tend to have the most emotional trouble with places where people were sick and suffering. Inside the Old South Pittsburg Hospital in South Pittsburg, Tennessee, I was alone in the “body box,” where corpses would be stored, doing a spirit box session. I was saying words like who am I? and murder, when something stroked the side of my head in a very creepy way. I had to get out of there. I very much did not like that feeling.

One of the hardest moments I’ve ever had as an investigator was when Adam and I returned to Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Season 3 of Kindred. There are over five hundred rooms across 180,000 square feet in that building, but owner Tina Mattingly asked us back because she was getting a lot of activity that was scaring her and other investigators on the fourth floor of the hospital, in what used to be used as a unit for mental patients.

We started our investigation in that spot with EVP work. “Do you want us to find your family? And if you wouldn’t, if you don’t want us to find your family and friends, if you just want to talk to us, that’s okay too,” I said.

The answer came so forcefully that Adam and I both jumped. NOOOOO. And it happened in the same spot where Tina had reported screaming in her ear.

We couldn’t tell if that man didn’t want us to find his family, or if he was saying that he didn’t want to talk to us. Once Chip came in, he said that he found “frenzied people saying they don’t want to be bothered anymore.”

We picked up a lot of hostility and anger, but we were having trouble narrowing down who was so angry or how we could help. In our research the next day, we found a terrible story of a patient at Waverly Hills who had suffered unimaginable personal losses. John Mitchell was at the hospital, ill with tuberculosis, while his wife was home caring for their seven children. She was also having an affair with another man. At 3 a.m. in a café, her lover slapped her so hard that she sustained severe head trauma and died. She was found in an alley the next day, her official cause of death a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a blow to the head. (The man who hit her was found not guilty of murder, but years later, his then-wife died the same way. He was found guilty that time.)

Sick enough to be treated intermittently at Waverly Hills for the past three years, John Mitchell had no choice but to ask the state to care for his kids. He returned to the sanatorium and died. We don’t know if he ever even saw them again, or what happened to those kids.

Think about what that would feel like, to be terminally ill, to be betrayed by your wife, to lose her in that traumatic way, and to be forced by those circumstances to willingly surrender your kids to the state.

Of course he would be angry. And of course he would feel like he had reason to stay behind.

Once we thought we were speaking to John Mitchell, we returned to that spot on the fourth floor to investigate, but whoever was already there did not want us to be there. Adam’s SLS camera turned off four times, even though it was fully charged. Eventually, frustrated, Adam gave up on that equipment, and we relied only on our recorder.

“My question to you is, are you or do you know who John Mitchell is?” I asked.

Mitchell, he said.

“Do you feel like your life was taken from you?”

YES.

It was so strong. All of a sudden, a breeze picked up out of nowhere, only in that one hallway. It became strangely windy for just a minute. Then we heard footsteps coming from the hallway.

“John, if that’s you, we want nothing but the best for you,” I said. “We don’t want you to be here—”

Just then, something appeared in the hallway.

It was a man.

A full-bodied apparition was standing directly in front of us.

It appeared out of nowhere, and disappeared in a flash.

It was not a shadow figure. It was a person.

I hadn’t seen anything like that since I was a kid. That was horror-movie level. I was legitimately terrified.

“That shit is rare,” Adam said. “It is so rare.” As we listened to the recording, I jumped, then said to Adam, “Oh, that was you. You touched me.”

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was over here the whole time.”

It was the strongest and clearest encounter with a ghost I’ve had in decades.

We think John Mitchell appeared that way because we identified him by name—maybe for the first time since he’d died—and because we knew he had been through something unimaginably bad. When he showed himself, it was almost like he was trying to say, I’m here, you’re right, now leave me alone.

The next day when we talked to Tina, we told her about John and his story. “We recommend when you have investigators come in,” I said, “you make them aware of him, so the more they talk to him—”

“Maybe he can let go,” Tina said. “I’ll try to help him.”

“That wasn’t our focus when we came in, but it became that,” Adam said.

“Well they made sure that that was your focus,” Tina answered, referring to the many spirits in the space.

They probably knew he needed it most.

That time in Waverly Hills, I really was terrified. But that is a rare exception, especially these days. People often ask me why I react so strongly when we get a big piece of evidence on the show. In general, I might look scared, but I’m really excited. Imagine sitting in the dark for four hours, hoping something’s going to happen, and then it finally does. You’d be pretty excited, too, even if it was just a recording of someone saying, Go away.

I’m infrequently afraid when I’m investigating. There are definitely moments when I get creeped out, but it’s more like wonderment and excitement. I will get an adrenaline rush for a minute, but then I launch into research-and-analysis mode. I want to figure out the “why.”

“Once you have a job to do, that mechanism clicks off. You click off the terror switch because you can’t be terrified,” Adam said. “I think it just naturally occurs when you give yourself a purpose with ghosts. We get a little freaked out at times, but that’s fun. When you have purpose and focus, the fear pushes to the side because what you’re doing is more important. Finding the answers is more important than being affected by the scare factor.”

There are exceptions, though, like at Waverly Hills. Once, when Kris Williams and I were investigating a home on Ghost Hunters and while we were in the middle of the pitch-black basement, a deep, gravelly voice said HELP ME right in between us. We both jumped out of our skins. But even then, that was more like getting startled than genuinely being terrified. That’s only happened a handful of times.

When there’s a train coming that’s going to run me over, that’s scary, too.

Even if it’s a ghost train.

When we visited the Crocker Tavern House in Barnstable, Massachusetts, on Season 3 of Kindred Spirits, we went there to investigate activity that had been happening over the past year to the home’s new owners. The building was erected in 1754 as a stagecoach stop and tavern, but then became a museum and eventually a residential home. With over 250 years of history, the house had accumulated a lot of stories. Kate and her husband, Joe, saw a dark shadow running toward their baby. Other family members heard footsteps, and some even claimed to have been locked in a room by what they felt was a ghost.

Early in our investigation, we got the name Willie on an EVP. Then later in our research, we learned a lot more about who that person might be. In 1926, there was a terrible accident not far from the house. A train had struck a car. Two women died on the scene, and another died at the hospital. Among them: Wilhelmina Crocker.

“Was there a car accident?” Adam asked in a spirit box experiment that night.

Hurry.

“Hurry and do what?”

Where are you going?

“Are you part of a family that lives here?”

Other one.

From speaking to a Crocker family historian, we had learned that a Wilhelmina Jones had lived next door to the house and had married into the Crocker family. It would make sense that she would return to this house, because it looks familiar to her. It has stayed nearly exactly the same in the century since her accident.

To communicate with Wilhelmina, we decided to try something we’d never done before: to attempt to record activity in the home she was haunting by using the site of her death as a trigger object.

I drove to the train tracks, and Adam stayed in the house. The idea was that I would do EVP work at the tracks, while he listened to the spirit box at the house for responses. We couldn’t hear the other’s work and had no way of knowing what the other person was doing.

“Amy is out there by the train tracks,” Adam said. “Is she safe out there? They don’t have anyone there signaling cars to stop when the train is coming, so it’s really scary.” After he said that, he moved to another room—as he walked past, a lamp in the hallway blinked off and on in an intense pattern. Was Wilhelmina trying to communicate?

“Hello? I know there was a terrible accident and I feel like one of you might be looking for help,” I said at the tracks. “My friend is at the Crocker Tavern right now. He’s waiting for you.”

At the same time, Adam heard in the spirit box: Hi, I’m outside.

“Why did you go there?” I asked. “Who was there who could help you?”

Help me, Adam heard. Then a scream in the spirit box.

“Can you say something if you’re here?” I asked. “Just talk into this little red light, or go see my friend at the Crocker Tavern, his name is Adam.”

Adam heard an explosion.

There was definitely something there with me. I didn’t know if it was residual energy from the accident, but I didn’t like it one bit.

Just then, the lights and bells went off, as though a train were coming.

I nearly jumped out of my skin.

The crew and I ran toward the car, but I wanted to see if there really was a train coming. We waited.

Nothing.

That was it for me. I was done. I was shaking. Had Wilhelmina set off that alarm? Was she trying to warn me of something?

Although it scared me half to death, the experiment was successful. Adam was hearing responses to the questions I was asking. Back at the house, after Adam and I compared evidence, we decided to talk to Willie again.

“I went to the train tracks where you were killed,” I ventured in an EVP session. “Did you see me there?”

Yes.

“Can you tell us who Clarence Shirley Crocker is?”

My husband.

“It’s almost a hundred years since you passed away.”

No.

We were stunned. She didn’t know she had died. I can’t imagine spending almost a hundred years in a place, not knowing what was happening to you, or why. We had to tell her the truth.

“Can you read this? I’m just bringing it here to show you that it’s your death certificate.”

Death certificate?

“Tell us what you want us to do.”

I’m going home.

“Mrs. Crocker, I know this is hard, but we’ll make sure no one forgets you, okay?”

With that, silence.

When we spoke to Kate and Joe the next day, she told us that trains didn’t even run on Cape Cod in the middle of winter. There was no way that train signal went off for an actual train.

Since we visited, they’ve experienced smaller instances of activity—you can accumulate a lot of ghosts in two and a half centuries—but nothing on the scale of the activity that had been happening previously, and nothing that scares them anymore. We hope Willie really did, as she said, go home.

The Ghost and the Showrunner

You might think seeing John Mitchell appear at Waverly Hills was the biggest thing that happened that night—but you’d be wrong. While that was going on, our former showrunner Brian Garrity was having his own experience, and we had no idea.

In the middle of our spirit box session, Brian started having a massive coughing attack from all of the dust and dirt in the old building. We stopped filming so he could have some time to recover, but he was having a really hard time breathing. Eventually he told us to start again, but he was still struggling to breathe, and doing everything he could do to stay silent. But we were getting so much crazy activity that he couldn’t stop what he was doing, which was to write down the evidence we were getting as we were getting it.

So we’re picking up all these responses, and we have no idea why we keep hearing Help him, help him. But Brian knows, because he can’t breathe as he’s writing down that the ghosts are telling us our friend needs assistance.

Just then, he felt a strong hand on his back, almost as though someone was trying to help him stop coughing. Waverly Hills had been a tuberculosis hospital. The spirits there had seen that kind of episode many times.

Maybe that’s why we were able to isolate John Mitchell after all—because the other spirits there were preoccupied with trying to help our friend.