Edgar ghost hunter
Kessler is veteran paranormal investigator
Is your house haunted? Do you hear strange noises? Do you see odd things?
Do you ever feel a weird presence? Maybe you need to talk to Kathy Kessler.
The town of Cassel woman has been investigating haunted homes and businesses since 2003 and, as of 2005, has been a leader within a group she founded, Central Wisconsin Paranormal Research.
Kessler, along with her husband, Don, provide free, confidential investigations to detect evidence of spirits, ghosts and other creatures from the beyond.
The veteran paranormal investigator talked about her research at the Edgar Branch Library last week Wednesday. She played recorded voices from what she said were ghosts and showed photographs of unexplainable luminous globes known as “orbs.”
Kessler had an audience of around a dozen people, several who discussed their first-hand encounters with ghosts and other spirits.
The researcher said she shows up at a home or a business with a standard collection of tools. These include voice recorders, Maglite flashlights, a laser thermometer, an Electro Magnetic Field (EMF) detector, night vision cameras and a “ghost box,” a device that records human voices uttered in radio frequencies.
Kessler said that ghosts sometimes communicate through the flashlights. The key is to screw the top of the flashlight just so that it doesn’t shine. Ghosts, she said, will sometimes answer questions by turning the light on and then off. The voice recorders pick up noises (known as Electronic Voice Phenomenon or EVPs) generally undetected during an investigation. Kessler spends hours after an investigation to hear up sometimes difficultto- hear voices. The EMF detector, she said, sometimes picks up the presence of ghosts, although it can also detect close-by power lines and malfunctioning electronic gear, too. The “ghost box” rapidly scans through available radio frequencies in order to record voices from the beyond.
Kessler said she performs her current investigations with another lady, a medium.
“Over time, you get sensitive to energies,” she said. ”But I am not nearly as sensitive as she is.”
Kessler said she has performed investigations in many local homes and advised residents how to rid themselves of a pesky ghost. The advice is to tell the ghost they are not wanted and order the ghost to leave. Sage is often used to ward off ghosts, Kessler said. Ghost visitations are often triggered by remodeling, she explained.
In her presentation, the researcher did not present data from any of these investigations, but, instead, concentrated on her visits to public places, including businesses and government buildings suspected of being haunted.
One well-known place is the old Rogers Theater in Wausau, not far from the Wausau Center Mall, where a stabbing has been rumored. A knife was found hid inside a wall, Kessler said.
She said she toured the old projection room and unoccupied upstairs. A photograph documented an orb (“a spirit energy.”) Another spooky place to visit was Norwood Sanitorium in Marshfield. The structure, used to house people with tuberculosis prior to the development of antibiotics, was in the midst of being demolished—a room ceiling fell in while she was in a different part of the brick building.
“This place was interesting,” she said.
The visit yielded an EVP. ”I’m warm,” a spirit voice said on the digital voice recorder.
Kessler showed pictures of a reportedly haunted Waverly Hills Sanitorium in Louisville, Ky. Deceased TB victims were taken out of the building through a concrete chute—so as not to “demoralize” the other residents.
Near the facility’s crematorium a voice recorder picked up the shrill voice of what sounded like a young boy.
“Momma!” it shrieked.
“That was a little bit weird,” said Kessler Other visits were to the Birnamwood Hotel, where she photographed an orb, and the Sherman House, Plover, where she said residents returned to the place after Kessler’s visit and found a dull and unpolished floor bright and shiny.
“If I could have a ghost that would come and clean my floors, that would be handy,” she said.
Kessler showed night pictures from a Pioneer Cemetery with strange, red and green streaks of lights.
“I don’t know where the lights came from,” she said.
Kessler told her audience that, to date, she has never seen a ghost.
That wasn’t the case with other people at the library event, however.
One woman said she saw a recently deceased grandmother, clothed in the blue dress she was buried in, float up a flight of stairs and attempt to enter bedrooms where her mother and sisters were sleeping.
A young girl said one night she heard noises in a sibling’s bedroom when she was alone in the house and that one night at 3:03 a.m. she heard all of the doors in the house mysteriously slam shut and, after feeling a cold sensation, claimed that somebody grabbed her by the foot.
“Sounds like your folks should call me for an investigation,” Kessler replied.
