The Hempsted House in New London

A 331 year old home in Connecticut is said to be haunted. With reports of a female ghost wondering the second floor of the home to objects moving about.
The Connecticut Paranormal Research investigates.

New London — As she sat in the Joshua Hempsted House’s modernized kitchen Saturday night, stooped casually over a quadrant-screen surveillance monitor, Christine Kaczynski could have been mistaken for a security guard ensuring nobody entered the premises.

But Kaczynski, director and founder of the Connecticut Paranormal Research and Investigations Team, was scouring for evidence of unearthly intruders. Team members flitted across her monitor as they moved through the house to capture audio footage in the hopes that, upon later analysis, it would reveal whether the house is haunted.

“There was a light orb that zigzagged through the old kitchen, and they caught that on video,” said Rochelle Simon, director of communications and marketing for Connecticut Landmarks, which runs the property.

“We have had paranormal experiences at our museums, and visitors always ask us, ‘Is this place haunted?’ and that’s why we’re doing this,” Simon said.

Four of the 12 properties operated by Connecticut Landmarks are undergoing paranormal investigations this spring with the first one at the 331-year-old Hempsted House. CT-PRI was at the larger house for more than four hours Saturday while Simon and site administrator Rick Spencer went to the smaller stone house across the property and opened a package of Oreos.

The six CT-PRI investigators went beyond the roped areas in the low-ceilinged, shadowy rooms to perch their infrared cameras — lenses like large, solitary eyes with red irises — at advantageous angles. The transmitted images were black and white except for the light filtering through one room’s street-facing windows, which glowed orange on the screen.

Members scattered through the darkened house, avoiding the uncanny, toddler-sized doll perched in one room downstairs. They wielded voice recorders while talking to potential ghosts and inviting them to interact. Spirits speak in three- or four-word phrases, sometimes clearly and sometimes garbled, Kaczynski said, at sound levels the human ear can’t hear unaided but that computer programs can decipher. Some members of CT-PRI are “sensitive,” able to feel where spirits might linger as people in adjacent rooms can sense one another’s presence but cannot see each other until opening the door between them. Others are just fascinated.

“There’s somebody there that I’m not seeing visually that’s existing in a whole different dimension,” Kaczynski explained.

While CT-PRI set up their equipment early in the evening, Spencer, the site administrator, moved through the house and related past instances of unexplained activity.

“One guide was doing a tour and came up here and saw that wheel moving,” he said, motioning to a spinning wheel in an upstairs room.

He deadpanned: “He had to change his pants. He didn’t really have to change his pants. I would’ve had to change mine.”

Jan Forcier, of CT-PRI, entered the room to ask Spencer about former uses of a space downstairs.

“We do feel a bit of energy there,” Furcier said.

Spencer explained that, before that site became a bedroom, it was a workshop space where Joshua Hempsted carved things like tombstones.

Another time at the house, Spencer said, workers restoring the roof saw a blonde woman walking from room to room. In the stone house, a spinning wheel expert once descended the stairs and asked who was lurking in the vacant second floor.

Kaczynski emphasized that the team works to eliminate all possible explanations for any phenomena their footage reveals before deeming it a spiritual presence, and that they do follow-up research on any findings to confirm it.

“They were matter of fact about it, and made it pretty clear to me that they needed to really analyze the data, like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. Let’s mark that down and we’ll go back and take a very close look at that,’” Simon said.

Full source: The Day