To say that our second night at Asylum 49 was an eventful one would be putting it mildly. Just like last year, an investigator was scratched, right in front of the team. Voices were heard in empty rooms. Two investigators were touched on the neck on two separate occasions. But here’s my favorite experience of the night, and we were lucky enough for investigator Jason Fellon to have been filming when it happened. (Video footage appears courtesy of Jason)
Six of us were sitting in the hallway outside Room 666, one of the most active locations based upon our investigation last year. It is where our investigator received scratches last year and again last night, and where SB-11 “Spirit Box” sessions turned nasty and verbally abusive. At the time this video was taken, everything was quite. Jason had been recording for a long time without any results. Cami and I were going to run an errand on the other side of the hospital. She got up, walked down the hallway, past the door of Room 5, without anything unusual happening. I followed right behind her. You can hear me say that I have my radio with me if the team members need anything.
The Banshee is a hydraulically operated ghost that is mounted on a track, which ends in the doorway of Room 5 (right next door to Room 666). When pressurized, the Banshee comes flying out of the darkness at the unwary customer, usually scaring the crap right out of them. It can be triggered in one of two ways: there is a manual button at the back of the frame, where a hidden operator can time it perfectly; but the most common method of operation is a sensor which points out into the corridor. When somebody passing by breaks the IR beam, the Banshee comes out to get them.
Knowing about the IR sensor, we had deliberately placed it face-down in the doorway so that the beam was pointing directly at the floor. There was no way for our investigators to break the beam. In fact, not only had we been up and down that corridor past the doorway multiple times last night, Cami and Jesse had also been inside Room 5 a couple of times, checking on noises that turned out to be nothing more than rustling plastic. Nothing had been triggered.
As I went to join Cami, I passed the open doorway of Room 5 and…you can see what happened next. After we turned on the lights and examined the mechanical apparatus carefully, we determined that the only way the hydraulic Banshee could have been triggered was manually…from inside a room that we all knew to be empty (we searched it again anyway, just to be sure).
This smacked of the experience I had last year, when a door was slammed just inches behind me in the main corridor of Asylum 49. Whoever (or whatever) triggered this device waited until the instant I was walking past, timing it perfectly.
Can’t wait to go back tonight and see what else the old hospital has in store.
