Phantom Folklife
For 40 years, UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures has been telling the stories of the people of Texas. Not surprisingly, some of them happen to be ghost stories.
By Rebecca Luther
Now, ITC has a few spooky tales of its own to share. Earlier this year, the museum was investigated by a Schertz, Texas-based group, Everyday Paranormal, that says they found evidence of paranormal activity around two popular ITC exhibits: the Castroville hearse and the Creation and the Cosmos exhibit. The group presented its findings to the public at the Texas Folklife Festival in June.
“What do ghosts have to do with folklife? Well, just about everything,” says Everyday Paranormal co-founder Brad Klinge.
ITC researcher Rhett Rushing agrees, and says that while ITC isn’t interested in trying to confirm or deny the existence of ghosts, he is interested in the fact that many people do believe in ghosts and also in the ways that different cultures use ghost stories. “As a folklorist, I deal with human beings and their stories,” he says. “Every culture that’s ever come to Texas has a place in their folklore for ghosts.”
The most widely known ITC ghost story is the Castroville hearse, which has been a center of speculation for years. Security guards have reported closing the heavy doors of the horse-drawn carriage that were mysteriously open, only to find them open again later. Others have claimed to hear voices coming from inside the hearse. Several years ago, the History Channel filmed a documentary on the Castroville hearse, and whenever the show re-airs, Rushing says, “my phone lights up like a Christmas tree the next day.”
It was the hearse that interested Brad Klinge and his brother, UTSA alumnus Barry Klinge ’06. A teacher of developmentally disabled young adults, Barry Klinge was on a field trip at ITC when he met Rushing and asked about conducting an investigation of the hearse and the museum.
The museum has probably been investigated a half-dozen times in its 40-year history, although Rushing says he fields countless requests, which he usually turns down. He says that in the past, he’s been disappointed by scam artists and self-proclaimed psychics who use Ouija boards and dousing rods in their work. What impressed him about Everyday Paranormal was that the brothers employ a more scientific method and use high-tech equipment such as thermal imaging cameras, infrared thermometers, electromagnetic field detectors and digital recorders. Their techniques, Rushing and Brad Klinge both say, are similar to those employed by the stars of the popular Sci-Fi Channel show Ghosthunters.
“They don’t tell you your place is haunted; they try to disprove it. They come in with a skeptic’s mentality,” Rushing says.
But rather than disproving theories about ghosts in the ITC, Everyday Paranormal’s investigations in February and March turned up some unusual activity. While they didn’t obtain any video or photographic evidence, the Klinge brothers and their team of volunteer investigators did collect a number of audio recordings, which they refer to as electronic voice phenomena or EVP. Klinge likens the EVP to dog whistles; they don’t usually hear them when they’re on site but pick them up later on the recordings.
A digital recorder placed inside the hearse revealed a whisper, heard over the voices of the investigators talking in the background, that seems to say “not dead.” On another recording, an investigator trying to speak to ghosts in French (the Alsatians who settled Castroville spoke French or a mixture of French and German) is answered brusquely by a voice that she believed said, “J’ai appris frère est ici,” a crude translation of “I understand your brother is here.” The Klinge brothers think that might be a reference to them, but admit that they’re not certain about what they’re hearing.
“A lot of times, you have to guess what it might be saying,” Brad Klinge says. “The fact that it’s a disembodied voice—yeah, that’s 100 percent. What it’s trying to say? Eh, that’s not always so simple.”
The team was especially challenged in their attempt to translate one EVP that was recorded in the Creation and the Cosmos exhibit, a cave-like structure featuring Meso-American pottery and other relics from American Indian cultures. In one recording from the exhibit, known as the shaman’s cave, a voice says what sounds like “koo-aah-aaht.” The team entered the phonetic spelling into Web search engines and eventually found a site that listed it as a Caddo Indian greeting meaning “welcome.”
Also in the shaman’s cave, recordings turned up sounds of flute music, chanting and another voice that seems to say “buffalo.” But it is the “koo-aah-aaht” that Brad Klinge finds the most compelling evidence of paranormal activity at ITC. “It’s the clearest, loudest EVP I’ve ever heard in my life,” he says.
Rushing thinks the EVP collected from the hearse and the shaman’s cave are compelling, but he isn’t quite ready to proclaim the ITC haunted.
“Do I believe in ghosts? Absolutely not—yet,” he jokes. “Nobody’s ever walked up to me and said, ‘Hi, I’m a ghost.’
“But I’ve had some really weird stuff happen to me, and I have interviewed literally probably a thousand people who absolutely swear to it.”
Shuffler, the institute’s first director, lived in an apartment on the top floor of the museum and was known for using cherry tobacco in his pipe. A number of people have reported smelling the scent in and around the conference room where his apartment used to be. ITC researcher and folklorist Rhett Rushing says he’s smelled the pipe tobacco himself on several occasions. Two years ago, he brought his sons, 8 and 12, to the office one weekend, and, because they had never heard about Henderson Shuffler and his cherry pipe tobacco, Rushing was stunned when his sons alerted their dad that they smelled “burning fruit” in the building.
Members of Everyday Paranormal also smelled cherry pipe tobacco during a couple of their trips to ITC. Founder Brad Klinge says he doubts that Henderson Shuffler’s ghost is roaming the halls of ITC. Instead, he believes the recurring smell of pipe tobacco is a residual haunting—a playback recording of a past event.
“Our second director also occupied that apartment for awhile, and he also smoked a pipe,” Rushing says. “If the smoke smell is a residual haunting, we may never know which of the first two directors is responsible.”
To read the full story, go to http://www.utsa.edu/sombrilla/feat3.html.