Manitou Springs – a little evidence

It’s taken a little while, but we wanted to recap our pre-Halloween visit to Manitou Springs and serve up a little bit of evidence. Well…sort of evidence.

We spent the Saturday before Halloween tagging along with Stephanie Waters and her Colorado Ghost Tours team as they were hosting a walkthru of the Crystal Valley Cemetery in Manitou Springs, CO. We were there in two capacities – to do a mini-investigation of our own, as well as covering the event for the Boulder Weekly, for whom Dave contributes freelance articles a couple of time a month, usually on music. The Weekly asked us to do a ghost story this particular week (the editor over there knows that we have a ghost hunting franchise on the side), and the Manitou Springs cemetery tour was the perfect event for us to cover.

Early in the investigation, as the sun was going down, Sharon pointed her Nikon up at the crescent moon as it was setting behind the trees, and caught an interesting light anomaly. Due to the proximity of the light anomaly to the image of the moon, and rough outline of the anomaly, we kind of suspect this is a bit of lens flare, but Sharon’s got a quality DLSR Nikon and the shape of the image is oddly inconsistent with simple lens flare. You can see the anomaly on the left – the moon is in the center.

Here’s a blowup of the image. Judge for yourself (and for the record, we have no problem with the idea that spirits may well exist over our head – who says that the non-corporeal need to be subject to gravity ???)

OK, obligatory orb photo time – Sharon caught this view shooting into the fading twilight. Here’s the fullsize pic (orb is in the upper left…)

Here’s the blowup:

Our view on orbs is pretty well documented - we certainly can’t prove this isn’t a spirit. But we’re a long way from endorsing it as such. We caught a few other orb pics. Eh.

This one is interesting – while shooting near one the reputedly haunted gravestones (a Col Adams, allegedly a member of the infamous Chivington Sand Creek raiding party of November, 1864), Dave caught this interesting image shooting north. Check out the right side of the image – and no, no one was smoking, the air was too warm for breath vapor, etc etc.

…(and yes, there’s an orange orb in the center of the image)…

Immediately upon reviewing the image, Dave re-shot the same view. About 8 seconds later:

We did find this quite unusual – we had our video camera rolling at the time we shot this (although pointed in a different direction), and we checked the audio for any EVP anomalies. Zip.

Lastly, one of the more celebrated stories of Crystal Valley is that of Theresa Kenny:

After the restless nature of the previous two individuals, it is a change to read the tale of Theresa M. Kenny, the woman who didn’t want to leave Crystal Valley Cemetery. Theresa, an immigrant from Austria purchased her plot in the cemetery 14 years in advance of her death. Known for her handiness in repairs and improvements on her home, she also built her own mausoleum in 1930. She performed all the work herself, with the exception of the roof of the structure. She apparently used a spoon from her kitchen to create the texture of the mausoleum walls.
She became enamored with her planned final resting place, calling it her “little house.” For more than a decade, she could regularly be found on the porch of her mausoleum, rocking in her rocking chair. She was known to take guests over to the cemetery to show her handiwork off. When Theresa passed away in 1943, her rocking chair was placed inside the mausoleum, where it sits near her to this day.

Sharon caught one photograph of the mausoleum, shot from a distance, with her flash on (that’s Dave walking nearby):

When we got home and we examined our photos, Sharon noticed a very interesting image on the right side of the mausoleum door. It looks an awful lot like the image of a woman standing in the door, body turned slightly to the right with her head facing forward. The face and hairline is clearly visible, as is the outline of her torso and her left arm. Here’s an extract the same image, blown up. What do you think?

What do we think? We’re inclined the regard this image a perfect example of visual matrixing, assembling an otherwise abstract and unstructured pattern of light and dark into something that looks familiar – in this case, the ghostly image of a woman. To our knowledge, there are no reports of Theresa’s spirit manifesting in the cemetery, and we haven’t been able to find any photographs of her in life to compare to this image.

We do think this is cool, though, even if it isn’t really paranormal.

We did record a number of EVP sessions and shot about 80 minutes of night-vision video, but the audio recordings were unrevealing – the ghost tour, which hosted about 70 people, broke up into four or five groups, each group listening to tales of the cemetery related by Stephanie and her team, so there was a lot of background vocal noise in the cemetery, too much, frankly, to reliably extract any solid EVP evidence. We had a couple of slightly interesting hits, but discarded them due to the unreliability of the background ambient noise. The video revealed nothing.

Still, it was fun evening – Stephanie and her team did a terrific job, and we were also pleased to meet Christopher and James from the Colorado Springs Spirit Chasers team, who did a presentation on recent investigations they’ve done. These guys know what they’re doing and some of the evidence we saw was indeed impressive. We hope to join up for an investigation with them in the coming new year.