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Is aviation museum haunted?

Sam Tyree and his team from Great Plains Paranormal Investigations recently spent a night at the museum to look into some unusual incidents.

BY BECCY TANNER

The Wichita Eagle

Larry W. Smith

WICHITA, KS - AUGUST 24, 2007: Sam Tyree with his equipment and who has been doing research for ghosts at the Kansas Aviation Museum in Wichita, Kansas on Friday, August 24, 2007. PHOTO BY LARRY W. SMITH

 

Sam Tyree had heard the stories.

Maybe you have, too.

Doors slam where there are no doors at the Kansas Aviation Museum.

Music from the '40s plays somewhere.

Crowds can be heard in the distance, moving, like they are walking to a waiting airplane.

A mysterious man in a fedora appears and disappears.

Tyree, the lead investigator with Great Plains Paranormal Investigations, was intrigued by the stories -- and by a photo he took there once. It shows a tiny, wispy orb that could be lint on a camera lens or... something else.

So he asked to spend the night at the museum.

Teresa Day, director of the museum, said she sees the paranormal investigation as a fun endeavor.

"From my perspective, we are doing this out of curiosity," Day said. "It could bring attention to this old building and make it more interesting. At the same time, I don't want people thinking we are off track from our mission."

Tyree says he is not a ghost hunter. He says he uses scientific methods and equipment to rule out what can be explained and document what can't. The things that can't be explained are "preternatural."

"People talk about the supernatural," he said. "The supernatural only refers to God. Preternatural is everything else."

Last Saturday, he showed up at 6 p.m. with his team. He brought audio and video equipment and an electromagnetic field indicator.

They stayed until 4 a.m.

So what happened that night?

They heard things -- residual public announcements from another time period, Tyree says. "Stone buildings can sometimes get events recorded and under the right conditions will replay themselves," he said.

And there's more.

"We did have an exceptional experience," Tyree said.

He reports that the meter of the electromagnetic field indicator -- which shows energy fields -- jumped when it was taken near the skeleton of a 1931 Stearman plane. The plane had crashed in Alaska years ago.

"We asked emotionally charged questions and it responded to our questions for 10 minutes," Tyree said. "We need to go back in and double-check but we believe it's the pilot who died in the plane. He was a crop duster and did not want the plane scrapped. He wants it restored to flying condition."

Tyree said the pilot was telling the paranormal team that the crash wasn't his fault, that a defective engine was the cause.

"It's definitely unusual," Tyree said. "You normally don't get that level of interaction."

Tyree's group is based in Wichita. It looked unsuccessfully for a ghost named Julie at the Eaton Place at Douglas and Emporia. It also investigated the Maple Grove Cemetery, but did not discover anything out of the ordinary.

The aviation museum's investigation is unusual because it was rich with experiences, Tyree said.

During its heyday, the Wichita Municipal Airport was a major mid-continent stopover for airlines.

In the 1940s, it was one of the busiest airports in the nation, with a take-off or landing occurring every 90 seconds. Aviation legends such as Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh have paced its terrazzo floors.

Eventually the airport was closed and converted to an aviation museum.

Longtime volunteer Cyndi Rhodes wasn't surprised at Tyree's experience.

During the early 1990s, she was working in the museum's gift shop on a day when the museum had few visitors.

"It was quiet that day yet I could hear voices in the next room," Rhodes said. "It was a babble of voices. They were happy."

One night when she had to go back into the museum, she heard the slamming of a door "like somebody was really irritated, but there wasn't anybody there," Rhodes said. "I decided we must have disturbed the ghost for whatever was planned that evening."

The paranormal group took several thousand photographs and recorded 10 hours of tape and video.

They hope to return to do more research.

Reach Beccy Tanner at 316-268-6336 or btanner@wichitaeagle.com.