Museums, tours plumb our grisly past

BY BECCY TANNER

The Wichita Eagle

Travis Heying/The Wichita Eagle

Shannon Kraus uses an infrared camera to search for ghosts or other paranormal events inside the Kansas Aviation Museum last month.

At the Broadview Hotel in Wichita, the staff blames prank phone calls and shifting furniture on a mischievous ghost named Clarence.

And at the Kansas Aviation Museum, volunteers talk of hearing ghostly conversations -- and of feeling a friendly tug on a shirt when no one is near.

Looking for a thrill or a chill or just a spooky lesson in history? A growing number of museums and businesses are trying to draw in visitors with the possibility of a haunting experience.

"Museums are coming forth with these stories as a way to tell the entire story," said Deborah Amend, executive director of the Butler County History Center in El Dorado, which is sponsoring a Creepy, Crawley Trolley Tour that tells stories of murder, mayhem and madness.

"You can't just tell the feel-good stories. I want to create exhibits that inspire dialogue. Truth is scarier than fiction. We have so many macabre items in our collection. We call this our dark history."

Same goes for the photos of people in coffins as a way of explaining the funerary practices of the late 19th century.

Or the grave of Clara Wiley Castle, who was married just 10 days when another woman cut her throat with a straight razor. She lived for 18 agonizing days with 100 stitches in her neck before she died.

Halloween is a time when people are more accepting of dark stories, Amend said.

"It's all about proper timing -- tying an exhibit and event with the public's psyche," she said. "I can't imagine doing this exhibit at Christmas or Easter."

The local Ghostbuster

Sam Tyree, lead investigator of Great Plains Paranormal Investigations in Wichita, began researching unexplained activities at the Kansas Aviation Museum after volunteers expressed concerns about things they had heard or felt.

He will help present evening tours at the museum, featuring aviation history and techniques on gathering paranormal information, the weekend before Halloween.

"We want to know about life after death," Tyree said. "It fascinates everyone one way or another. We are scared of ghosts or something unknown because we are taught to be afraid of them."

Using high-tech audio and video recording equipment, the group has ruled out many things as not paranormal at the museum.

An orb -- a ghost or spirit -- in a photo could merely be dust on the lens of a digital camera. Electromagnetic fields created from furnaces and other heavy appliances can make some people who are sensitive feel "sick." They may feel nausea, headaches or paranoia, he said, but that is not the presence of ghosts.

Not everything at the museum has been explained yet, though, like the tugging on a person's shirt or what sounds like the thumping of a microphone when no one is around. Tyree continues to investigate.

Paranormal events, he said, are things that absolutely cannot be explained.

At the Broadview, Trisha Harding has a different response for things that can't be explained.

"On the things we can't control, guests will say, 'What's going on?' We put it down to Clarence," said Harding, sales manager and historian for the 85-year-old hotel. "Clarence is our friendly resident prankster."

The hotel offers a "Fabulous Flapper Tour" featuring tales of its history, famous visitors and unexplained activity.

Unexplained fascination

In eastern Kansas, Beth Cooper and Cathy Ramirez run "Ghost Tours of Kansas" in Topeka and Lawrence. The sisters have discovered their business is part of a growing tourism niche, drawing people from across the nation.

They offer tours year round, but this is the peak time. Many of the October tours are already booked, Cooper said.

"Some people go for the novelty; some people go because they think they are really going to see a ghost," Cooper said. "People have asked if spirits can attach themselves on the tours. I tell them not as far as I know. But we have seen anomalies on our tours."

Tammy Hanna, assistant curator of the Coronado-Quivira Museum in Lyons, usually offers ghost tours of Wichita at Halloween. She canceled her tour this year because arena construction is under way in the area of the tour.

She recalls her own encounter at the Lyons museum.

"I was opening up at the museum and somebody said 'Hello' to me. I said 'Hello' and went back to work because I knew I was the only one in there.

"A lot of us have experiences we can't explain," Hanna said. "I've been dealing with these things for the past 25 years, and the majority of unexplained things are not ghosts. The power of the human mind is an amazing thing."

Maybe, Tyree said, people also explore scary stories for the same reason explorers once climbed into ships centuries ago to explore the horizon.

"People want to hear about far away places," he said. "Death is about as far away as you can get. It's the horizon of life."

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