Read Online Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew by Kelly Crigger, Zak Bagans - Free Book Online

investigate it and try to debunk it. At least 50 percent of the time I find nothing that could have caused the sound.
    Footsteps are very common in paranormal investigations, so much so that I expect to hear footsteps above me almost everywhere I go. They seem to happen with more regularity than other sights, smells, and sounds. At the Moon River Brewing Company in Savannah, Georgia, I was preparing for an investigation of this old building when I heard the distinct sounds of boot heels clacking on the wooden floor above. It was loud and unmistakable and I was absolutely sure someone else was in the building. Nick and I ran upstairs to see who it was and tell them to get out of the building, but no one was there. We had already been locked into the establishment for the evening and confirmed that no one else was in the building. My only conclusion is that it was the residual energy of a former worker walking across the floor and dragging something heavy, like a barrel or a chest . . . or a body.
    Footsteps like these were also common during an investigation at the Vulture Mine outside Phoenix, Arizona. Once a thriving community centered on the most productive gold mine in the state’s history, the Vulture Mine was a community of nearly five thousand people at one point. The mine closed during World War II, and a once-flourishing community became a cold, desolate spot on a forgotten map. At least twenty-five people are known to have died suddenly and violently in what was once Vulture City and their spirits are trapped in a lonely town with nothing but miles of open desert to keep them company . . . until I showed up.
    Everywhere I went in those buildings, footsteps echoed from different rooms and floors. And these were not modernday tennis shoes or soft-soled kicks. Those would have sounded different. The sounds were clearly hard-soled boots with heels, so it’s easy to believe that they were the footwear of a past era. It was like an entire company of miners had just gotten off work and marched through the old town, but didn’t want to be seen. They were as elusive as heat waves on the desert floor that you only see from miles away but not up close.
    If I was in one room, the footsteps were in another. When I was on the ground floor, boots walked across the floor upstairs. When I went upstairs, they were downstairs. It was like a game to them and since it was harmless, I played along. I would rather hear footsteps all around me than nothing at all. That way, at least I know they’re there and I’m doing all I can to make contact with them.
    But when it comes to phantom sounds, one of the creepiest things I’ve ever witnessed also “played out” at the Vulture Mine. During our investigation there, Aaron distinctly heard the sounds of a piano playing in the schoolhouse. He stood motionless in the main room listening to the music, but the keys on the dilapidated piano, which had sat unused for probably one hundred years, were not moving. Beyond that, the piano was incapable of playing music. Its strings were long gone and its keys were stuck. Aaron walked over to it and pushed on several keys to make sure it wasn’t capable of making sound and nothing came out of it. There was no way it could play music, yet we all heard the notes floating through the air of the abandoned building.
    How does a piano that doesn’t even work make music? Was this a residual haunting of a room full of miners and entertainers letting off steam after a long day in 1880? Was it a child’s recital after long hours of laborious practice? I can’t ascribe any intelligence to sounds like these. To me, random sounds that are not human voices, and especially footsteps, are residual hauntings. They’re the echoes of prison guards still walking their beats, of miners striding over an old wooden floor, of brewery workers dragging goods from one end of the store to another, and of history that refuses to be forgotten. Whatever it was it gave us a