Spooky Experience As Teen Led Voss To Ghost Hunting
Posted
David Slone-dslone@timesuniononline.com
When Laurie Voss, now 54, was about 13 years old, something happened to her at her family’s Silver Lake house that led her to ghost hunting. “I woke up during the night and there was this big, white, cloaked figure at the edge of my bed,” she recalled during an interview Oct. 20. “And I scooted down the end of the bed, and out the door and down the stairs. Of course, there was nothing up there, and my mother stayed up with me the rest of the night. But we always said that house was haunted. We named him Herman.” The family would hear footsteps in the house. Even when she knew she was the only one home, Laurie’s mother heard the footsteps upstairs. “I had an incident one time where I had my bedroom door locked on the inside and I was on the end of this upstairs hallway. And I just kept hearing footsteps back and forth, back and forth right outside my door,” she said. At first she thought her brothers were up to something. Finally, she unlocked the door, ready to hit whoever was out there with a glass money bank. But no one was there. She started to go downstairs. Her brother, who was at the other end of the hallway, asked her if she was the one making the footsteps. When she said she wasn’t, he went downstairs with her. “I wasn’t the only one who heard all this. I just assumed it was him,” Laurie said. After that happened, Laurie became interested in ghosts and ghost hunting. In 2007, Laurie and her husband, Rick, traveled to Gettysburg, Pa. “That was our first trip to Gettysburg and ghost hunting, period,” she said. “And I was just addicted. We got some awesome pictures that year.” They have since gone to the battlefield almost every October since then. Earlier this month, the Vosses took their seventh trip to the Pennsylvania town. “Something always happens. The whole town is just so active,” she said. While Laurie has never managed to get photos herself of apparitions, “all the photos have been taken with me in them,” she said. “They follow me. I have never gotten a picture with something in it.” The photos in her album show misty forms of what appear to be people, some specifically soldiers. “If you look, some of these you’ll see – there’s a figure in that one. There’s a figure in that one – it’s a skeleton. There’s a head there, it’s kind of sitting,” Laurie pointed out as she flipped through the album. It wasn’t fog, she said, as it was gone a second later. While people have disputes with ghostly orbs, Laurie has several photos of them. “I don’t count an orb unless it’s very, very bright because of bugs,” she said. In a couple of orb photos Laurie had enlarged, one can almost see a face in the orb. Another photo shows a misty figure coming out of a fence post, but a photo of the same fence taken a second later shows nothing there at all. When Laurie pulls out another photo, she asks if the soldiers are evident. Some people spot them quickly, others don’t. Laurie said another person pointed out the soldiers to her, while someone else told her there were three figures in the photo, not two. A photo she took this year at Gettysburg appears to be a ghostly horse. “It’s like a mist. It’s like trying to take form, something like that,” she explained. Laurie uses a variety of tools for ghost hunting, but her favorite is a pendulum. While using it at Gettysburg once, she asked for something to come out to her and touch her hair or jacket. Behind her appeared a long misty figure. “It’s just a lot lighter than the rest of the picture,” she said. “I just kind of picked the camera up and shot behind me. I always tell them you can touch my hair, you can pull my jacket, but you’re not allowed to do anything else.” While the majority of her ghost hunting is done at Gettysburg, Laurie said she did visit a local cemetery for some ghost hunting. She declined to name the cemetery in print. “I had a friend, he has a ghost story about that place that I can’t even replicate. It’ll scare the pants off of you. So I wanted to do that cemetery,” Laurie said. Along with a girlfriend and Rick, Laurie visited the cemetery. At first she didn’t think she was getting anything, but her girlfriend was following Laurie around taking pictures. “And finally, she said, ‘Laurie, there’s something following you.’ She said, ‘In all these pictures there’s just a little mist right behind you. Stop and talk to it,’” Laurie recalled. Laurie pulled out her pendulum and started asking questions. “I stopped and was asking yes or no questions,” she said. The ghost told Laurie that she’s an 18-year-old female who died in childbirth, and her child died shortly after she did. The ghost’s husband wasn’t buried at that cemetery. “Never thought anything more about it until probably two to three weeks later I was in (my office) and – I take the obituaries from the paper and put them on our library website – I was doing that and I thought I would go check (that cemetery’s) records,” recalled Laurie, who works as circulation supervisor at Warsaw Community Public Library. There was only one girl buried at that cemetery who was 18, had her 4-month-old baby buried with her and her husband was not buried at that cemetery. “I thought, ‘Dang!’” Laurie said. “It works! Had there been two or three people that fit that, I would have said ‘Eh.’ But there was only one in that whole cemetery that fit that.” At Gettysburg, Laurie and Rick have heard the gunshot from a Civil War-era gun, even though shooting is not allowed at Gettysburg. Laurie has heard a male voice say, “Honey, we’re home” and felt a cold breath in their hotel room at the Days Inn in Gettysburg – neither of which were from Rick. The next night they tried recording in the room, but got nothing. Laurie has tried ghost hunting at Brownstone, a now-closed restaurant in South Whitley, a place where many people say strange things happen. She didn’t get any pictures there, but got communication through her pendulum. This year and last year, Laurie and Rick were out at Sach’s Bridge at Gettysburg where Laurie talked to a ghost named Henry. “When the war was over, General Robert E. Lee left via that bridge. The very last day of the battle, it had started raining. They had taken a lot of the wounded soldiers, put them in a field a back away from the river, and laid them there in that field. They were to wait there until wagons came to get them. That day and that night, they had torrential rains and the river overflowed, and those that couldn’t move then drowned,” Laurie said. “So it’s a pretty haunted place in itself because of all of the death.” This year at the bridge, Laurie asked to speak to a soldier. She was told no, so she asked who she was talking to. The ghost was a 5-year-old named Elijah who told Laurie he was going home with her. She said he could not go home with her and had to stay. Elijah didn’t stay. She found him at their hotel, at a gas station in Ohio and finally at her house. “I have an aunt, she’s like, ‘Don’t you go talking to those things, they’ll follow you home.’ Well, apparently ...,” she said, trailing off and chuckling.
