The seven of us sat in the parlor amid the darkness. In silence, we waited for our senses to adjust to the sights and sounds of the Granger House, located in Marion, Iowa. I could only see dark shadows in front of me and hear the noises coming from our own slight movements. I closed my eyes and strained to place my ears in every room of the old Victorian house.  

Adam Hyatt, co-founder of S.E.E. Paranormal, stood to the right of me near the opening to the back living room. He brought out the spirit box and handed it to Kyle Grandstaff, a new member of the S.E.E. Paranormal team. Hyatt stood with his arms folded and his hand placed on his chin.

“If there is someone with us tonight, can you tell us your name?” asked Hyatt in a friendly and inviting tone.

Grandstaff flicked the switch on the spirit box and crackling static sounded throughout the pitch-black room. We focused intensely on the static as it quickly skipped from frequency to frequency. We listened for anything that sounded like a name. Mostly inaudible sounds came through the white noise, except for one sound that possibly resembled a name.

Grandstaff turned off the spirit box after about 10 to 15 seconds.

“I heard the name ‘Ed,’” said one of the women sitting to the left of me.

“Yeah, I did too,” said another woman.

“Interesting,” said Hyatt.

The spirit box, as described by Hyatt, is essentially a “broken radio.” It scans radio frequencies at a high speed. The theory holds that ghosts can use the frequencies to communicate with us.

The usefulness of the device is controversial, even within the world of paranormal investigation. When Hyatt explained we would use it during the investigation, I was admittedly leery because I think people sometimes hear what they are hoping to hear based on the questions they ask.

There is also the possibility of snippets from radio stations coming through as the frequencies are scanned. These snippets can be mistaken as a ghost attempting to communicate.

Despite my reservations toward the spirit box, the next question Hyatt asked yielded a response which I cannot explain.   

“Did you say your name is Ed?” Hyatt asked.

Grandstaff turned on the spirit box and static white noise filled the parlor. It only took a couple seconds for a response to come through.

“Incorrect,” said a voice from the spirit box. I was immediately taken aback by what I heard.

“It said ‘incorrect,’” I said aloud.

It was clearly a male’s voice. It was stated firmly and briskly. I wasn’t expecting to understand anything from the static as clearly as I just had. I wrestled with the idea that it was a snippet from a radio station, but it didn’t come across being quite clear enough to be that.

The others agreed it sounded like what I heard, and we continued with the session. Hyatt asked several other questions in hopes of learning more information about the spirits we were talking with. But no other words or phrases came through very clearly.

“Where can we go to hear you better?” asked Hyatt.

I listened for a response but couldn’t really decipher anything from it. However, a woman in the group said, “I think I heard it say ‘up.’ Like upstairs.”

We decided to take ourselves upstairs, where the bedrooms are located.

Prior to the paranormal investigation, I was able to sit down with Barb Trujillo, who serves as president of the Granger House board. She gave me an overview of the Granger family’s history. A lot is known about them because of extensive diaries, letters, postcards and other sources that remain.

The Grangers were one of the first families to settle in Marion, Iowa. They were an upper-middle class family in their time. The Granger House was originally built in 1848, and it is furnished with much of its original furniture, which was donated by a living Granger relative when the house was turned into a museum. 

“[The Grangers] were pillars of the community and very well loved,” said Trujillo.

Earl Granger, the father, owned a large cattle farm and made a living by selling meat to the railroad. The family managed through the Panic of 1893, which was a serious economic depression in its time.

Trujillo described Dora Granger, the mother, as extremely kind and generous, even during the economic depression. “Tramps came through and Dora would always feed them,” said Trujillo.

However, despite the family’s prominence and generosity within the community, Dora dealt with heavy depression. Trujillo believes this is largely due to the multiple deaths of their children. In Earl’s diary, he wrote how Dora worried every time one of her children became sick. Of the seven children they had, only three lived to adulthood. Alfred and Arthur, two of their boys, did live to be adults.

Hyatt believes Alfred and Arthur inhabit the Granger House today in the spirit form of their younger selves.

“Alfred and Arthur, they lived to be older, but I believe they come back a lot as kids. I do have a firm belief that when you pass, you can come back at whatever age you felt like you were happiest at,” Hyatt said. “So, if you were happy being 20-something [years old], you come back in that form. Because why come back as a 90-year-old guy with bad hips?”

Once during an investigation with S.E.E. Paranormal, they encountered a lot of commotion coming from the upstairs part of the house. Hyatt said he was using the spirit box when they recognized German words being spoken.

They attributed the words to Dora because she came from a German family. The words translated to “spank” and “go to your room.” Once the words came through the spirit box, the house became quiet.

Much of the activity experienced in the house happens upstairs. Members of the volunteer staff have heard footsteps going up and down the stairwell. Hyatt recalled a few other of his paranormal experiences from that part of the house.

“I’m assuming it’s the kids. It [often] sounds like they’re playing [and] running around upstairs. The day that [S.E.E. Paranormal] came to talk to Barb [Trujillo] about wanting to actually investigate here for the first time…we heard this little girl singing from upstairs,” said Hyatt. “I’ve seen shadows peek around the steps numerous times.”

Trujillo stressed that all their experiences with the ghosts are friendly or playful.

“There’s nothing frightening though. It’s their home and we respect the fact that it’s their home. We acknowledge them. I’ll come in and say ‘hello’ and when we leave we say ‘goodbye.’ If you were to just come in and leave then it would be rude. We just acknowledge the fact that they are here,” said Trujillo.

There are four bedrooms upstairs in the house. They are connected by a hallway with a railing overlooking the stairwell and main floor. The seven of us spread out amongst the rooms and the hallway so we could detect any paranormal activity that took place in each room.

I preferred to stand in the hallway instead of in one of the dark bedrooms. The hallway was more appealing because of the large bay window on the end which emitted moonlight.

Hyatt conducted another session using the spirit box. However, nothing too discernable came through the static. Nothing, except for one remarkable moment.

“If you know what my name is, can you say it?” Hyatt ask.

Grandstaff turned on the spirit box, and after a few seconds, a voice came through quite audibly.

“Adam,” the voice said.

“That definitely said, ‘Adam,’” said one of the women in our group.

I agreed that it certainly did sound like his name was spoken. This didn’t surprise Hyatt because he’d heard his name spoken through the spirit box before. He believes he is well liked by the spirits which inhabit the Granger House.

If this is the case, I think it is largely due to Hyatt’s respectful nature when he tries to communicate with them. He speaks to ghosts as he would a living being. He rarely requests them to do anything that would insult their intelligence, such as requesting noises to alert him of their presence.

At times throughout the investigation, depending on what he heard through the spirit box, Hyatt communicated in a joking manner. He maintained this kind of light-hearted demeanor throughout the night. From the beginning, it helped to alleviate any anxious feelings I had about the investigation.

Hyatt explained to me why he’s interested in communicating with ghosts and why he co-founded a team to try and do this. S.E.E. Paranormal is an acronym for Seek, Experience and Educate. The acronym serves as their mission statement for what they strive to achieve from their paranormal investigations and through their attempts at communicating with ghosts.

“Some of these people probably haven’t heard their name called or haven’t spoken to anyone in a hundred years, and all of a sudden, they are like, ‘I can talk to this person.’ And they’ll carry on a full-on conversation,” Hyatt said.

Through these conversations, they are sometimes able to clearly understand a name or catch other specific information about the ghost they are talking with.

Hyatt said that on nearly every investigation they conduct at the Granger property, they have picked up the name of Mike Russell, a spirit that inhabits the adjacent carriage house. Hyatt said Russell often talks about coming to Marion from the train in nearby Fort Madison.

“When we find someone, we go back in history, and my wife does most of the historical stuff, but she’ll research census records and everything and find the person in history and write the story about them,” said Hyatt.   

His wife, Sarah Hyatt, is currently working on her first book about the historical background of different ghosts they’ve communicated with around the Midwest. The Granger House will fill a chapter of the book.

“To be able to prove that ghosts exist, there has to be some historical facts that go along with the person that you are communicating with,” Hyatt said. “Every time we’ve been able to get a solid name and a solid story, we have actually been able to relate it back to an actual historical fact [and] an actual person. So that’s pretty impressive.”  

Hyatt says their focus on the history is an important part of what they do, and it is what distinguishes them from a lot of other paranormal investigation teams. 

“I definitely want to be able to tell stories of people that have been forgotten about,” said Hyatt.

Our attempts at communicating with the Grangers upstairs didn’t yield too much paranormal evidence.

Hyatt made the remark that some nights are more active than others, so we headed to the carriage house outside. Hyatt said the carriage house is a sure-fire hotspot for activity. I hoped to meet Mike Russell, or whatever other entities resided in there.   

It was about 20 or 30 degrees outside. The carriage house was not heated, so it was about the same temperature as outside.

There were only a few small windows which made it darker inside than it was in the house. Large, rusty equipment sat on the floor and hung on the walls, making it hard to navigate through the rooms. Luckily, I was equipped with a structure-light sensor (SLS) camera which emitted enough light to help me see where I walked.  

With the SLS camera, my job was to detect heat anomalies in the camera’s field of vision in front of me.

When a heat anomaly was identified on the camera’s display screen, it would measure the shape of the heat source.

If the heat source formed the shape of a human, then the SLS camera’s display would plot points along the form of a human body. The theory suggests that ghosts radiate heat, so their form will be detected by the SLS camera.

In the darkness, I walked around the carriage house trying to find any anomalies. I worked my way to the section of the building which contained the horse stalls.

I scanned the stalls trying to identify any heat forms. As I scanned to the right, the SLS camera detected a heat anomaly. It then formed and plotted the points in the shape of a human figure. At first, I thought it was another member in our group because the form was so well defined. But when I looked up from the SLS camera, I realized all my group members were standing behind me.

“Guys, I see something over by this far stall,” I said. Hyatt and the rest of the group came from the other side of the carriage house.

“What are you picking up?” asked Hyatt.

I watched as the heat form quickly disappeared from the camera. It looked as if it moved into the far stall.

“I think it went in the end stall,” I said.  

Those of us who could fit inside moved forward and entered the stall, which was in the shape of a square and probably six or seven feet on each side. I stared at the SLS camera, turning around in the stall trying to find the heat form again. I went and stood on the far side to see if I could observe a wider shot of the stall.

One of our group members brought forth the K-II meter. This hand-held device detects electromagnetic fields (EMF). The idea is that ghosts emit EMF and the K-II meter will detect fluctuations and spikes in EMF, thereby alerting us of their presence. She held out the K-II meter toward the middle of the stall. It was spiking like crazy and detecting a high level of EMF.

Hyatt decided to use the K-II meter as a way to communicate with the ghost. He started asking questions using the scale of the K-II meter to gauge the ghost’s response. The meter’s scale was currently in the yellow zone which signified a medium level of EMF detection. The closer the source of the EMF got to the meter, the higher it would spike.

“If there is someone with us in here, can you move closer to the meter?” asked Hyatt.

Almost instantly, the meter started to spike and push closer toward the red zone, which denotes the highest level of EMF detection.

Hyatt asked the ghost if it could move the meter’s level all the way to the red zone. The K-II meter responded by jumping into the red zone. I was amazed at how quickly the meter seemed to respond to Hyatt’s questions.

“If you like us being in this room with you, can you keep this in the red?” asked Hyatt.

Immediately after he asked the question, the meter went completely blank. It was as if whatever was in this stall with us didn’t want us to be there. If there was a natural EMF source in the stall, such as underground electrical wires running beneath it, then the K-II meter should have been detecting a constant level of EMF. The fact that the source of EMF immediately went away in response to Hyatt’s question was remarkable and even a little frightening. We quickly decided to leave the stall.

After that, we spent some more time in the carriage house. We were able to detect a couple other heat anomalies on the SLS camera, which were clearly plotted in the form of a human body. One looked to be dancing based on the swinging movements of its arms and legs. We asked it to wave and it did. While other anomalies seemed to be camera shy, this dancing “ghost” enjoyed the attention. Hyatt suggested it was probably Alfred or Arthur having fun with us.

We concluded our investigation after finishing up in the carriage house.

The experience was full of humor, excitement and even a little terror. I’m skeptical to label every mysterious thing that occurred during the investigation as something paranormal, but there were certainly some thrilling moments that are hard to explain.

What I enjoyed most about the experience was the way Hyatt conducted the investigation. He made sure not to take things too seriously, but at the same time, approach the investigation with a respect for the ghosts we attempted to communicate with.

“I can’t guarantee what’s going to happen when I do an investigation. It might be completely dead [and] nothing might happen,” said Hyatt.  

“You can feel it though. You really can. If it’s active and all of a sudden nothing happens, it’s like you feel that energy go [down],” said Trujillo.

“And you can feel it go the other direction too. There’s been a lot of times when we’ve been here, and nothing is happening and all of a sudden out of nowhere just everything starts happening and flashlights are turning off and on,” said Hyatt.

“It’s like they went out to eat and they came home,” said Trujillo laughing.

“We like to have a lot of fun as you can see. More things happen when you’re not really trying to make things happen. More things will be interactive when you’re talking about something totally off topic,” said Hyatt.

If you’d like to experience this for yourself, visit their website to find out information about educational tours, paranormal tours and other upcoming programs and events at the Granger House