The Defense Commission of these four birds will play 10-day period. It's one of the worst-killing sprees in history of the state. We'll skimp them and buy some gold, slip them and slip them all over the world. Hey, from the spirits of anybody that still remains, I have a device in my hand.
If you'd like to talk to me, please come forward. Tell me your story. Maybe I should have killed four or five hundred people, then I would have felt better. Then I felt like I really offered society something.
You are listening to Serial Spirits, the podcast. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Serial Spirits, the podcast. It is me, your host, Brandon Shae. And with me, finally, after two weeks of not being together, is my partner in crime.
Anywebs, well, we still live together. We just didn't record together for the past couple of weeks. We didn't, but that's true. Baby problems.
Yeah, baby problems. We already started daycare. She did. So we just kind of...
We've had a lot of snotty noses. Yeah, and you know, just the schedule's been all screwed up. So we're back together. Now we're recording face to face.
One more time. We're back. Shae, before we start tonight, I want to remind everyone of the event on August the 20th with Emily Horror Stories at the Old Hospital on College Hill in Williamson, West Virginia, tickets are available on event right now. I think it's like $25.
And so for that, you get to hear us tell a story. More importantly, you get to hear Jerry and Tracy Polly from Hillbilly Horror Stories. Tell their stories and then get a tour from the owners of the Old Hospital on College Hill in Williamson, West Virginia, which is an amazing location. We would love to see you guys out there.
It's going to be a blast. Yeah, get there early because it's a really pretty place to take pictures. I mean, it's up in the mountains. It's gorgeous.
Can't wait to be there. So Shae, over the past month, we have talked about some of our favorite haunts. And we're going back there again tonight with another one of my favorites to tell our story and share some of our favorite EVPs. Tonight, I'm taking you to Ross Opera House in Sintheana, Kentucky.
Sintheana sits on the banks of the South Licking River, 28 miles from Lexington and Harrison County, Kentucky. Two notable Civil War battles in 1862 and 1864 were fought in Sintheana, the latter resulting in burning nearly all of downtown Sintheana to the ground. The town rebuilt and by the early 1900s was a mecca for tobacco fields and bourbon distilleries. The theater opened in 1871 as the Aeolian Music Hall Association, which operated on the second floor of the building.
In 1873, a local man named H.A. Ross purchased the building and renamed it the Ross Opera House. H.A. Ross and his son Carl ran the Opera House, bringing generations of theater to Sintheana.
It's interesting to note that H.A. Ross was the great grandfather and Carl Ross was the grandfather of actor Chris O'Donnell. So they start a little bit of a famous lineage there that kind of picks up through the years in Sintheana. Yeah, my favorite part about Sintheana, I'm sure.
I don't know if you're going to mention it or you should I. Of course, I'm going to mention it. So you can go there first if you want to. Yeah, because one of my favorite things here in about this town where this town is Sintheana, Kentucky, actually is where the story of the Walking Dead starts out.
Rick Grimes wakes up in his coma from being in the hospital shot to find the world has gone to hell in a hand basket. There's zombies or walkers everywhere. And he wakes up in Sintheana, Kentucky, and that's where the story kicks off. But there's a reason that it happens in Sintheana, Kentucky, and that's because it's the hometown of one of the creators of the Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman.
Heck yeah. And so an amazing part of the history of Ross Opera House is that during its downtime when they were afraid that they were going to have to just shut it all down and the building might be destroyed, Robert Kirkman stepped in and made a hefty donation to Ross Opera House to digitize all of their technology and basically bring it back to life. And so the first thing that you see when you drive up on Ross Opera House is this enormous mural that's painted on the entire outside of the building of some of the foundation characters of the Walking Dead, Rick Grimes, Carl, Daryl Dixon, Michonne. That's the first impression that you get from Ross Opera House.
It's actually what drew me to Ross Opera House because even before I knew you was such a fan of the show and so the history was so deep there, you have to see the mural first and then you've got to get inside this building. Yeah, it's a pretty sweet mural and actually have benches that are like the comic book of the Walking Dead, like their shape like an open comic book. So it's pretty awesome. Such a cool place.
And so you don't anticipate what Ross Opera House is going to look like until you're in downtown, downtown, Indiana. And it is just this little old Kentucky town. You know, it sits right outside of Lexington and so the drive there, you go through all the bluegrass area, all of these beautiful horse stables. And then you're just in this little downtown area.
And so the first time that we went there, we were met by one of the owners, Roger, who is just an incredibly hospitable host. And the first thing that he did was hold us about a lot of the history of Santa Ana. And then he dove into the paranormal experiences there at Ross Opera House. To date, Ross Opera House is the oldest running theater of its type in the entire state of Kentucky.
So there's so much history there. The first thing that he told us as far as their paranormal experiences were concerned. Roger told us about his story of The Lady in White. He said that one evening while they were running a show at the Opera House, he was manning the concession stand area and the ticket area, which is in the main entrance.
And he saw a woman in an old white Victorian style dress go up the stairs where people weren't supposed to be at that time. So the downstairs area of Ross Opera House is just the main part of the theater and the stage and the ticket area. When you go up to the second floor, it's the old Aolian Hall, which is just hardwood floors, almost used like a conference room now, tables and chairs set up. Then when you go up to the third floor attic area, it actually overlooks the Aolian Hall part.
And so we got to investigate all those areas. Why is it that all these theaters always have a woman in white going up the stairs? I don't know. Like the Twin City Opera House, we talked about that with, you know, a gaylin' finley when he lived on the stage, he saw that woman in white and she walked up the stage, or the stage right up the stairs to the catwalk.
No idea. But Roger told us that he kind of gave chase to this woman in white and he chases her up the stairs to where you either turn right and go to Aolian Hall or you turn left on this hallway and go to the projector room or the entrance to the balcony. And I believe he said at the time the balcony was closed off, so nobody was supposed to be up there and he gets up there and the woman's totally gone. And he looks all around the area and he realizes that the person that he saw was no longer there.
When we went there, he had a, when I went with you the second time you'd been there. It's the time we went with the other time for you. The first time for me, but he had that really cool video of that shadow of a person right in the, right by the bathroom in the back of the apartment. The video of the shadow person is probably single-handedly one of the best video captures that I've ever seen during a, well, I don't even think it was a paranormal investigation.
So they, what Roger captured there was in the main part of the theater, back towards an aisle that runs at the very back of the theater where the restrooms are and the exit. He caught a video of a full-bodied shadow figure kind of walking out of the room right behind him and it was absolutely incredible. He showed us at the very first night that we were there. And so we were already kind of amped up for this really amazing investigation and we definitely were not disappointed.
That video too, I mean, you look at it when you showed it to us on that computer screen and it was just, it's unmistakably not like somebody following him or whatever, like an actual person, like it is full-digit, like paranormal and you, there's just no explanation for it. It's crazy. It's insane. We should try to get a hold of it and see if we can watch it again.
They were on an episode of, I believe it was my go, was it my go story? I think it was my go story. It was on bio, it was the same show that you were on, on bio-channel. And so it was still on there at some point, but absolutely amazing capture.
And so the first night that we were there, Roger shares his stories with us. He shows us this video and we know that we are in for a pretty amazing night. We just didn't understand how much activity that we were getting ready to experience from the minute that we got started. So the first thing that I remember from Ross Opera House was the number of intelligent, it seemed like, spirits that we encountered there, not only disembodied voices that we were hearing at that time, but when we listened back to our audio, things that were interacting with us and one of the most prominent was that multiple investigators that night were called out by name, either by disembodied voice or on our video or on our audio.
And I want to share some of those EVPs with you now. So one of the investigators that was there with us that night was named Lonnie and it seems like everywhere that we ever went with Lonnie, these spirits called out to him. And one of the very first EVPs that we captured that night sounds like it's saying Lonnie's name. I just heard them saying Lonnie.
I just heard them saying Lonnie. So right before that beeping ends, you hear this very breathy voice say Lonnie. And then my reaction and Sam, my good friend, co-founder of our group, kind of reacts to that too. And so that was the first one that we captured that night kind of calling us out by name.
It's always interesting when both investigators actually hear that disembodied voice. You're almost taken back for a second, like, that I just really hear that. And it's clarification when the other person says, hey, did you hear that? It's just that odd feeling like, shit, there's something going on right now.
That's my most favorite phenomenon is disembodied voices. Like it's just, it blows my mind. And Ross Opera House was full of it that night. So the second EVP that we captured, there was an investigator named John there with us and we caught his name too.
Oh yeah, it clearly says John. And that's John talking right before me. And he says something to me. The interesting thing about John was that he was not a quote unquote paranormal investigator by trade, right?
He was part of a kind of a videography group that was going in there with us that night, was handling the audio booms and that kind of stuff. We were recording a lot of this. And so when I say something about being pinched, he's the one talking right before me. And then you hear that very breathy voice say John right after that.
It's creepy. The next one is probably one of my favorite EVPs that came from there. And I mentioned Sam, my good friend, who's one of the investigators there. I'm just going to play this one and see what you think it says.
This sounds like there's two voices like an adult male and then like a little kid. So the adult male before that is Lonnie and we're talking, but the voice that you pick up in the background is a child's voice that kind of became a repetitive voice through the night. And it sounds to us like he's yelling, come on, Sam, I'll play it for you one more time. That's the tricky thing about EVPs though is now that you mentioned that it says, come on, Sam, that's what I hear.
But it's clearly a little kid's voice. It's subjective and so a lot of people could hear a lot of things. But in the context of that investigation that night and knowing that there were so many of us that had been called out already, it was just very interesting. The last name that got called out that night was mine.
And it was actually a disembodied voice that as we were sitting on the stage in the very front of the auditorium, the Sam and I both hear it from somewhere else in the building. That's full on creepy when your name gets called out. It's one thing when it's on an EVP, but it's another thing if it's just called out in the darkness. So you hear that very kind of deep male voice say, Annie, and you know how things reverberate when you're in an auditorium like that?
Yeah, it's the way that the acoustics are for ceilings and everything. And so Sam and I were sitting on the stage and we both hear it audibly. And I said, Lonnie, was that you? And Sam says, no, but that was somebody saying your name out loud.
And so it just gives you those full body chills all up and down your side. An auditorium isn't really that big either. I mean, it's not that big of a it's not a deep auditorium. So I mean, you clearly can hear pretty easily there.
Right. It reverberates all around. Most of the time, like, you know, if you're an investigator and you're seasoned and you're conditioned to be in a place like that, you try to watch your whispering and stuff like that. And it's easy when someone whispers to mistake it as an EVP also pick up what people's voices sound like.
And that's clearly no one that we've heard. Right. We were very careful to mark our EVPs while we were there. Everyone who was with us was very quiet and very respectful of that.
And so we knew in that moment that it was absolutely nobody who was there with us. So you heard the EVP before of what it sounded like the child saying, come on, Sam. So we captured that child's voice multiple times throughout the night. And I'll play a couple of more clips of that child's voice for you now.
That is creepy. And I really don't know what it's saying. It's one of those. It's almost like it's please go or something like that.
It's unintelligible. And I don't know who it is. We don't really have a lot of history about who any of these spirits could even be. But it's the same child's voice that reverberates through these EVPs over and over again.
It's so weird. Like the very, the same kind of spirits, like that's at the Twin City Opera House. It's weird. There's a little girl that called herself Elizabeth.
There's a woman and white. There's a grumpy old man that has a deep voice. It's the parallels are kind of weird here. One more EVP of that child's voice.
And I'll play it for you. And you can tell me what you think you say again. That is 100% of kids saying, uh-oh. Okay, you think so?
It sounds like the kids saying, uh-oh. Because to me, all this, and I don't, I couldn't pick up on the conversation that we were having in the background. But I wrote it down as him saying, that's me. To me, it sounds like, okay, let's do one more time.
Could be, right? I mean, everybody, like I said, these are all open to interpretation. And that's why I love playing these for you for the first time when we do this because your ear hears something different than mine. Again, I don't remember what that conversation was that we were having at that point.
But it's the same kids voice over ever. Oh, it's the same, the same kids voice, the same phonetics, the same tone, everything. I mean, it's the same person. So who is this child that we encountered at Ross Opera House?
I don't know. Roger doesn't know. I mentioned it to him. And he just says they capture a lot of EVPs over the years, but really don't have any idea who any of these spirits could be.
I, you know, when I was there, I got a sneaking feeling, you know, not that I'm psychic or whatever, but there was a section in the theater was that was for the African-American people. Right. There was a segregated area of the balcony. Yeah, correct.
And they had, it was like way back in the corner, like terrible seats. And I just had a flash image in my head of like kids on a field trip going there, and they were all, you know, in the segregated section. So maybe it was, maybe it was somebody who was segregated. Maybe so.
I really don't know. And that is always got a weird feel in that area. It's almost, now it's almost boxed off. It's actually kind of like enclosed and it's right beside the projector agreement.
It was the segregation area, just in the back right corner of the balcony. So I don't know. But the kid wasn't the only voice that we heard over and over again. What was most interesting to us about some of these EVPs were the almost conversational pieces that we picked up that seemed to have more than one voice.
And so I'll play one of them for you now. And you can tell me what you think it said. Okay. So that one is a little more difficult to hear without your headphones in.
There are two different voices there and they're both a little whispered. And at the very beginning, it sounds like a woman says, I got to go. And then there's another voice that whispers kind of trailing off and says, wait for me. So it's probably two women who are going to the bathroom together, because don't women do that?
She says, I got to go for me. Wait for me, maybe wait for me. Maybe it says flush flush flush the P or number two. I don't know.
I don't know. I don't know. Again, the reason I like to let you hear these and put your sarcastic span on them. I don't know.
But that wasn't the first of the conversational pieces that we captured. So I'll play another one for you now. So that last part there, it says, I did not touch it. Right.
And it almost says like I did not eff and touch it. So you hear the human voice in there, that's Sam. And again, I don't hear the two whispery voices. Right.
So what I want to say about the last voice, and if you complain again after this, it's almost like there's that Kentucky accent, that dialect in that voice, like I didn't touch it, almost like that. Okay, I'll play it again. Yeah. And I don't remember even again, what was going on in the conversation at that point.
But you hear the two to me, it's distinctly different voices. They're having a conversation. I mean, there's a conversation conversation with the two other people besides the investigators that are there. And you know, it's interesting.
That's one of the most of the things that is always interested me. And that's why I look at the different paradoxes and the different like dimensional stuff that has to do with all this crap. There was years ago where there was an episode of ghost hunters and Grant and Jay are in this old house and they say there's an old woman who's who haunts like the bedroom up there. So they go in there and they say hello.
And later on, they play back to get a EVP and it's almost like the EVP saying hello, who's in here? It's almost like they're Jason and Grant are the ghosts, right? Haunting this old woman who's seeing things as she would like in her reality. And that actually happened to me with an EVP too, where I walked in someplace and I heard I said hello, is someone in here?
And I forget what the voice said, it was almost like a response to that like what who's here? You know, kind of thing. And it's almost like I was the ghost haunting them. It's crazy.
It's the multiverse, Dr. Strange. But also this, but in this similar situation is that you what I'm going to part just guess is there's an instrument out there like a MF meter or one of them ghost meters or something. And they see it and you've given them instructions to say, Hey, touch this thing and a light will go off.
And they're trying to like don't touch it, dude. If you remember specifically when we were there the last time with Gateway, didn't we have a REM pod? We did. On the stage that had some really crazy activity.
Yeah. So it could very well have been something like that. We had a REM pod, we had EMF detectors, we had K2s, and so it could have been any number of those. And we always got crazy energy hits off of those.
Well, as well that we're not explained by any external. The weird thing about that to me is what I'm saying is like, you know, there's some instances where it's like you're existing in the same plane, but you don't see each other or it's not crossing over. You're just hearing that voice. But in this instance, it's almost like they see you.
They know you're here. They're existing on the exact same plane and they see that instrument and they're like trying to like say, Hey, man, don't mess with their stuff because we don't know what they want. The veil is very thin at Ross Opera House. And one thing that interested me that Roger told us on our very first investigation there was that besides the very dense history that's there, the building is supposedly built on a limestone structure that has a stream running underneath it like a stream with a current.
And so water is such a conductor. Limestone is such a conductor of physical activity. It makes you wonder if there's a little bit of science behind the haunting there and how that resonates. It is 100% science, but it's also science that they don't understand because it's it's intelligence.
It's another intelligence that's there. And the veil is I wouldn't even say thin the veil is open. It's just that they see there's an existence between two people. They realize that somebody else is coming in here and maybe that they're not alive anymore.
But to me, it just boggles my mind that stuff. And that to me is the most interesting thing about being a paranormal investigator is EVPs like that. So there's one more EVP of a voice that I want to share with you. And again, it's kind of a conversational piece.
But instead of spirits conversing with each other, it seems like this one is reacting to something that we're saying. I definitely hear the word not in that EVP. So at the very beginning, you hear, I believe it's Megan who was with us. He was one of the videographers talking about where she's going to put the audio boom.
And then you hear this whisper in between and you say, I believe it's John say, I could put it here. I'll play it for you one more time. I don't know what it's I hear the first the first not not or ought or you hear that. To me, it sounds like it says not touching it or don't touch it.
Let me do it one more time. It could be. It's almost like it's jumbled together real quick. Right.
But at this, it's something that's reacting to what we are saying again, talking about something interacting with us. We talk about where we're going to put this audio boom so that we're kind of capturing all of the audio around us and either says not touching it or don't touch it or something like that in between. So again, it's these intelligent responses that seem to be there with us all night long that once we went back and listened to this audio, we didn't even capture the whole scope of it while we were there, like most investigations. But it was just absolutely apparent on the back end of it that something was there watching us while we were watching them.
I think like my my experience there was pretty great. I don't recall getting EVP evidence like that, but we had a lot of personal experiences there. And it is it just you walk into that place. It's just really it gives you a really creepy vibe.
And there's definitely something otherworldly there. We were allowed to spend the night there. And so instead of getting a hotel, we had to say that we were just going to kind of bunker down there for the night. And so we had taken our air mattresses and that kind of stuff.
And so around three o'clock that morning, we decided we were going to call it a night. We were going to get up early sleep a couple hours, get up early that morning and do another quick pass before we had taken our equipment down. After we kind of settle down and stop talking to them, it was like we started to get some maybe residual type of hollens. The first thing that we noticed was a metallic noise over and over again that we could not physically find.
So you know how a theater kind of sits at an angle, right? So when you walk in, you're like walking down a slope and the floor is old there. So it's concrete. One sound that we heard multiple times was almost like somebody was standing at the front of the aisle kind of back where the bathrooms were, where Roger captured that shadow figure.
And almost like they were rolling a handful of change down the aisle, this metallic clinking. And I remember just as we had laid down that night, Lonnie was trying his best not to sleep. He was sitting in one of the chairs in the front row and he heard it and he sat up really quickly. He said, what in the world was that?
Almost like somebody walking with keys or something? Like maybe the janitor or like custodian? It was very metallic, whatever it was. But it had this almost rolling sound to it.
Another noise that we heard multiple times with our own ears and that we captured on the last EVP that I'll share with you. I'll get you your impression before I tell you what I think it is. I definitely hear a male voice. I don't hear a voice.
I hear clapping. I hear somebody talking. Okay, hold on. To me, that sounds like a voice.
Okay. So multiple times, as we were trying to sleep that night, we heard what sounded like clapping coming from the balcony area. And that's what we thought we captured there. So it's interesting that you think it's a voice because I think it's the clapping that we heard.
It could be clapping too. I mean, because the acoustics in there, you know, I mean, you want to just attribute it all that stuff to just be in voices because it sounds whispery. But the echo in there, I mean, it would make sense. It almost sounds like one person would be clapping then, not like a whole audience.
No, it just sounded like one person clapping. And we heard it multiple times at night trying to sleep, which would make sense being a it's a theater house. It's a theater. So we had such an amazing experience, the first time around at Ross Opera House that within just a few months, we decided to go back and actually do a public investigation to open it up to some of the people who might be from the area, but didn't really have anybody to come in and do an investigation with.
I'd asked Roger about that when we were there. And so we went back with the same group of investigators. I took some friends that are from Huntington with us. And then when we got there, there were several groups of people who were from the area who just like Roger said, really kind of wanted to get in to see if the rumors of the place being haunted were true.
And so we were so glad to have them there that night, but it was a little quiet. And so throughout the night, we heard little rumblings of that, you know, kind of the the very slight disembodied voices or the noises throughout the building that you couldn't really weren't intelligible at that time. And so around midnight, there was a group of people who had come together and we take breaks through the night as we're investigating. And around midnight, as we kind of walked outside, they said they were going to leave and they were very grateful.
They had a lot of questions, very kind people, but there were two guys there that night that we didn't know. I don't think they ever even gave us their names. I don't think so. I think they were real.
So they came in and they kind of stayed very separated from everybody else. They weren't really asking any questions. It was almost like, I got the feeling that they were very skeptical. They wanted to come in and see what we were going to say, see what just basically what transpire that night.
And so as everybody else from the area had disembarked for the night, these two guys stayed behind. And when everyone else was gone, they started asking a few questions, but still very much kept to themselves. And so the last pass that we did through the building that night, we were on the second floor in Aolian Hall. So the way that Aolian Hall sits now, it's just one room, hardwood floors, chairs, tables, kind of like a reception type area.
And to to get into the hall, there are two very large wooden swinging doors that are half glass at the top. And so we're in Aolian Hall and we're leading a spirit box session and we're getting a lot of very valid responses. All the investigators were kind of in the front of the room, looking back towards the crowd. And these two guys were sitting in the very back of the room.
And during the spirit box session, one of the guys almost kind of like raises his hand like he's in a classroom. And I said, what's going on? And he said, who else is in this building besides us right now? And I said, there's nobody here, any points towards the double doors that led out into the hallway?
And he said, well, then who is that? And so I walked to the back next to where they were sitting and looked through those double doors that go out into the hallway that leads to the projector room and the balcony where Rogers saw that woman in white come up through there. And there was a full on shadow figure just like what he had captured kind of bobbing in front of this door. We had there was no light in that room or in the hallway behind whatever this was.
But in the instant that I moved back there to where these guys are sitting, our motion sensor light that was in front of that door was triggered. And when that motion sensor light went on for probably 15 seconds, we watched this figure bob and weave in front of this door and then vanish. When I mean, Marty, we're cleaning up one time in the opera house, rolling up or we were setting up cameras. And I looked over to the back and it was real dark.
And it was something from behind one of the pillars that are doing the same thing just bobbing and weaving. And I was like, oh my God, what is that thing? That's creepy as shit. It was one of those holy shit moments.
That's creepy as hell. And you could see in an instant that these guys who I believe were full on skeptics when they came in, we stayed up there for probably another 20 minutes after that. And it got really super quiet. And when we went downstairs to take a break after that, those guys peace out, they were gone.
And I think it was that moment of them realizing that this was real, that we weren't there putting on a show that Ross Opera House has something very definite to offer. And whoever we were watching was again, they're watching us. So Shea Ross Opera House definitely in my top at least eight haunted locations would love to get there again this year. And and experience it again.
I'm totally down to go back, especially because walking dead fans out there, make sure you give this town a visit because it is pretty sweet, especially the the history if you're a walking dead fan. So Annie, you got any final thoughts before we say goodbye this week? Guys, if you like serial spirits, we love hearing from you. And we want to do a lot of listener submission stories.
So if you have stories that you would like to share with us, please feel free to reach out to us on Facebook, on Instagram, you can email us, you can find all of our contact information in our description below. And if you really like what we're doing, please feel free to leave us a five star review. It helps people find the show. It helps us get out to more listeners.
And we love just hearing back from you guys because we love you. So guys, that's going to do it for us this week. Until next time, be aware and be safe. Bye-bye.