After five years of living in her historic home, Jaime Shea has grown comfortable with the creaks that old houses make. She's even okay with the footsteps, voices, shadows, flashes of light and other unexplained activity.
But that wasn't always the case.
"At one time we were afraid to live here," she said of her family, which includes husband Ben, daughter Tory and sons Bridger and Jackson.
That's back when Bridger, now 8, would run downstairs, saying he could hear a torrent of angry voices; when Ben Shea would hear crying on the baby monitor when no babies were in the house; and when Jaime Shea would feel oppressed every time she went upstairs.
Many people don't think about haunted houses until Halloween time, but the Sheas live every day knowing they aren't alone at their home in Lamar.
As a fan of the Ghost Hunters TV show, I couldn't let this Halloween pass without embarking on a ghost hunt. So I contacted the Central Arkansas Society for Paranormal Research, an organization that researches and documents unexplained phenomenon throughout the state, to see if Sync photographer Shannon Sturgis and I could accompany them to a haunted place. CASPR founder and director Karen Shillings offered to take us to the Shea house, which she has been studying for four years.
"It's a very active place," she said.
Shannon and I arrived at the Shea house two Saturdays ago and were greeted by a neat white farmhouse adorned with pumpkins and other fall accessories.
It resembled the house that had been featured in an episode of A Haunting in September. But, according to Shea and Shillings, many of the events depicted on the show were exaggerated - or never happened at all.
Unfortunately, Shillings was sick and couldn't meet us there. So Shannon and I decided to see what we could find on our own, drawing on what we've learned from watching TV.
I started by interviewing Jaime Shea, who for more than three hours regaled me with stories of her paranormal encounters: turning around to see kitchen cabinets open for no reason, seeing the reflection of a shadowy figure on her computer screen, and having Bridger come downstairs in a trance and laugh maniacally at her.
Soon after, Shea contacted CASPR for help.
"When it started messing with my child is when I did something," she said.
Shillings said she could sense something in the house the first time she visited. She has captured "mist-like" forms on camera and has heard the "boom, boom, boom" of someone walking around upstairs.
One night, when Shillings was lying on the couch, she heard murmuring in her ear and felt like she couldn't move.
"What I heard was not angelic," she said.
Many records about the house were destroyed when the local library burned down; others are still held by the family that owned the house for several generations. Shea knows that part of the house was built in the 1700s and then added onto in the 1800s. It has been a stagecoach stop, a saloon and a jail. Plus, a little boy fell out of an upstairs window and there's a centuries-old cemetery behind the house.
Shea told me all this while we were sitting at her kitchen table. Afterward, I turned around to survey the room. For no apparent reason, one of the cabinet doors was open.
I went into Ghost Hunters mode and tried to find an explanation. Shea and I had been the only people in the room (Shannon was outside taking pictures), and the magnets keeping that door closed were stronger than normal.
I am convinced the cabinet did not open by itself.
After coming back in, Shannon took her seat at the table and saw a shadow hovering near the cabinet.
"It looked different than a regular shadow," she said. "It was three-dimensional and sort of floated below the ceiling. It made a sweeping outward motion on both sides, as if to create the shape of shoulders, and then it quickly disappeared back into the ceiling."
Shannon said she sat there, moving her eyes to see if she could re-create the shadow. She couldn't, and Shea said her family sees shadows like that all the time.
After a while, Shea took the kids to dinner and left Shannon and me to our ghost hunting. Admittedly, we were too scared to turn off all the lights. And the thought of going straight upstairs freaked us out. So we sat in the living room to see if could hear footsteps or voices.
We got nothing, so we headed to Bridger's bedroom, where the most activity has been reported.
Shannon took pictures, and I taped the two-hour session. We asked the spirits to reveal themselves. That looks pretty cool on TV, but it feels weird when you're sitting there doing it yourself.
In the back of my mind, I was begging the entities not to touch me. I wasn't ready for that level of activity. Maybe the entities sensed that because at the end of the night, Shannon and I had a lot of pictures and recordings but no experiences. Later, Shannon found two orbs in a picture of the kitchen cabinets. But I had no voices (other than mine and Shannon's) on the tape recorder.
Shillings said that's how it goes sometimes. All I know is that the ghost hunt in Lamar only whetted my appetite for more.