Is it a cigar or a ghost? Team hunts specter at museum

GASSVILLE - Local lore says a cigar-smoking spirit haunts the Baxter County Heritage Museum in an 84-year-old building that once housed the county's first hospital.

Now a team of paranormal investigators is on the case.

Members of the Yellvillebased Paranormal Studies of Arkansas recently spent a night at the museum in Gassville, looking for evidence of other-worldly activity.

Team leader Jason Mansfield of Yellville, in neighboring Marion County, said investigators set up night-vision equipment throughout the museum. They took some 300 photographs, shot 30 hours of video and recorded 36 hours of audio.

Museum curator Jane Andrewson is a true believer. Shehas heard ghostly footsteps and caught the scent of the cigars favored by the building's former occupant, the late Dr. William James Rollins.

"I've been down there so long and so much by myself that I'm used to his wanderings around in there," Andrewson said.

Mansfield's team is reviewing the information collected at the museum during the Sept. 22 visit and hopes to have a report for museum officials in about two weeks.

So far, the review has turned up one strange sound on the audio recording. A man's voice can be heard, whispering the word "facility."

"I can't explain how or why that's there," Mansfield said, adding that the team hopes to make a follow-up visit to find an explanation for the unusual audio.

"I'd say out of all the locations we go to, 99 percent we can explain" by conventional means, Mansfield said. "It's that 1 percent that leaves me baffled."

Built in 1923, the Rollins Hospital was the first hospital in north-central Arkansas. It closed in the early 1950s and sat vacant for 40 years until the county Historical and Genealogical Society established the museum. The one-story, concrete-block building was recently nominated for a spot on the National Register of Historic Places.

James Randi doesn't believe that Dr. Rollins haunts the halls of the former hospital. Randi, who has an international reputation for debunking the supernatural, said there is no scientific evidence of any supernatural activity, anywhere. Paranormal investigators, he said, "find what they want to find."

He is the founder of the James Randi Educational Foundation, which is offering a $1 million prize to anyone who proves there is an afterlife or makes contact with the afterlife.

"I think most [paranormal investigators] are quite sincere. They really think they've found something," Randi said in a telephone interview Tuesday from the foundation headquarters in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

"I don't consider it to be harmless," he added, "because it changes people's mode of thinking, changes their sense ofvalues. And they're liable to give all their money to charlatans out there who are ready to take the money."

Mansfield, a draftsman who took up paranormal investigation as a hobby, said his organization never charges a fee. Team members pay for their own equipment and expenses.

Mansfield, who once exchanged questions with Randi on an Internet radio broadcast, agrees with some of his conclusions.

"He does have a lot of good input from his point of view. I will agree with him that there area lot of crackpots out there."

But Mansfield said there are also many people like him who are sincerely interested in otherworldly exploration.

"We are a little community of people trying to find more to our world and our universe than what we can see and feel and hear with our five senses," he said.