Spooky business at Little Rock museum: Arkansas Paranormal Expo offers tales of Bigfoot, ghosts, past lives

Numerologist Cheryl Waldmer (right) does a reading Saturday for Elizabeth Thomas of White Hall at the paranormal expo in Little Rock. The event continues today.
Numerologist Cheryl Waldmer (right) does a reading Saturday for Elizabeth Thomas of White Hall at the paranormal expo in Little Rock. The event continues today.

Driving alone, on an October night, is the perfect time to spy a Bigfoot, statistically speaking.

J. Robert Swain, who hunts the apish creature, said the data come from 1,100 sightings he's recorded in the Natural State alone. There have been flattened flower beds in Mena and a bipedal "bear" in Guy, he recalled.

Though the right conditions might increase one's chances, a sighting is not guaranteed, Swain said.

He's sought the elusive beast for a decade. It was last Friday when, Swain said, he got his first glimpse.

He was traveling in Oklahoma, not far from Fort Smith, when he stopped along a gravel road. About 300 feet away, there it was, he said.

A 9-foot-tall, 500-pound Bigfoot, Swain said. In seconds, the thing slipped behind trees, out of sight.

Swain told the tale to an eager audience Saturday at the seventh annual Arkansas Paranormal Expo, which continues today at the MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History.

Proceeds benefit the museum, which is inside the Little Rock Arsenal building, once a major military installation during the Civil War.

A sign directed traffic at the bottom of the nearly 150-year-old staircase: vendors to the left, psychics to the right.

Stands were stocked with crystals said to help with common ailments, as well as powders, perfumes, meteorites and molds of Bigfoot feet. Speakers gave talks with titles like "Do You Believe in Ghosts?"

The answer, from most in attendance, was yes.

At her booth, numerologist Cheryl Waldmer laid out a cache of cards and glass balls the color of an oil slick. The digits of a person's birthday unlock hidden meaning, she said.

An Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reporter offered her birth date. Waldmer scribbled magic math on a piece of paper.

In two years, "you'll be kind of confused," she said. "You might even switch careers."

Like many who lined the museum halls, Waldmer said she was a child when she first encountered the other-worldly. Her deceased grandfather spoke to her to say he was "floating in water," Waldmer said.

The family exhumed his vault. It had flooded, she said.

Waldmer said she's able to tap into the presence of those who linger after death. On Friday night, she could sense that five souls were milling about the museum, she said.

At one point in her life, Waldmer recalled, the dead's presence became so overwhelming that her husband said, "If you don't get rid of the dead, we'll have to get separate bedrooms."

Steven Summers also is familiar with mixing marriage and the mystic. He proposed to his wife, Posy, just four days after they met. Later, he said, they understood they'd been together, off and on, for centuries.

The pair were best friends as Aztecs in central Mexico, Summers said. In another era, his wife perished young, which left him with a lasting need to overprotect.

Equipped with headphones and a microphone, Summers offered expo attendees a chance to enter their former selves. After inducing a "light trance," he walks each person through another world.

People go as far back as primitive man and to times as recent as World War II, he said. One woman became a libidinous Scottish man, accent and all, he said.

Regardless of who they become, it's "their job to find the relevancy," Summers said. Most of the lessons people learn will be "slap-in-the-face kind of stuff," he said.

Summers said he's done about 1,000 "past life regressions," though he's never undergone one himself.

"I'm not a very good subject," he said. "My mind tends to wander."

Other vendors, like Alan Lowe, sold their own experiences. He and his wife founded Spirit Seekers of Arkansas to log the strange and unexplained.

As a child, Lowe said, he met the ghost who would take up the first chapter of a book he co-wrote, The Ghosts of Little Rock. While with his father in the state Capitol, Lowe swore he saw a gentleman in a three-piece suit and hat.

Since then, the ghost has become local lore. When spotted, wandering the rotunda, he mostly smiles and nods, Lowe wrote.

It could be a Confederate soldier who died of disease, Lowe wrote, or an Arkansas politician named Ira Gurley, who was crushed in an elevator shaft in 1932.

Whatever a ghost's origin, a big mistake one can make when encountering a ghost is assuming it has evil intentions, Adrian Scalf said.

He started River Valley Paranormal with his wife, Tina. Together, they investigate the preternatural and tell people how to do the same.

Scalf advocates for "peaceful coexistence," though he acknowledges some ghosts can get unruly.

"If you're a jerk in life, you're a jerk as a ghost," he said.

Still, most will back down if a homeowner stands his ground, Scalf said.

For instance, inhabiting the Scalf residence is a ghost who appears as a man with a crew cut, Scalf said. The ghost usually tucks a button-down shirt into creased pants.

"We call him James," Scalf said. "He's a smoker."

Once, while watching an episode of Survivor, Scalf and his wife smelled a lit Winston cigarette. When they told the ghost to knock it off, it never happened again, he said.

But until people meet a James of their own, they're likely to stay rooted in disbelief, Scalf said.

"We're not in the job to convince people. All we can do is present facts."

photo

Cheryl Murphy, owner of the Board Camp Crystal Mine in Mena, describes paranormal activity at the mine as she speaks during Saturday’s Arkansas Paranormal Expo in Little Rock.

Metro on 10/08/2017

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