As part of our newish yearly tradition, Enterprise staff and family spent the witching hour in some of Malad’s historical buildings looking for elusive ghosts, spirits, or contact with any outside entities of note.  While not a slam dunk suitable for a cable TV show, this year’s findings were more intriguing than at least one of the skeptics on hand expected.

The evening began with a night time tour through the Oneida County Pioneer Museum.  While no specific experiences have been reported in the building, according to museum director Jean Thomas, the site is certainly the county’s largest repository of materials, relics, and connections to the past.  

At night, the museum takes on a completely different pallor than visitors might be familiar with, especially by flashlight alone.  The mannequins and dental and surgical implements all become much less expected and familiar than they do in the full light of day.  Despite the best efforts of our crew to scare themselves, nothing but nerves seemed to break the stillness of the main floor and basement, other than a few unexplained noises.  The biggest scare occurred when Sherrie’s daughters pulled a sheet back from a box in the upstairs storage area to reveal what at first appeared to be a body.  It was soon revealed to be a scale mannequin designed for the Welsh Festival to illustrate a coal miner in a coal tunnel.

After leaving the museum, we headed over to the Evans co-op building, one of the most interesting old buildings on Main street, and the heart of Malad’s old downtown area.  The building has been under discussion by the city council for years, and several plans to restore sections of the structure and bring it into usage are currently being explored.  The cost of restoring such a large facility will obviously be enormous, and various grants and sources of funding have been and are being pursued.

In the meantime, the building serves as a storage area for various groups, including the Friends of the Oneida County Library and the city.  The building is also the location for the season window displays which have been created and maintained by the Coleman family (including this season’s amazing series of Halloween displays).

therwise, the building largely sits as a testament to the past.  Even during the daytime, the weight of decades worth of people existing within the walls can be felt heavily.  You can almost hear the chatter of shoppers, the excited shouts of children, the routine noise of business, and the accumulation of generations worth of special events and moments.

The imagined noises contrast sharply with the reality of the basement, where old vaults and storage areas are almost deathly quiet.  Although the total area is not vast, the layout becomes much more maze-like under thin flashlight beams, and conversations echo in peculiar ways through the environment.  More than once we experienced noises that couldn’t be directly located or explained, though it was comforting to assign them to the age of the building and its various stages of disassembly.  

Though the feeling on the main floor and in the basement was eerie, to say the least, nothing singular happened in either location.  It was the suite of rooms on the upmost floor that produced unexpected results.  The floor was used for a series of offices, and various commercial detritus is still scattered around, creating irregular, angular shows in reflection.  In the upstairs room that had the most uneasy feeling, the group sat on the floor and tuned off their lights.  Sherrie Wise’s daughter Bailey asked anyone who might be there to turn on the flashlight.  Sherrie and daughter Kelsey Jones reported seeing a shadow move through the next room, after which the flashlight turned on to full brightness.  Bailey said that if the presence didn’t want them to be there that it should turn off.  Immediately, the flashlight dimmed.  

“I’m out of here,” Bailey said to the group.  

“But the flashlight is still on,” Kelsey said, insisting on the letter of the law.  The flashlight then turned completely off, after which the group quickly exited.

“I didn’t think anything was going to happen,” Enterprise owner Bryan Scott said afterward.  “But that was something.  That was definitely something.”

It is here where your writer admits that the incident recounted above happened outside my experience.  I was returning keys for the museum to Dotty Evanson just up the street when the culminating event took place.  In fact, I was just in time returning to the co-op to meet the group, both shaken and stirred, hastily leaving the building.

“You missed it!” Sherrie said.  And so I did, once again.  But there’s always next year!