Baker Revisited
On February 18, 2005, the Eerie Oklahoma and GHOULI teams headed to Mineral Wells, Texas for the Spirit of the Baker Conference. We stayed at the GREATEST Bed & Breakfast, Silk Stocking Row. The owners were wonderful and the rooms were great and OH MY GOD, the bacon... Everything was fabulous and we will definitely stay there again.
Chuck & Wilene
This is the dining room
The following day, the 19th, we spent the day at the Baker for the conference. There were several speakers there and it was a good conference. We had arranged to go on a special after hours investigation and it was freezing in the building so we headed to the store to stock up on some warmer gear for the night time adventure.
We had to wait awhile, but we finally got to ascend those beautiful stairs into the mystery of the Baker Hotel. We wandered in and out of several rooms. It seems that over the years, there have been certain rooms associated with certain "ghuests" of the Baker and people have set up what have become shrines in some of them. While their hearts may have been in the right place, I feel that as an investigator, it is unnecessary and rather rude to leave things on a property like that. Who do they think is going to clean all that up? It is just one of our rules to leave things the way we found them.
Anyway - as always, the Baker is exciting to be in. There were a lot of people there that night and we didn't think we would get much good evidence because of all the commotion, but we did have a couple of things happen.
Now, Tonya and I have been to the Baker before and when I was there the first time, we had a bit of a strange experience on the third floor. Tonya, another girl, and I had stepped into the hallway of the third floor from the stairwell and we all stopped dead in our tracks and heard what sounded like a woman screaming from somewhere far away in the hotel. We all looked at each other and asked if everyone else heard it, so it wasn't just one person's imagination. We went on through the floor and there was one hallway that gave us that "don't go that way" feeling and we have avoided it every time. But this night when we were there, Tonya and I found ourselves walking down this particular hallway. We made note that this was the first time we had been down it. The moonlight was streaming in through the window and it was very quiet. She was a little way ahead of me and made the comment, "I feel like I'm gonna puke." I didn't think much of it and continued down the hall. In the moonlight, I saw something about eye level that I can only explain as a "ripple" in the atmosphere. It looked somewhat like a heat wave on a hot highway on a summer day. It was a shimmery wave in the air and I noticed it as I was walking through it and all of the sudden, I felt a wave of some kind of energy go from my feet all they way up my body to my head and I felt like I was going to throw up. I stopped and I told Tonya I felt like I was going to get sick and she said she had felt that, too, when she walked through that part of the hallway. I noticed that my eyes were filling up with tears and I wanted desperately to cry, but I was also aware that it was not ME that wanted to cry. I wasn't sad at all, but physically, I was going to cry. I stopped to regroup for a minute and all I can think of is that someone else's energy was wanting to cry and it was trying to do it through me. I know this sounds CRAZY and if it were someone telling me this story, I would probably call it bunk. But it happened and it was the single weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.
We moved on through the big dark building and Scott and I had fallen to the back of the group. The rest of them had gone into a room and when we arrived, there was quite a commotion going on. They had entered the room and heard a man's voice say a gruff "huh." We were able to capture it on the recorder. There were no men in the room at this time. You will hear a "huh" right after Tonya says, "It's in this room, Tammy..." This particular EVP is significant because several people heard it in real time and it was captured on the recording. There are a lot of times people hear things and they don't get caught on the tape, or you get something on tape that you didn't hear, but for several people to actually hear and get it recorded is rare.
Later, we were traveling down the hall and we heard two very loud snapping noises. Being at the back of the group, Scott and I were trampled and squashed when everyone in front of us turned around and high tailed it away from the direction of the noises. I turned and stuck my head up over the crowd to see Keith, a fellow Baker aficionado and investigator from Dallas. He is a Ft. Worth police officer and had been working late and decided to come find us after his shift. He claims that he snapped his fingers to alert us he was there but I don't think that explanation flew with the people that peed their pants and ran down the hall!
Keith accompanied us the rest of the way through and told the group a lot of the history. We got to go to the top for a few minutes only to be rushed out by the security guards that were ready to go home. We returned to the Silk Stocking and reviewed our video and audio and headed back to Oklahoma the next morning after another wonderful breakfast.
Here are the pictures I took at the Baker. There isn't anything particularly abnormal in them, I just like the place. First, the Divas...
