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Knock knock.

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Who's there?

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After dark?

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And houses all across the United States.

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Things that go bump in the night.

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Can strike fear into even the bravest soul.

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Make yourself at home with truth or scare.

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As we move into some of America's most haunted houses.

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The United States.

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The United States.

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They say there's no place like home.

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Could that explain why some people never leave?

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The United States has only been around for a little over 200 years.

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That's been more than enough time for the ghosts of the dead to haunt lots of American homes.

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At least that's what the people who live there say.

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Are these claims to be believed?

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That's up to you to decide.

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How and why does a house become haunted?

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These questions have been asked but never really answered.

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John Golsby claims he can see and communicate with the dead.

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He says a haunted house is home to spirits that cannot let go of life.

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People that the desire is so great within and that they have to keep coming back to where they existed

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or there's some great emotional pullback and they cannot totally accept the fact that they've left the physical body.

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One place it's said they won't leave is here.

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The Winchester House in San Jose, California.

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Believe it or not, this house was built with ghosts in mind.

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But there was one rule.

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Uninvited ghosts were not welcome.

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Twisting hallways, a maze of staircases, and doors to nowhere were designed to confuse evil spirits.

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Even though no one lives here anymore, Winchester House is open to tourists if they've got the guts to go in.

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Because in this house, they say glimpses of the dead are still a way of life.

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Shara Smith works at Winchester House.

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The first time she was alone here, she wandered into one of the closed off rooms.

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And I let the door close behind me and it felt the air pressure got really heavy in there

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and it felt like the walls were getting closer and I had to get out of that room really quickly.

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Other people claim to have seen lights on in that very same room, but it is not wired for electricity.

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Unexplained footsteps, creaking boards, and whispering only add to the aura of the mystery of the Winchester House.

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Sara Winchester was heir to the Winchester Firearms fortune. She built the house for protection.

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William Winchester.

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William.

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A spiritual medium in Boston had told Sara that the deaths of her husband and only child

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were caused by evil spirits that had been killed by Winchester rifles.

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The seers advice? Go west.

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So Sara moved to California where she decided to turn a simple farmhouse into a mansion for the spirit world.

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She had been told that here she would be safe from those vengeful spirits, but only if she kept building.

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So for 38 years, 24 hours a day, construction continued.

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Today, the house sprawls over six acres of landscaped grounds.

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It has 160 rooms, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, 52 skylights, and nearly 10,000 windows.

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Only Sara's death in 1922 brought the building to a halt.

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In the end, she had spent nearly five and a half million dollars to build her safe house.

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That's the same as around $53 million today.

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Sara firmly believed that the house had kept her safe from harm.

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Could that explain why some say she still walks the halls of Winchester House?

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The most mysterious room in the house is the blue room.

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That's where Sara conducted her private salonses.

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No one ever set foot in the room while Sara was alive.

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Some believe it's still a doorway for visitors from another dimension.

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Like Jack and John Stewart, they work at the house today.

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If their claims are true, at least one Winchester employee from the past is still on staff.

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And I turned around and looked down the hallway and I seen a man standing.

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And then he disappeared. We went down to see if somebody was in the house.

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And there was nobody there.

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I never believed in spirits or ghosts or anything.

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But I do have a belief now that there is something in this house.

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Something or someone we may never know.

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In New Orleans, our hotel guests sharing their rooms with the dead.

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Next on Truth or Scare.

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The gaggle will be back on Discovery News.

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Sara Winchester built her house specifically for ghosts.

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Today, tourists go there practically expecting an encounter with the unexplained.

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But in one historic American city, visitors experience the spirit world the old fashioned way.

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Unexpectedly.

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At the southern end of the Mississippi River, you'll find New Orleans, Louisiana.

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One of the truly unique places in the world.

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A place where time seems to stand still.

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Where the past mixes with the present.

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And according to some, the living with the dead.

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In the city's French Quarter, a jazz club called Maxwell's is said to be haunted by its violent past.

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Some say entering the club might just bring you face to face with a very deceased doorman.

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A casualty from the bad old days of Mafia Rule.

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It was late at night and I was cleaning up and everything.

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And something caught my eye and I look up here to the balcony.

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And for about two seconds, there was a sky state in there.

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It just looked Italian and his hair slicked straight back.

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It looked like kind of like a tuxedo or some kind of evening wear on.

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And he was just looking at me and like smiling and then he was gone.

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In another part of town is the southern night's bed and breakfast.

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Here they haven't seen any ghosts, but they're convinced they've got some uninvited guests.

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There was such strange things that went on when I first bought the house.

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I would hear sounds and whispers and voices.

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My housekeeper, my son would come to me and say, did you call me and I hadn't.

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When we first moved in here, that's when I first started to notice the first strange occurrences.

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A few times when I walked in different rooms, the hair would stand up on the back of my neck.

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As if someone was in the room with me and a light would turn on.

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Alarm clocks that would set off when I had made sure that all the alarm clock might disconnected.

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Doors locked themselves.

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All these strange occurrences convinced Judy to call hauntings today.

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A paranormal investigation company run by parapsychologist Larry Mons.

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We conduct scientific investigations of phenomena and try to determine using scientific methods what's going on.

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Larry sent one of his staff to check out Judy's house.

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I said, why don't you go around and look at everything and check out all the rooms.

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So when she came back, she said, do you know you have an entity in the house?

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Paranormal investigations are not widely accepted, but Larry Mons thinks his organization is different.

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Our particular organization is a little unique in the fact that we use a combination of scientists as well as psychic investigators.

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We have conducted numerous investigations in haunted hotels, just like the Bourbon Orleans Hotel here in the French Quarter in New Orleans.

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This building was once home to St. Mary's Academy, St. John's Orphanage, and the world famous Orleans Ballroom.

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Hauntings today will be assessing what they believe are signs of paranormal activity.

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There have been people walking by this particular guest room suite and have heard a little girl crying.

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Hotel managers proceed to go up there, knock on the door, no answer, walk in, no one's there.

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Actually, I've even had guests come to the front desk and tell me that in the middle of the night they were woken and heard the water running and got up and actually saw the water running,

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turned it off, got back in the bed and have it happen two and three times still at night.

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The investigation started in the lobby.

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Once the team entered, it was only a matter of seconds before the psychic said she felt a strange energy.

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Shannon, you getting anything?

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I'm getting energy suppression up here and mostly from the front desk.

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Okay, go ahead.

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The energy pulls them out of the lobby and up to the hotel's grand ballroom.

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According to Larry, the room is full of strange electromagnetic energy readings and cold spots, which he says are very common in a haunted house.

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We also experienced some poltergeist activity with one of the chandeliers that actually started to move.

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Hold on, hold on.

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Did you feel that?

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Let's get a temperature reading.

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But the most chilling image the investigators say they saw was eerily similar to one reported by a hotel maid.

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They give you a list of vacant and rooms that you need to turn down.

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When you close the curtains at night, you look across the courtyard and I saw none sitting in a window in a vacant room crying.

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At first we had gotten kind of an impression or a psychic impression of a person standing all the way at the end of the hallway.

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And as we approached it, this none appeared and she turned quickly and moved through one of the doors of the room.

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And as we entered the room, of course, she disappeared.

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200 years after his death, does Abraham Lincoln still live at the White House?

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Next on Truth or Scare.

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New Orleans may be wilder, but the city of Washington, DC is just as fascinating.

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As the seat of power for the United States government, everywhere you go, the nation's history surrounds you.

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And some say the ghosts of historical figures might also be surrounding you.

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Claims of hauntings in Washington draw plenty of attention.

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Historians say that the city of Washington is the most important city in the world.

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Historian Stephen Lee Carson knows why.

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One of the reasons Washington is so fascinating as a haunted city is not only because of all the power that's been involved, past and present and the forces, if you will,

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but also the people who have verified these sightings.

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Congressman, senators, even presidents and first ladies have claimed they've seen ghosts.

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When Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was visiting President Franklin Roosevelt, she stayed in the Lincoln bedroom.

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Late at night, there was knocking at the door.

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The door opened.

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And there, she said, was Abraham Lincoln.

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Just down the street from the White House, you'll find the Octagon House, which was built back in the 1700s.

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It's a national historic landmark now.

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And according to Errol Platzer, the director of the house, there have been so many bizarre occurrences and unexplained phenomena here.

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There's only one way to keep track of them.

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We have a ghost file, as we call it, and we keep all the documentation that we can find on any ghost stories that have been told.

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During the War of 1812, the Octagon was used as a temporary White House.

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Today, some visitors have reported seeing images of first lady, Dolly Madison.

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Some even claim to have smelled her famous lilac perfume.

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Others say they've heard strange ghostly sounds coming from inside a wall.

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And many claim they have witnessed the sudden, unexplained swinging of the chandelier over the staircase.

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Not far away at the United States Capitol building,

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people say that the most haunted room here is Statuary Hall.

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It was once the chamber of the House of Representatives, and visitors have sworn they heard John Quincy Adams in the middle of a passionate debate.

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Some former security guards make a more shocking claim that late one night, the statues came to life and started dancing around the room.

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These stories are definitely scary. Could they actually be true?

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At the Center for Inquiry, ghost stories are just that. Stories.

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As skeptics, they're in the business of looking for impartial scientific explanations of paranormal claims.

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Joe Nickel is one of the center's investigators. It's his job to travel the country to check out places that are said to be haunted.

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Obviously we can't parachute into Peoria every time Mrs. Smith thinks she is a ghost, or every time someone sees a flying saucer somewhere.

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But we do try to hit the bigger cases, and we do investigate paranormal claims.

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Joe Nickel investigates the appearance of a little girl at a hotel with a dark history. Is this mystery all in the mind?

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Next on Truth or Scare.

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When people claim that a house is haunted, the stories are always fascinating. What if they're more than just stories?

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Investigators of haunted houses use many methods to explain the inexplicable, and sometimes they find very different answers.

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That's exactly what happened here at Brookdale Lodge. Just south of San Francisco, Brookdale was once the place to be seen if you were rich and famous.

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Movie stars and other celebrities came here all the time, dining and dancing the night away in the Brook Room.

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But the Lodge has also been the scene of tragedy. A fire, flood and a young girl's drowning will never be forgotten.

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Maybe that's why hotel employees like Jennifer Soto and Elan Gilboa are convinced Brookdale is haunted.

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Elan and I were cleaning up, getting ready to go, and I had heard some faint music, and I stopped and I said, Elan, do you hear that?

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And he said, yeah, I do.

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It was a mixture of people talking in the background and music, old time music.

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Jennifer and Elan figured that some people had probably broken in for a little late night party.

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So we got the keys and we were going to go in there and kick everybody out, and we opened up the doors and everything just seized. Nothing.

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The room was totally empty.

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It was scary a little bit.

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There were other incidents just as startling. Another haunting had been reported.

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Guests and employees claimed they'd seen a mother and her young daughter in the Brook Room.

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Are they grim reminders of an unknown earlier tragedy?

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Joan Nickel, the investigator from the Center for Inquiry, has been called in by the owners of Brookdale to try and find an explanation.

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I think the first thing that one tries to do with the haunted house is to gather data and see whether there is evidence, first of all, for some kind of hoax.

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Brookdale struck me right away as not having the characteristics of overt hoaxing or prankery.

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As a skeptic, Joe searches for plausible explanations for odd phenomena.

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Once a hoax or prank is ruled out, he looks for clues that something normal is being misperceived as paranormal.

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While Joe leads the skeptical investigation, the team of parapsychologists Lloyd Auerbach and professional psychic Annette Martian have also been called in.

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They're investigating the haunting from a believer's perspective.

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In the field of parapsychology, we look at interactions of the human mind, living or dead, if you want to look at it that way, with other minds, with the environment.

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Lloyd uses a magnetometer to measure magnetic fields in the area.

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Annette Martian is psychically searching for the same magnetic fields.

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Everyone has electromagnetic field around their body, and I have the capability of being able to read that.

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Right away, Annette claims she picked up a reading. It was of a young girl.

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And I asked her her name, and she was very shy and very demure and didn't want to give me her name, but she said that she liked to be called Katie.

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Is this proof that Brookdale Lodge has guests that never check out? When both investigations were complete, the conclusion was yes and no.

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There's something out of the ordinary going on here in people's experience and in the environment based on our readings and based on what the people have picked up.

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And this is warranting a second visit for sure.

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I have not seen anything that seems to mean evidence of haunting or supernatural activity here, but I have seen a correlation between the people who don't believe in ghosts here,

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who therefore have never seen one, and those who do believe, who do experience ghosts.

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Are skeptics like Joe Nickel right? Do ghosts have to be believed in to be seen, or is the truth something else entirely?

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We may never know for sure if haunted houses are real. The skeptics think that ghosts and hauntings are just ways for believers to explain the unknown.

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But for most people, the truth is a total mystery. One day, science may find an explanation and will know for sure. Or maybe, or better off, not knowing.

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The truth is that the truth is not a lie.

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The truth is that the truth is not a lie.

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The truth is that the truth is not a lie.

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The truth is that the truth is not a lie.

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The truth is that the truth is not a lie.

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The truth is that the truth is not a lie.