In the basement of the Bryn Du Mansion, paranormal investigator Sam Taylor sits cloaked in shadows, surrounded by cobwebs and the scent of mildew. From his pockets, he has placed in front of him two flashlights and a device that looks like an old television remote.
Periodically, the “remote” – an electromagnetic field detector (EMF) – whirs to life, flashing yellow, then orange, then red lights, each only lingering for a moment or two.
The EMF detector measures the presence and strength of electromagnetic fields. Ghosts are rumored to have electromagnetic fields, much like humans do with electrical activity in our bodies, like heartbeats or nerve firings.
Each light of the detector indicates to Taylor that someone – or something – is listening.
“Hey, is anybody in here?,” Taylor asks.
Silence.
“Somebody here?” he asks again.
Taylor explains ghost hunting is much like fishing: “Sometimes, they bite. Sometimes, they don’t.”
The ghosts don’t seem to be biting much in the basement. The flashlights – which Taylor says ghosts often turn on and off to communicate – lay dormant, though the EMF reader continues to fluctuate. The little lights on it flash from the baseline green to the middle yellow range. This could be some disturbance but according to Taylor, paranormal activity requires ongoing engagement. Spirits tend to be more responsive when people have been investigating more regularly. But no one has investigated Bryn Du for quite some time.
“If you don’t keep things active, then that’s just what happens,” Taylor said. The ghosts can leave – and they often will, when no one comes to chat with them.
Across the more than 400 paranormal investigations he has performed, Taylor has seen a lot that would make even the most stringent skeptic start to question themselves. And while boxes flying off counters and flashlights blinking on and off are strange, it’s not always a ghost or specter haunting a home.
The things that go bump in the night, he said, are often easy to explain: Cats knocking things off shelves; shoddy wiring; creaky floorboards.
“I am the biggest skeptic you’ve got. I do not believe everything is paranormal. I believe of everything that we’ve seen maybe 10 or 15% is unexplained,” Taylor said. “Then from that unexplained, then we’ve got to worry about, well, what is really paranormal and what’s not?”
Outside of the paranormal, Taylor owns a transportation company, Varied Transport; however, the paranormal always finds a way to creep in. Varied Transport offers paranormal night ride experiences for those curious about the supernatural.
Taylor became involved with the paranormal around 2012. Over time, he has become the director of the United Paranormal Project, a team of 15 who investigate potentially “haunted” locations in Ohio and beyond, including in New York, Tennessee, Illinois, Indiana and South Carolina.
Additionally, Taylor is a part of a smaller team of three investigators, Crossover Paranormal, who specialize in “breaking of attachments, cord-cutting, cleansing locations, house blessings, crossing entities over, and offering to help others learn how to protect themselves,” according to their website. And they don’t charge those in need of a cleansing.
“How can I tell somebody that I can’t come because we don’t have money for gas and we need $50, especially [to a] single mom and a couple of kids?” Taylor asked.
Being a paranormal investigator also brings with it a variety of different experiences, according to Taylor. From succubi and incubi to possessions to witches to seeing spirits pass on, Taylor has experienced every paranormal instance from the other side.
“I like the diversity of what I’m seeing, because it’s not always the same thing. It’s not like you’re going to Arby’s and making a sandwich that’s always made the same way,” said Taylor. “With this job we’re dealing with different types of entities, but we have to figure out what it really is and how we get rid of it.”
The things he sees, too, aren’t always scary.
In 2020, Taylor and his wife sat in a hospital room where Taylor’s mom lay, unresponsive for the past three days, sick with leukemia. Taylor’s father had passed away two years earlier from lung disease.
In the corner of the hospital room, Taylor saw glimpses of gold glitter sprinkling down from the ceiling. Taylor asked his wife if she could see it; she said she could not.
“I made sure there was nothing coming through the window because there was a cover or drapes over the window,” Taylor said. “And I could still see it.”
Taking the gold glitter as a sign, Taylor then stood up from his seat, walked over to his mother lying in the hospital bed, and reached for her hand.
“You know you need to get out of here,” Taylor told her. “This is not the place for you. You know it’s time for you to go. Go see Dad. Go see your parents, go see your brother. You need to let go.”
She squeezed his hand three times and passed away. Since then, Taylor said he can hear and see more “paranormal.” Over the past few years, he decided to keep on traveling down the paranormal rabbit hole.
To aid in this investigative part of paranormal work, Brandy Jeffers, Taylor’s trusted medium, is always there to lend a helping eye. As a psychic medium, Jeffers explained that she has been able to see and sense spirits through visions, feelings and hearing voices since she was young.
At 12 years old, Jeffers awoke in the middle of the night. At the foot of her bed, her great-grandmother sat in a bean bag chair. She looked at Jeffers, and told her that everything would be fine before disappearing.
It was a strange – albeit impossible – encounter: Jeffers’ grandmother had passed away years prior. But ever since, Jeffers can see, hear and feel things that others can’t.
“As far as it pertains to the ghost hunting aspect, when I go into a room, I may get the tingles or feel cold on one side of my body,” Jeffers explained. “That means that there’s energy there, there’s an entity.”
Sometimes Jeffers feels a pressure on the top of her head or a headache coming on. According to her, it means bad energy is present. Using body signals and other physical feelings is often how Jeffers determines characteristics about an entity.
“When I go into a haunted place, I try not to go in knowing anything. If I feel like something in my heart, I’ll ask if there’s somebody here that passed of heart disease or a heart attack or something like that. If I can’t catch my breath, to me, that is a lung issue,” said Jeffers.
Taylor does not consider himself a medium.
“If [Jeffers] tells me there’s something going on, I 100% believe her,” he said. “I might not feel it, see it, whatever, but she knows things. And it’s amazing the level of connectivity she has with the spirit world.”
While strolling the grounds of the Bryn Du Mansion in October, Jeffers saw someone invisible to Taylor. She described a woman against the fence behind the mansion in a long, blue dress and a large “derby-style” hat.
Jeffers believes everybody can be a medium, but you have to learn the abilities and use them accordingly. To her, a mix of meditation and education on the chakras, the seven points along your spine some people associate with physical, emotional and spiritual functions, help lead to heightened spiritual abilities. Ultimately, Jeffers stressed: “Trust your gut.”
“That’s the biggest thing – trust your gut. And that goes way beyond ghost hunting; that goes throughout your entire life,” Jeffers said. “Have you ever been in a situation and you’re like: ‘I really shouldn’t be here. Something bad is going to happen?’ And something bad happens because you’re not listening to your gut. That is your instincts, telling you: warning, warning, warning.”
Taylor is not in the business of convincing people ghosts are real. But in his life, he has seen things.
“You’ve got to understand: Everything we’re talking about is theoretical,” he said. “There has been no ‘100% guaranteed’ scientific proof of this ever. But the human experience, you have something happen and you know that it’s real. What is real 100% to you might not be to someone else.”
Seeking Sallie
Taylor led a group of journalists through the winding halls beneath the mansion, ducking under short ceilings, pipes and gray tubes stuffed with insulation. Halfway through the trek to the basement, it became necessary to bend in half to navigate through the compact halfway.
In an empty space at the end of the hall, Taylor went to work setting up his ghost hunting technology.
Taylor set two flashlights on an upturned bucket, along with two EMF devices, and then laid one flashlight on the floor near one of the cold, concrete walls, in case the spirit preferred it to the others.
Since the spirits didn’t seem too keen on congregating in the basement of the Bryn Du Manison, the TRP reporters followed Taylor past electrical wiring and the old wine cellar, up several flights of stairs, and into a what appeared to be a log cabin built into the third floor of the mansion.
This wooden paneled room is called the Trunk Room, and was a place for guests to store their luggage during their stay.
Bryn Du, meaning “black hill” in Welsh, honors the history of the area as abundant in coal. Ownership of the mansion has bounced around ever since it was constructed by Henry Wright in 1865. It was first a villa, then it was a horse farm, restaurant, non-profit headquarters and field house before the Bryn Du Commission took over operations two decades ago.
Today, the 52 acres and nine buildings host various events and organizations, including the occasional spirit-seeker, hoping that the old mansion’s history means it’s haunted.
“I get that question all the time: is it haunted?” Athena Koehler, executive director at Bryn Du Mansion said. “Can’t have an old house that’s not haunted.”
Taylor has investigated here many times before. But it’s been a while since his last investigation, and the spirits aren’t stirred. Taylor propped four flashlights on a window sill in the corner of the room, where they sat turned off.
Until one flickered to life.
“Hey, is anybody in here?,” Taylor asks. The ghost meter beeps. “Okay, who’s here with us? Somebody here?”
Silence.
“Now is that you, Sallie?”
Sallie Jones Sexton, born in 1912, was the daughter of John Sutphin Jones, who purchased the property in 1905. She didn’t die at the Bryn Du Mansion, but spent most of her life on the property, selling it in 1976 to William and Ortha Wright.
“So tell me, what turned that flashlight on?” Taylor asked the reporters.
Taylor thanked the possible spirit for turning the flashlight on, and requested that the spirit signal their presence by turning the flashlight back off or turning on another one of the flashlights.
The spirit did not oblige.
Silence.
Ella Diehl, Mia Fischel, Maddie Luebkert, Shaye Phillips and Tyler Thompson write for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.