Ghost Hunting at Wyoming's Fort Caspar

FORT CASPAR — Strange things have been known to happen on the 57 acres of the historic — and if you believe in ghosts, very haunted — Fort Caspar Museum grounds.

An impossibly blocked door, footsteps of hobnailed boots that echo through an empty museum, a little boy in suspenders who ran past a staffer and seemingly vanished.

Such are the occurrences that museum staff have come to accept at the historic site where thousands of westward pilgrims and soldiers once passed through. It’s also where lives were lost in battle, people drowned and succumbed to disease.

Every once in awhile, the museum opens after hours for those who don’t believe in ghosts — and those who do — to use science, technology and their natural instincts to snoop to investigate the paranormal activity at Fort Caspar. This weekend is one of those once-in-a-whiles.

“Much like you see on those ghost hunting shows, there is a variety of equipment that we use that participants are allowed to use themselves searching for possible paranormal activity,” Museum Director Rick Young told Cowboy State Daily.

The museum typically schedules paranormal investigations each October and April when the tourist season plexiglass barriers are removed from inside fort buildings. Visitors can play checkers on a table and challenge an invisible opponent in the enlisted quarters bunkhouse. They can also watch for a paranormal detection device in the telegraph room to light up.

The Tools

People buy tickets and go out in 10-member groups and investigate three areas of the property. Each group is given a bag of professional paranormal “tools.” The object of hour-long excursion revolves around seeing if a “spirit box” will talk, divining rods move, lasers detect movement, or an electro-magnetic field detector will light up with contact from the beyond.

Fort Caspar Museum Association Vice President Johanna Wickman explained the tools. One is an EMF detector that picks up fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. While it will detect electronics, she said paranormal investigators use it to ferret out potential activity if electronics are absent.

Another tool is the REM-POD which picks up temperature fluctuations as well as disturbances in the electro-magnetic field.

“We have a couple of them that we will set up in buildings,” Wickman said, adding she has left two of them set up overnight in the cavalry barracks with a video camera on and “these things just start going off by themselves.”

“There is nobody in the building, there is no electrical, there is no reason for it,” she said. “These are usually pretty active in the telegraph office and in the cavalry barracks.”

The teams will also be given laser thermometers to determine temperature fluctuations in a room or outdoors because paranormal activity is associated with cold spots. The tool bag also will have audio recorders team members can carry around because “sometimes the audio recorders will pick up sounds that you can’t hear with the human ear,” Wickman said.

“We’ve heard footsteps, voices, unusual things on the audio files,” she said.

Names Spoken

Young tells of one instance when on playback, the recorder “said people’s names that were present, which was pretty odd.”

Another oddity occurred when Wickman left a video camera in the cavalry barracks.

“We’ve let it run overnight in the cav(alry) barracks and picked up those hobnailed boots … and you could hear it clicking on the wood floor … walking away from the camera and toward the camera,” she said. “On one of the recordings we heard someone say ‘Hello’ right in the camera, which is weird.”

She said it was 3 a.m. when one was at the fort.

Other paranormal gear teams can use is a “spirit box,” which scans radio frequencies at a high rate of speed and creates a white noise paranormal investigators have used to hear names and voices.

“These are pretty popular on tours,” Wickman said. “These are things where we have heard someone come through and say names and they can speak to you essentially.”

Another tool is a laser grid light that indicates if something breaks the laser grid pattern. Teams also are given dousing rods that once were used to find water. These are good for asking “yes” or “no” questions,” Wickman said.

A board for checkers in the barracks is set up to see what happens when someone makes a move and challenges the spirits to make the next.

‘Something Happens’

“We have a lot of people come back every year because they say something happens,” she said.

A few years ago, Wickman said the museum invited Sarah Lemos, a well-known ghost hunter on the Travel Channel, who came and did a special investigation at Fort Caspar.

“She commented that this location from her perspective was a ‘Class A haunted location,’ meaning that it is extremely active,” Wickman said. “She was blown away that she was on these tours and there was something happening on every tour.”

Additional strange events at the fort encountered by staff have included:

• Wickman said she saw a boy in the museum when they were doing paranormal tours years ago run past her wearing a button-up plaid shirt, suspenders and pants that were “a little out of place for the T-shirts you would expect to see, but not necessarily out of time.” She went after him into the museum and could find no one. There was only one way out of the gallery where people were standing, and she asked if they saw him. They had not. Others later reported seeing a boy with the same sandy hair over by the Sutler Store, a building in the fort complex outside of the museum.

• Michelle Bahe, curator of collections, said she was doing her regular cleaning of 8-by-6-foot sheets of glass in the museum that protect exhibits and one day found a little kid’s handprints on the inside of the glass. The exhibit had been up since November, she was cleaning the glass in August, and it was the first time she saw the handprints. And there was no way for a child to get behind the glass.

• Young said a few years back he went to open the Sutler Store door in the fort, and it was blocked by a heavy chair. The door to the building opens to the inside. Windows in the building are nailed shut. The door is the only entrance. There was no logical explanation for how the chair blocked the door.

• On another occasion a few years ago, Young and two other employees, including Bahe, walked into one of the fort buildings to find wet barefoot footprints in the middle of a room that walked into another room and stopped. There were no footprints leading into the room from outside — they just started in the middle of a room. No security motion detectors had been set off.

• Young said during a paranormal tour a few years ago that Museum Association President Con Trumbell was playing checkers in the cavalry barracks. He made an illegal move and a voice came through the spirit box: “You cheated, Con.” “I can’t explain that,” Young said.

No Fear

All three staff say they have become used to the strange occurrences and have never felt fear. Wickman said she considers them similar to scientific “data points.”

During the weekend investigations, teams go out at staggered 20-minute intervals. One team will do the fort buildings while another does the grounds and a third goes through the cemetery.

All three museum staffers say the activity they see is not relegated to the night or day, it just happens when it happens.

Wickman was setting up an exhibit on a Monday a year or so ago when the museum was closed. She and Bahe heard footsteps coming down the hall of the museum.

“The doors are locked there is no one here, but Michelle and I, we are in the gallery, and it is those hobnailed boots, you could hear the nails clicking on the tile floor,” she said. “Someone is walking almost as if they had walked from the fort buildings and down the hallway. We go out and look and there is nobody there.”

They weren’t afraid.

“It’s very matter of fact, it’s like it’s one of the guys,” Wickman said.

Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.