Date: August 19, 2022
Location: New Castle, Pennsylvania
Investigators: Chris, Matt S, Ana, Matt K, El, Jody, Zoe, Kate
Location History
When it comes to tales of hauntings, New Castle, PA’s is considered to be one of the most haunted places in the United States, landing itself on many “Top Lists”. Opened in 1926, the Lawrence County Home for Aged originally housed the area’s destitute, mentally ill, and elderly residents. It was transitioned into a skilled nursing facility in the 1960s and ‘70s and was renamed Hill View Manor in 1977. Due to funding, overcrowding, and general disrepair, the facility closed in 2004. Over the course of its history, hundreds of people called the manor home and as the stories of such facilities go, some are rumored to have never left.
Our Experience
GRAVE Paranormal set out to investigate Hill View Manor in a private, overnight investigation in August of 2022. Armed with an arsenal of tools ranging from light-up, motion-activated cat toys to sophisticated thermal detectors and REM pods, we set out to try and experience the phenomena and “sightings” that many prominent television paranormal investigators have claimed to experience here.
The visit to Hill View began as most investigations normally do with a guided tour by the staff to allow the GRAVE team to get our bearings and learn some of the lore and stories surrounding the 80,000 square foot building and its supposed otherworldly residents. During this tour, we learned about the best locations for activity on each of the four floors and how best to illicit responses from the spirits.
Notes From Our Tour
We were particularly interested in the basement, where the spirit of a 6-year-old girl named Courtney along with her friend Isabella can sometimes be found in the “Artifacts” room, and also where the spirit of George is said to reside – we were warned to make sure we said “Bye, George!” before departing the area if we wanted to avoid some unpleasant reactions from him.
On the first floor, we were told that the Chapel is an area with many sensory experiences including hearing music and detecting hints of various smells. We learned the residents are apparently big Johnny Cash fans. The boiler room on the first floor is also the home of Eli and we were warned that women will be touched by this entity and we learned that room 128 belonged to Bill Boots and if we wanted to avoid trouble, we should not sit in his chair. Of course we knew we’d have to sit in the chair.
The main attraction on the second floor that has been the subject of many paranormal experiences at Hill View is near room 202: Angelo’s hallway. This hallway has garnered a reputation for being extremely loud and very active. We set up a camera here.
The third floor has a variety of spirits including the little girl entity Ellie, Joe Miller, who was described to us as a happy entity and that we may detect the smell of coffee, and John Robinson, who is suspected to have been pushed out of a window and whose body wasn’t found for hours until shift change. Once we finished the tour, we set out our strategy.
Investigation
The GRAVE team typically does a combination of full group investigating, small group/pairs investigating, and solo investigating and the plan here was the same. We got our headquarters set up, made sure cameras were rolling and that we could get the feeds up on the laptop, checked headlamps and flashlights, and headed out.
We started in the basement as a group. We went to the Artifacts room to see if we could find Courtney and Isabella. The Artifacts room contains decades of personal effects that have been abandoned or forgotten by the residents. The room itself has a bit of a creepy air to it just because of the amount of shadows and strange shapes in the dark caused by the suitcases, dolls, clothes, etc., contained here. To try and find Courtney and Isabella, we placed a cat toy on an arm chair near a high chair in which Courtney’s doll was sitting. The cat toy is motion activated and lights up if touched or moved.
We also set up a REM pod in the middle of the cleared area around which we all sat. A REM pod reacts to changes in temperature, electro-magnetic energy, or proximity detections. Different coloured lights will illuminate on the device depending on what triggered it. We have found that the REM pods can be finicky and even sitting on uneven ground can cause one to falsely go off. But, because they detect a variety of inputs, they’re good tools to have. Then we settle down, turned on our digital voice recorders and started asking questions.
We asked the girls what the doll’s name was. We asked about their favourite things. We asked how they were feeling and what it was like to be at Hill View. We asked everything we could think young girls might be interested in answering. The cat toy remained dark and still and the REM pod silent.
During one quiet moment, one of the team heard a whistle from the doorway. But it was not picked up on any of the recordings and did not repeat. Is it possible this was a spirit? Sure. But it is also just as possible it was a misidentified sound the old building made, an actual person outside or inside the building, or just a phantom sound. At one point, the team very clearly heard a response which we all felt very confident had said “Courtney” and we got very excited. But, after reviewing, there was a sound, but it was not “Courtney” and we’d all fallen victim to confirmation bias from each other. “Did you hear that??” “Yes!!! Did YOU?” “Oh, yes, me, too!!!”. Feeding off of each other’s perceived experiences or activity is something we try to stay very aware of. In the end, this turned out to be the most excitement we would experience in the investigation.
We headed down to George’s room where we attempted to elicit a response by tossing footballs, asking questions, even attempting to pretend to leave the area without saying goodbye to him. The only slightly interesting thing we got here was a faint odor. But this is not uncommon in old buildings and we chalked it up to nothing. After spending a bit more time here, we did say goodbye, because it’s nice to be polite if there really is a spirit around and headed upstairs to the first floor.
This is where we began to split up with some folks heading to the chapel, others to the cafeteria (supposedly, a cafeteria worker haunts this space and she does NOT like folks to line up on the other side of the room where a second serving line would have been), and a few others headed off to the boiler room and Room 128. Despite our best efforts playing music, asking questions, trying to entice the boiler room entity by having women enter the room and ask questions, and even sitting in Mr. Boots’ chair, we did not get any activity on the first floor.
The second floor had us with high hopes: Angelo’s hallway. The hallway where many shows have captured loud bangs, shadows, noises seemed like the prime place for GRAVE to finally capture some truly compelling evidence that we could analyze.
It’s worth noting that the hallways at Hill View are very stereotypical of your everyday, average horror movie. They are long, dark, and have plenty of doors along either side just waiting for something to pop out and scare you. It’s very easy to have your eyes and ears play tricks on you and for your mind to take the shifting and settling sounds of a building and turn them into something more otherworldly or scary.
A few of us headed down another hallway together. Once we were well away from the group, we turned off our headlamps and sat down and just listened and waited. And waited. And waited. We knocked. We banged. We whispered questions. We loudly asked questions. We waited in the darkness and silence some more. Other than the normal sounds of the building shifting around us, we didn’t hear anything that seemed out of the ordinary or particularly interesting. We headed back to join the group and we all sat together in Angelo’s hallway, lights out, recorders on, and started asking questions and listening.
At one point, a team member startled when she thought she saw movement in a doorway. However, review of the video camera footage didn’t show any movement in or out of any door. This is another example of your eyes trying to make sense of constant darkness and sometimes your eyes may see shadows or movement as they try to adjust to any variance in light. Again, it was another quiet location for us and we were disappointed.
A few folks came back to this hallway a few more times during the investigation but we didn’t get anything noteworthy as far as evidence. The scariest moment was when a piece of the wall fell off and hit one of our investigators. Not ghost related, I’m sure! It’s a creepy hallway alright, but that’s about all we can say for it from the GRAVE perspective.
At this point, the team was fairly split up with folks off exploring on their own or taking a break at headquarters. Despite all of our best efforts, no one experienced anything significant and in the wee hours of the morning, the team decided to call it quits before heading back to our rented house for a few hours of sleep.
After reviewing all of the footage, our notes, recordings, we didn’t find anything conclusive or even compelling at Hill View Manor. We had really thought that THIS time, in Angelo’s hallway, we would finally get something to phone home about. While we are glad to have scratched it off our paranormal bucket list, we still find ourselves looking for the elusive evidence. The only truly terrifying experience we had was running face-to-face into a certain Florida politician at a local Sheetz gas station while we were stocking up on caffeine and snacks.
Did we capture Paranormal Evidence?
No, we caught nothing out of the ordinary.
