See also: - Paranormal investigator LeeAnna Jonas on her first apparition and evil spirits at the Gilpin County Jail - Ten spooky stories from Denver's own Croke-Patterson mansion - Over the weekend: Ghost hunting at the Spirits of Victor Paranormal Convention
Westword: What experience do you talk about on My Ghost Story?
LeeAnna Jonas: Well, it took place at the Gilpin County Courthouse and Jail, which is an 1800s building. It's no longer used as a jail, but back in the day it was. When we ran into our angel reader, Kelly, she had warned us not to go into the courthouse because there was a dark entity in the basement. She was there for training one day and she actually saw the apparition of a man and because of what she does he didn't like her. She was good and he was bad. He was probably a murderer at some point that was housed there, and she warned us not to go in there. But of course we were curious.
Did you take precautions before you went into the building?
We do protection before we ever go into any location; we use metaphysical oils and stones and do a white light of protection as a group. We thought we had ourselves covered. We went in there and right away during the walk-through my one gal Tawni saw a dark shadow man in the back of the jail who scared the heck out of her. She told me at that point she had spotted him, so she was already a little on edge and then as we went we kept trying to get them to respond to our equipment. We were in one cell and I'm just like, come on guys, let's communicate. So we walked from one cell to the other and as we did that something jumped off the top bunk at Tawni and freaked her out. She started swearing and freaking out and she was really keyed up after that. Later that night we went back to make one more attempt with our ovilus and I said, what happened to you? Who are you? And it said, "will die murder and blood."
What does the ovilus do?
An ovilus is a piece of equipment that generates energy and puts it into words. It has different modes. There's a dictionary mode to where the unit has I think 2,500 to 3,000 words built into the database, and then it also has a phonetic mode so if the spirit wants to talk it comes out the words that they wanna say instead of the database. So basically what it does is it transforms the energy that the spirits are putting out and assists them in putting out the words.
What happened after the ovilus said, "will die murder and blood?"
My medium, Allie, my other teammate, we had a code word that if anything tried to enter her, because they can do that, especially nasty entities, that she needed to tell me and we would get out of there. And at that point after all those words came out she said, LeeAnna it's trying to get in me right now, we gotta go. And I told it, you didn't play right, you didn't play fair, now we're leaving. I could feel him on the back of my neck; I was the last one to come out of the jail.
Did you have other ghost experiences in the jail?
We also contacted a man, his buddy killed him because he thought that he was gonna get in trouble for stealing gold bars that were housed in the building back then, and encased his best friend in a wall with the gold. He thought he was dead until he heard him scratching. And this all came out on the ovilus, too. We were talking and it said, "trapped," "gold," all this stuff. There was an actual ghost that said "boo" to us, we got it on EVP [laughs].
There was stuff in each floor. We caught a man's voice on the second floor with the man who works there. We got tons of EVPs and the moral of the story is the man who has worked there for I think nineteen years has built a relationship with the dark entity in the jail. He talks to him, tells him his stories, tells him his woes. Well, it comes home with him. It makes him act different. His eyes dilate and he starts acting like a different person, so he's basically possessed by this spirit.
We were warned, but we wanted to check it out. He still has the problem with the entity, but we're gonna try to get him cleansed because he's no longer working for the county anymore. We felt while he was working with the county there's no reason to cleanse him, because it'll come right back.
So are those stories what your episode of My Ghost Story is going to feature?
We don't really get a say in it, all we do is send in our evidence and when they came out in July and we filmed, they had a storyline. So I do know from the commercial they have the part where he jumps out at Tawni. They are gonna talk about the man who's encased in the wall with the gold for sure, and then I don't know what else. We're either the first or the second story, that's the most that I could get out of the production company.
What else do you want people to know about SRIP or the show?
I want people to know that there is a dark side, and people need to realize that ghost- hunting has itss good and bad, and you're gonna come in contact with the bad. And if you're gonna come in with bad, you have to protect yourself. There's a lot of teams out there that won't do that and they need to. [The ghost] still resonates with Tawni, we had to cleanse her in her residence one night.
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