Ex-cop now hunts the haunted

FORMER NEW ALBANY POLICE DETECTIVE INVESTIGATES THE AFTERLIFE BY VISITING THE LOUISVILLE AREA'S SPOOKIEST SPOTS

NEW ALBANY, Ind. – Standing over two headstones a few hundred yards from the abandoned Floyd County Asylum, Mike Culwell slipped a St. Michael holy card from his wallet and recited the Catholic prayer for protection. The retired 36-year veteran of the New Albany Police Department readied himself for another investigation. But neither gun nor badge would offer him sanctuary in this case.

“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle,” he intoned. “Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. … By the power of God, thrust into hell Satan, and all the evil spirits who wander through the world for the ruins of souls. Amen.”

Mike and his fellow investigator, Matthew Jackson, knew not the culprits. They had no notion of who they were looking for nor what they’d find. They had no names save the ones on the headstones: Lerian Neves and Charles Potter.

Yet in this potter’s field, they hoped to commune with the dead.

The pair are members of a loosely knit network of paranormal enthusiasts that Matthew founded who call themselves Paraholics. They like to say: Our addiction isn’t normal. It’s paranormal.

Their methods aren’t scientific, and they profess neither proof nor prophecy. They have no aim to convert nonbelievers. Rather, each man is on his own quest to explore the mystery of the hereafter.

On this night, they placed near the headstones trans-communication instruments – electronic devices they believe will allow something unseen to make its presence known. Matthew fiddled with one called an AGBX3, a black and silver box with dials that looked a bit like a gadget Captain Kirk might carry. It picks up electronic voice phenomena, or EVP, he said – voices from beyond the veil.

Though critics would describe the exercise as fanciful hokum, some paranormal enthusiasts theorize that spirits can talk through the white noise between radio stations. When Matthew flipped it on, the gadget whined and whirred as it rapidly scanned the FM dial. It sounded a bit like someone wigwagging a transistor radio dial only to find the scratchy stations just out of reach.

Investigation ground rules: No whispering because it can be misidentified on the replay. No startling anyone. And if your stomach growls or you cough, call it out so people know what’s on tape.

“Did you live in the poor farm?” Matthew asked after introductions. “Do you know the name of this cemetery? It’s probably been a while since anyone spoke to you, so if you want to talk, feel free to come over near us. We’re not going to hurt you. We’re all friends here.”

Matthew kept with the questions, waiting for a gizmo to light up. Prodding, persuading, inviting. No lights came on. No gadgets fell off the graves. He kept recording.

When he played one file back, there seemed to be a faint word between the first two questions. It sounded like a whisper: Yes.

“That could be a whole lotta nothin’,” Matthew said.

“It’s a head-scratcher,” Mike agreed.

Was it a passing car? A frog in the woods? An airplane overhead?

It was cause for more inquiry nonetheless. And prompted additional questions from Mike in hopes a spirit would answer through a ghost voice box: How many of you are buried here? Can we give someone a message? Are you happy where you are?

No voices. Just static. So they decided to move locations – inside the old asylum.

“If any spirits want to talk to us, we’ll be in the poor farm,” Matthew said. “Come join us.”

…

For nearly four decades, Mike Culwell looked for black and white evidence. As chief of detectives at the New Albany Police Department, if he couldn’t prove it, it didn’t count. And he knew eyewitness testimony was the worst kind.

“Everybody sees things in a different way,” he said. “The more they think about it, it may even change. … You’ve got to remember that their personal attachment to the situation is gonna weigh deeply on the way they recall it. … Yet when the fog clears, you find out, well, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that.”

Mike retains a cop’s sensibility – even in retirement – running down plausibility and motive. But he went from running 2,000 miles a year for 20 years to an aging man with aching bones. At 70, he knows 80’s not a given.

“Now you’re talking about my weak side,” he said. “Being a human being, I know my days are numbered.”

Mike confesses he can’t quote much of the Bible and isn’t a genuflect-every-day kind of Catholic. He believes in God, an ultimate creator, but got to wondering as he sat on his back deck enjoying nature if there might be something between here and there.

“I’d like to think the ultimate goal would be to reach heaven, to be with your God,” he said. “And I’ve certainly not given up on that because now ain’t the time to be givin’ up on it. … Now I fought a long, hard battle, and I still do all the time, about making sure I don’t overstep my religious boundaries. I’m not questioning the big guy.”

The church of his childhood talked about purgatory and unclean spirits so the idea isn’t foreign. Still, he’s reluctant to say the name of the “Big D” out loud.

“But maybe there’s something – like Columbus discovering America – something in between.”

After their inquiry in the potter’s field, Mike unlocked the back door of the Floyd County Asylum, a refuge built in 1878 before safety net programs like Social Security. Those too poor, elderly or infirm to take care of themselves, and unwed mothers and their babies – ostracized by their families – found a haven there. The mentally ill or unruly were locked in basement cells.

The building has had many names over the years – the asylum, the poor farm, the county farm, the county home for the aged and then simply the annex. Decades after the last residents died, it housed offices and the county youth center. Too expensive to rehab or raze, it’s now boarded up and abandoned.

Matthew’s face glowed in the beam of a red flashlight as the investigators set up camp in the newest part of the building. It was in a room just off the same hallway during a previous investigation that he heard something growl in his ear and, in the same instance, a light flipped on. He’d also seen doors shut on their own.

“EVP session. Juvenile detention area,” his voice echoed as he spoke into a recorder. “Hello? Anybody here tonight? Do you remember me?”

He paused. The only light in the room emanated from the recording equipment. Thick dust covered the tattered carpet, and the building’s bones were visible through holes in the wall. Mike kept his eye on the darkened hallway and waited for a machine to flash. The temperature gauge flickered down a few tenths of a degree.

“Who’s here?” Matthew asked.

A faint but audible moan seemed to come from the left, maybe from upstairs.

“Was that you?” he asked.

The only sound came from Mike shifting on the floor. No creaks, slamming doors, no footsteps.

They waited half an hour, asking more questions, entreating. Then they waited a bit longer. But no answer came.

It seemed like it might be a quiet night.

It was time to move the investigation to the oldest part of the building – the basement.

In Mike’s New Albany home, hard briefcases hold all manner of cameras and audio equipment to catch the voice of a phantom or the silhouette of a specter. Four single terabyte hard drives back up his data. It’s not evidence, he’s quick to say. He can’t prove a thing. But it adds to his collection of occurrences.

He dabbles in just about every aspect of celestial literature as his bookshelf attests: Answers About the Afterlife. The Gospel of Thomas. Demons and Demonology. Ghost Hunting Book. Wicked New Albany. The Idiots Guide to Ghosts and Haunting. The Psychic Energy Codex. The Soul Rescue Manual: Releasing Earthbound Spirits. And, of course, the Cathedral of the Assumption church directory.

Culwell has gone on 60 or 70 investigations. To an abandoned doctor’s office dating back to the 1940s where a physician died. Culwell caught a wispy figure on video that looks as if it’s walking down steps. But the staircase is no longer there. “It’s as if the doctor is assigned for eternity to walk up and down those stairs,” he said.

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To the Culbertson Mansion where investigators played Victorian music on a hurdy-gurdy and recorded what Culwell purports to be a ghost’s voice say: "Listen, Eliza." An Irish maid who once lived at the home had that name.

On a visit to the old Waverly Hills Sanatorium he and a fellow Paraholic saw a shadow figure peek its head out of a third-floor hospital room, Culwell said. Suddenly, it moved into the hallway and came toward them. When it got five feet away it dropped down to all fours and ran past him, he said. It was so close he could have touched it. He was not inclined.

On another Waverly visit, Mike said he turned a corner to face an entity about 4-feet-tall that looked like a character from the Lord of the Rings. “I looked at it. It looked at me. And then it just disappeared,” he said. What it was he had no idea.

And, once, he found himself at a house on Ekin Avenue where years ago he worked a murder case and got a conviction without a body – the first time in Indiana history, he said. He’s convinced to this day that the guy whose body was never found was the one causing all the trouble.

Winding down the old steps to the asylum’s basement was like a walk back in time – a labyrinth of crumbling brick archways, old amber pint bottles, dead birds and spider webs. One outside wall looked charred from fire damage – perhaps a remnant of the 1916 blaze that destroyed much of the building. There’s also a cold room where, the story goes, bodies were held until the winter ground thawed enough to bury them. Names are etched into the wall and the floor – Glenn Brown. And J. Everbach 3-15-35. And an impression of a pair of baby shoes with the date: 3-27-35.

With gadgets set up in the hallway, Mike tagged the session on his recorder. The glow of the green LED meter on the ghost box lit the men sitting in the hall.

“Is there anybody down here with us this evening?” Mike asked.

“Could you tell us your name please?”

“Why would you remain in this basement? Is there some attachment here?”

Matthew wanted to know how the spirits wound up at the poor farm. From the ghost box chatter, there seemed to come an answer. Taxes? An accident?Critics would say hogwash, that’s simply imagination and mutual validation, that the men heard what they wanted to hear.

Matthew: “I want to hear from the guy that was hurt in the accident.” No response.

The investigators continued their inquiry over the squawk and echo of the box. Sometimes it was loud, as if someone banged their elbow on the lower keys of an organ.

Matthew: “Can you say the name of this building?”

Jibberish. Static. Reverb. And then one word, clear: Reporters.

“Tell me the odds of that,” Mike said.

For Matthew, who owns a salon in Columbus, Ind., their investigations are less about answers and more about the quest.

“It’s all part of the mystery,” he said. “There’s no such thing as proof. There’s no such thing as evidence or we’d be on CNN or the cover of Science journal or something. … Maybe it’s not about the answers. Maybe it’s just about the mystery and appreciating that.”

For Mike, who likes to say he’s closer than Matthew to knowing what happens after death because of his age, the investigations have convinced him of an afterlife.

“I’m not afraid to die,” he said. “I’m just not sure who I’m going to meet.”

He’s got a million questions: “What’s next? Are you happy where you are? Why are you here, and why did you not go into the light? And is there a light? Just so many things. … A question I hit ‘em with all the time is are there rules? Are there certain things you’re allowed to tell us? Is there a boss where you are? These are things that go through my mind.”

In an older part of the asylum where plywood covers the window casings, Mike laid down on the floor in front of an ornate fireplace while Matthew manned a camera pointed at a chair in the hallway. The usual questions commenced.

As the ghost box whined and moaned, all of a sudden one of the gadgets lit up. An electromagnetic field sensor went off. The temperature gauge flickered. And three minutes later, a noise upstairs like boots on the floor.

“Are you in the hallway?" Matthew asked. “Are you coming in here?”

Minutes passed with no activity.

Matthew: “Can you come back into the hallway? Did you get bored with us?”

More questions.

Mike: “These people came a long way to talk with you. Can you be a bit more cooperative?”

Matthew: “Do they make you nervous?”

Buzzing, static and scanning on the ghost box. Distorted voices that sound like they’re talking over each other but through tin.

Mike invited any spirits to light the equipment up in the hallway or touch anyone in the room.

Matthew: “Can you give us a sign of your presence? Are you lonely?”

“It may be months and months before you see anybody here again,” Mike warned.

It was getting late, and Matthew sensed they wouldn’t get much more activity.

“Guys, it’s quiet tonight,” he said. “But we’ve heard a few things.”

“Such as people that are not here running above us,” Mike quipped.

The investigators made their way back to the first hallway where they heard the moan for one final session.

For the next half hour, Mike and Matthew took turns asking questions. Slowly, by just tenths of a degree, the temperature dropped. 71… 70… 69… 68.

Matthew: “Can you say your name?”

Mike: “Can you say one of our names?”

They poked. Questioned. Cajoled. Prodded.

And then the box alighted on a name: Timothy.

Mike: “Are you from Floyd County? Or are you just passin’ through?”

Mike: “I tell you what: Tell us our names and we’ll get out of here.”

They asked simple questions: The name of the building. The city. Even the next letter in the alphabet. A, B, C, D… E, F, G.

Matthew, a little punchy, reached: “Can you say unicorn? What’s your favorite color?”

The ghost box burped out dissonance until Matthew conceded.

“Alright,” he said. “I think it’s time to say goodnight to the Floyd County poor farm.”

He walked down the hall to the ghost box.

“I’m going to turn this off on the count of three,” he said. “Anything you want to say? One. Tell Kristina goodnight? Two.

“Three.”

Click.

With that, the night’s investigation was over.

After six hours inside the asylum, the crew packed up their equipment, and Mike locked the back door.

Footsteps upstairs, a faint moan, a momentary flash of light from the parascope and the clear word “reporters” in the basement. The old asylum gave up few of its mysteries that night. But the Paraholics will continue searching for answers.

This time, the investigation didn’t compel Mike to recite his prayer for protection before they left. Nothing about the inquiry had particularly unnerved him. But just in case, he had a message for mischievous spirits who might be tempted to try any funny business.

If they were thinking of following him home, he said: Don’t.

Originally published in the Courier Journal