I find Jackson in an office, sitting in a swivel-chair behind a heavy oak desk, covered with cartons of matches, a toy tractor-trailer, wood-clamps, and an old-fashioned banker’s lamp with the green glass shade.

I stand in the doorway trying not to intrude. A low train whistle echoes from somewhere far off. The box makes its electronic garbling sound.

“REWARD,” reads Jackson. Then a long silence. Ian joins me and says the ghost of Stephen Douglas haunts the Old State House. They give tours. It occurs to me that Ian seems only to ramble in the absence of other conversation, that he is less obsessive than just terrified of silence or his own thoughts. I wonder what they must drift toward.

“JESUS. Do you like to pray to Jesus?” Jackson asks some unseen presence in a loud, slow voice. “SHOULD”, he reads softly, casting his eyes around as if he might find the source. “Should you see Jesus?” Another pause. “UNDER,” he reads.

“Maybe,” I suggest, despite not wanting to involve myself, but too curious to resist, “Jesus should be the reward, but… they’re stuck here?”

“FELON.” Jackson looks up to explain to me “sometimes it doesn’t have a lot of words in the dictionary so it combines things. Either it’s felon like felony, or fell on…”

“From a Christian perspective,” I venture, “maybe it’s like they should have seen Jesus as the reward, but they’re under sin, like a felon — ”

The box goes off again, and Jackson reads: “KISS.” He turns his head up and speaks loudly: “Do you want a kiss?”

“Maybe they had an affair or something. That was their great crime.”

“Would you like a kiss?” Jackson asks.

A few seconds pass before the box flashes the word “CORRECT”.

“Oh, you want to kiss Pat?” Jackson laughs.

In the adjoining room, a later addition to the house

In the adjoining room, a later addition to the house without any of the grand wallpaper or panelling, Damian sits at one end of an oversized couch. I walk in, disoriented in the dark, trying as much as anything else to track down the students I hadn’t had the chance to talk with yet. Damian holds a pair of divining rods out in front of him. Caroline stands opposite, holding another pair.

They are by far the least technological of any of the equipment, copper tubes with thick copper wires placed into them and bent into an L-shape like a toy gun. Holding the tubes allows the wires to turn freely from side to side. Dave demonstrated them earlier.

“They don’t work for me,” he said as he stood holding them motionless.

“Has anything happened so far tonight?” I ask Damien.

He says Alice had a turn with the divining rods earlier and had them spinning all over the place. I’m skeptical, but watch as he settles in with them.

Sitting stock still on the edge of the couch, the copper wires facing forward, he asks “where are you?”

Slowly they begin tilting to the left, gliding over until they slow to a stop. “Are you in here with us? Cross the rods for yes, don’t cross the rods for no.”

I notice Damian’s eyes tilt up toward Caroline’s. She meets them briefly but as quickly turns back to the rods. It’s hard to read, in the darkness especially, how the pair feel about each other, though in Caroline’s case it hardly seems to matter. She’s too focused on the unseen in the room to bother with anything else.

After a few tense seconds, the rod in his right hand remains still as the left drifts back to the right, sliding over the top of the other. Then the other moves as well until, crossing, they each touch his arms. Damian looks up, smiling.

Throughout it all, Caroline seems detached, watching her own divining rods twist one direction, then another, with a constant, easy speed. She stares fixedly at them, never looking up.

Damian eventually sets the divining rods aside and picks up a spirit box, a small speaker connected to a radio tuner that sweeps through frequencies and pauses and progresses in response to electromagnetic detection.

“Be careful,” says Caroline quietly, not looking up. “It’s always loud.”

A few seconds later, an explosion of static shocks the room. Damian jumps and wrestles with the volume knob until the static falls into a low hiss, punctuated with incoherent snippets of music and voices.

Wandering into another room at the back of the house, no windows to let even a hint of light penetrate, I find Ian and another boy placing a teddy bear on an orange plastic chair. A green light glows from under the fur of its chest.

“Do you want to be my friend?” it chirps in a child’s voice.

“The hell is that?” I ask Ian.

“That’s Boo Buddy.”

I spot one of the students I hadn’t met yet standing nearby, but he doesn’t seem interested in an introduction.

The green light fades as red lights pulse to life in the bear’s paws.

“Come play with the bear,” said Ian, invisible in the pitch black. Soon, the red lights disappear too and there is only the sound of our breathing.

“Brrr. It’s cold in here!” comes the high child’s voice from inside the bear.

From the next room, I hear Damian bragging “I got a hug from Alice.”

I smile at the words. As wildly different as Damian is from the kid I was at his age, I can’t help but projecting my own high school desires on him. Cloistered in his room watching YouTube videos, he probably doesn’t think nearly as much of being popular or having a girlfriend, but it’s all high school was for me. And I want it for him. I’m tempted to go in and peek, at least to meet Alice, but I can’t turn myself away from the horrifying stuffed bear.

“Are you playing with Boo Buddy?” asks Ian to the air. “Can you make the red lights come on?” Again, silence, no lights. “Can you make the red lights come on for us, please?”

Nothing.

“Please, make the red lights come on.”

“Do you want to be my friend?” the bear says.

“Make the red lights come on!”

Ian seems strangely agitated.

Suddenly, the sound of shrieking comes from the room with Damian and Caroline. Then the snippet of a song, then the quiet shush of static. I thought for a second. It certainly didn’t sound like Caroline.

“Was that Alice, or the radio thing?” I ask of the shriek.

I wander back that way, and Ian, bored of the bear, follows. Pulling out his phone he shows me a conservative online discussion forum he manages, to which he regularly posts essays on the evils of socialism and liberal identity politics.

Much of the group finds its way to the room. Dave sets up a box that projects a tight grid of hundreds of green laser lights at the walls, to better detect shadows, mists, movements. He and Jody sit on the couch, and Jackson joins them. Ian shows me a photo on his phone of a classic car.

“We got any spirits here?” Dave asks the air.

These outings don't happen frequently, typically the club works throughout the year at planning, organizing, and fundraising to pull off one trip a semester. The rest of the time they meet in Dave’s classroom to discuss any paranormal experiences they may have had over the course of the preceding week.

The stories that emerge are often fascinating, though Jackson admits “sometimes, in my opinion… not anybody here… but primarily when the freshmen speak it feels like they’re just…”

“Yeah,” groans Ian, “the freshmen are just being freshmen.”

It’s not the only complaint in that vein.

Dave recounts a trip to Ashmore Estates, a crumbling brick building surrounded by neck-high grass two hours away, where a group of freshmen got themselves into a crawl space and worked up to a frenzy in the dark confines, screaming for Dave, insisting that there was a demon.

That trip to the abandoned building, a poor house that served a rural county for the first half of the twentieth century, started off badly. The first time they tried to go, they got twenty miles from the school before the engine started smoking, leaking antifreeze and stinking up the whole bus. They had to turn around.

Trying again the next year, the dash panel of the usually reliable bus “kept beeping, beeping,” says Dave, “and we had to keep stopping and pulling over.”

One of the students suggested that if the bus broke down again maybe it meant they shouldn’t go.

The bus made it.

But the long and ominous trip had some of the younger members rowdy before they ever entered the building. One boy in particular bounded through the place, taunting the spirits to do their worst. He ended up nursing a gashed arm, explaining with a drained face that he had been scratched somehow. Inexplicably. Afterward, Dave booted him from the club.

Then, the crawl space.

“We were all messing down in the crawl space,” Damian recalls, “next thing you know, somebody goes into this back room. She walks out, and next thing you know you hear a loud smack from the room.”

Panic ensues.

“There’s a demon in the closet!” Ian shouts in a mock impression of the girl.

Dave came down and found the girl insistent that it was following her.

“So here I am,” says Dave, “feeling really stupid, talking like Okay, whoever it is, leave her alone, please go away, don’t touch her, stay away.”

After the chaos at Ashmore, senior members of the club began finding ways to weed out some of the others, in part by not telling them the dates of the outings. There are no freshmen tonight.

Caroline speaks so quietly you can barely hear her.

“There’s this room at Ashmore, they say that if you stay in there for a certain amount of time, you get depressed. One guy in our group went in there and said he just started crying.”

Dave mentions a pair of girls that had gone in together, stood in the blackness in two separate corners. They only later realized that both of them had spent the entire time in tears.

“Did you go in?” I ask Caroline.

“No,” she says. Pauses. “I was already depressed.”

“I had an experience in there,” says Damian, “I felt something cold behind me, trying to hold my hand, and it was a child behind me. I did not like that experience of having something there with you. To me it is like… I feel bad for the spirits attached to a place, being there… have no way to move on. I feel sad… being around people that die there. And you can contact something good or bad. That’s why I don’t like Ouija boards. It’s very dangerous in my opinion. I’ve never messed around with one of them, but I’ve seen YouTube videos of them and I think it’s pretty scary. Cause I think about getting possessed by a demon or have the Ouija Board go crazy or have the planchette go in straight circles, which I think I don’t want to mess with.”

“Yeah,” says Caroline, “my dad played with one and it said he would die at 19.”

Hardly seeing either of their faces in the darkness, the stories seem more ominous than they probably would otherwise. I don’t interrupt, but stomp my feet against the cold that’s finally numbing them.

“The one thing is,” says Damian, perhaps thinking again of his grandfather, “you have to say goodbye. So the spirit goes away.”

Hearing him lay out a very specific and precise set of rules makes me smile. I can’t help thinking of Jessie Eisenberg’s character in Zombieland, and the funny contrast of specific, sensible commandments for dealing with something as absurd as zombies.

“Because that’s the one thing you don’t want to do,” he continued, “you have to say goodbye.”

The other rule, he says with equal gravity, is that you should never do it alone.

“Since this is a paranormal investigation,” Jackson practically shouts, breaking the mood, “I would like to say my favorite ghost joke.”

“Oh God,” moans Ian.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no,” incants Damian.

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on, hold on, you guys, you guys, shhhh… I have a joke. What is the difference between a musician and a dead body?”

“Oh, I’ve heard this one,” says Damian.

“One decomposes while the other composes.”

“You told me that one before,” says Damian.

“Yes I did, and you laughed,” seethes Jackson with mock indignation. “What’s a ghost’s favorite meal on Thanksgiving?”

“Ectoplasm,” says Ian flatly.

“The poultry-geist.”

“That one got me,” admits Damian.

 

Idling cars line the sidewalk, manned by impatient parents.

In the back room, I watch as Dave places equipment back into the case, and listen as snippets of the students’ goodbyes float in from the doorway.

Ian shouts out a farewell to me. To Dave. Damian and Caroline go at the same time, Damian says “Goodbye Alice.” Caroline also says goodbye to Alice, whom the other kids seemed so taken with and whom I still hadn’t seen and had now apparently missed for good in the rush of departures, without the chance to ask why she shrieked.

With the last of them gone, Jody steps out for a cigarette and Dave stands at the door, triple-checking the contents of his case to make sure he hasn’t left anything behind. Just as he seems satisfied, heavy footsteps pound over our head. We both crane our necks upward, then look to each other. An indistinct voice follows.

“I didn’t see Jackson leave,” I say.

“The kids are gone,” he insists.

“All of them?”

We look back at the ceiling, silent, pausing a while with our necks both twisted into the same pose in the darkness. Dave seems to think less of it than I do, but with the key required to open the door from the inside, I can’t shake the uneasy feeling that someone left behind has no way of getting out short of busting a window. Just the same, I don’t volunteer to go back upstairs.

I follow him out, watch him lock the door shut.

There’s a light flurry of snow outside that night. Homesickness and unease and a lack of sleep make my brain as much of a haze as the glistening shards twirling through my motel room window like television static. I run Damian’s words over in my mind, I feel bad for the spirits attached to a place, being there… have no way to move on. I feel sad… being around people that die there.

All of it followed me home and gnawed at me in ways I struggled to articulate, which is arguably problematic for a journalist.

There was a lingering sadness and unease when I thought about that night in the house. The teens that came together to wander through rooms in the darkness, clinging to electronic devices with no serious scientific support. Poor teens yelling at spirits until impossible scratches drew blood, attention-hungry freshmen screeching about being possessed, truth-seeking seniors smiling as they stared at copper wires in their hands.

I hated the way I found myself thinking of their efforts in a condescending way, certain it said more about me than them, or maybe more about adulthood than adolescence.

From where I stood, everything they did was ridiculous because there was no such thing as ghosts. And if there were, after thousands of years of people dedicating their lives trying and failing to prove it, what hope did some seventeen-year-old in Springfield, Illinois have?

I know things. In ten years, I will, in all likelihood be at the same job, living in the same house, same wife, same children. But the students have no real idea where they’ll be.

I think of the depression room. Of the girls crying in its corners. Of Jackson making the walk away from it, looking haunted. Of Caroline refusing to even enter it since she had yet to be able to extricate herself from her own unhappiness and could not stand to go in alone and face it. Maybe there was something to Damian’s rules. You have to say goodbye. You can’t go alone.

There had been such a strong sense of isolation in the house. It was unsettling that for as long as I’d been in there, and as small a group as there had been, there were still students I’d somehow missed, perhaps even walking by them unaware in the darkness. At least the one boy I’d seen but not gotten the name of, and then Alice, whose name I’d heard but who I’d not seen.

Trying to wrestle the experiences, pictures, audio recordings into something like a story, I shot Dave a text message to ask who Alice was. A few minutes later my phone buzzed with the reply. I re-read it several times before fully absorbing it.

“She’s allegedly 8,” he replied. “I’ve had psychics say they’ve seen her. No proof however. Conjecture etc. no real proof.”

I was at a loss as to how to feel about the revelation. What to make of it.

Either to validate my skepticism or in spite of it, I tried to dig into the records of the house. In its first days as a private residence, there was never any girl named Alice that lived there. I cross-checked the families of the domestic servants, no Alices there either. Nor Alisons or Elsies or anything else remotely close.

In its days as a Men’s club, no female, least of all a child, would have been permitted to step foot inside.

I was ready to laugh at myself for even bothering to look into it all when I remembered the brief period it had served as a funeral parlor. Despite Dave’s feelings that no ghost would linger in a place like that, I found the years the parlor had operated, then checked the Illinois State death registry against it.

There was a single listing of an eight-year-old Alice dying in Springfield at the right time. Alice Manning, dead in the midst of a polio epidemic on April 10, 1916. Her birthday.

The question of whether or not I believed was actually, as it always is, whether I wanted to believe. To believe meant that Alice’s life hadn’t actually ended so tragically on her eighth birthday. That she lived on. But it also meant that for over a century she’d been trapped inside a dark house, limited to the most fleeting of interactions and human connection.

Going back to the audio recordings I’d made, I caught something I hadn’t before.

When Caroline left, she didn’t just say goodbye, she said “stay here. Don’t follow me.”

Whether I just hadn’t paid attention, or failed to absorb it since it made no sense, I don’t know. But I certainly understood it now.

I guess you have to say goodbye.