Spooky Ohio

FORT RECOVERY - Mike and Jill Walter didn't start noticing strange noises and lights turning off and on in their Fort Recovery home until all their kids moved out in 2008.

The couple bought the home in 1978.

"When we sitting watching TV or whatever, it was like somebody came down the stairway and went out towards the kitchen or went from the kitchen up the steps," Mike Walter, 66, and retired from Buckeye Design, said. "And once (in) a while, you would hear like somebody on the steps at night. The thing that really happens is he likes to turn on a light in the dining room. He's turned another light on that we know of a few times, but the one in the dining room is the main one."

The 173-year-old house is across the street from the monument. They figured being so close to the monument and the bodies buried there from the Native American battles, spirits are in the house.

After the strange happens began, the couple called Alex Meiring - a Fort Recovery native and insurance agent by day and ghost hunter by night - to investigate.

In September 2017, Meiring and his crew, Dark Alley Paranormal, determined that four spirits, a man, a woman and at least two kids, live in the house. Meiring and his team put a flashlight in the center of a table at the home and asked the spirits a series of questions. If the answer was yes, the spirits turned on the light.

"There was nobody close enough to touch the flashlight when it came on," Mike Walter said. "And then after it came on, he says, 'Okay, you can turn a light out now' and it went out."

Over the years, the couple has accepted the spirits as family members.

"We call them all buddy. It's our buddy," Mike Walter said. "So the ones that turn on the lights, it might be the man, it could be the woman, it could be one of the kids. We don't know for sure, but we accept them all. They've never done anything that's been harmful or destructive."

Mike Walter said that one time, he had been in bed, lying on his side and when he tried to roll over, somebody was blocking him. He thought it was Jill, but she was on the other side.

"I said, 'OK, buddy, I want to roll over' and then I could roll over. It was like he was just blocking me," Mike Walters said.

He has seen the ghosts himself, albeit, just a glimpse out of the corner of his eye

"I've seen a kid run into the bedroom and around behind the bedroom door, but it's always in the middle of the night. It looked just like a person. It wasn't … like I could see through them or anything. It looked like a solid person at the time," Mike Walters said. "We don't see them very often. It's more like just a blur that you catch out of the corner of your eye."

Mike and Jill Walter aren't scared, though.

"It's kind of neat having them here," he said.

When Meiring and his team came to the house to investigate, they recorded both video and audio, Mike Walter said. Normally, it takes the team anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half to see any activity, but at the Walter's house, they saw activity within five minutes.

The recordings revealed a voice saying "hello" and the lamp and flashlight blinking on and off when Meiring asked the spirits questions, Mike Walter said. The next morning, when the crew reviewed the audio and video, both were wiped clean.

"There was nothing there when we'd seen it all the night before," Mike Walter said.

Meiring said one of the most remarkable occurances was the spirit consistently turning the flashlight on and off and responding to yes and no questions.

"Buddy or whatever his name is, he was turning flashlights on and I would move it to a different spot just to prove to everybody that it's not the flashlight," Meiring said.

Meiring said when he investigates a house, he starts by having the homeowners tell him what has happened and what they want him to do.

"To be honest with you, all I can really provide for you is kind of like a (peace) of mind, knowing that yes, there is something here," Meiring said. "Generally, I tell people ghosts were people too."

After talking with the homeowners, he sets up his equipment. He uses night-vision cameras and a digital voice recorder, which has a high-frequency microphone that can pick up noises within a frequency that the human ear can't hear, Meiring said. He will ask the spirits a series of questions and he plays back the audio to see if it recorded any answers. If the spirit communicates, those sounds are called EVP (electronic voice phenomena). He uses REM pods and K2 meters, which detect electromagnetic frequencies in the air.

He also uses a spirit box, which "essentially is a radio that scans through frequencies extremely rapidly so it produces a white noise. It allows the spirits to speak through that white noise in real-time. It's almost like a walkie-talkie with the dead," Meiring said.

Meiring said the most rewarding part of his job is validating people's experiences.

"A lot of people when we investigate homes, they literally think they're going crazy. Part of what I do is try to help validate what they're hearing, or seeing, or feeling and to let them know that yes, it is actually something that is happening inside of (their) home," he said.    Meiring, 37, lives in Dublin. He majored in communications at Bowling Green State University. He has been investigating ghosts for 13 years and has visited Waverly Hills Sanatorium in Kentucky and Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia and the Ohio State Reformatory, among others.

He and his team have been featured on Travel Channel's "Paranormal Challenge." Meiring was inspired to start looking into the paranormal because of Fort Recovery's history.

Although the Walter's house is 173 years old, it doesn't look like it, with its perfect paint and neatly-trimmed bushes. When the couple repainted the lamppost in front of the home, they found it is the same type as the Amityville House, Mike Walter said. "The Amityville Horror" is a movie, based on a book of the same name, that was inspired by Ronald DeFeo Jr.'s killings.

"I think there's several different types of spirits. You got some good ones and you've got some bad ones," Mike Walter said. "I think some of the movies have it right on for the type of spirit that's in that house or that building. It just happened like we've got a nice family. We talk to them quite a bit."