Investigation of Richardson Hall 2/27/2012 Part 1

The Chair Experiment

After being absent from investigating for so long, Becca and I headed back over to Richardson Hall. Yes, I know we do a lot of investigations on the Theatre, but really, we can't explore anywhere else, so for now our choices are limited. And besides, it's a pretty active place, so why not investigate it to the fullest?

The two of us came up with an experiment to perform: the chair experiment. Like we said before the little boy (who we discovered is really named Joshua, so that's what we call him now) likes to interact with us a lot, so he's our best spirit to study. 

For our experiment, we went through the entire first level of the theatre and put up any seat that was down. Now, in the theatre, there are some seats that, when pushed down will stay down. But for the most part, the chairs spring back up unless there is weight in them. 

So once all the seats were up, we went through to take pictures as evidence that all the seats were back up. After that, we had planned to go through and check if any somehow went back down. However, before I could even take the first round of pictures, we found that one seat had gone back down. 

Every time we are in the theatre, that is the seat that's always down. We've dubbed it "Joshua's Seat" because without fail, no matter how many times we put it back up, it always comes back down, and we believe that it's Joshua's way of telling us that he's here. 

So for the experiment, I put the seat back up and took pictures as best as I could to document the seats all being pushed up:

Right Side
(Note Joshua's Seat, 2nd Row on the left)

Larger view of right side
(Joshua's Seat bottom right)

Center section right side

Left section back half
(Note: First row on the left, the two seats near the heater
are half down again after we put them all the way up)

Center Section Left side

After taking these pictures, we went back through maybe a minute later to check seats. This is what we saw:

Center section

Left section front half

Left Section

The one that really gets me though is comparing a picture that I have in the beginning of the blog to something I just discovered going through them. The two pictures below were taken 2-3 seconds apart. I've labeled the rows to make comparing them easier. In row four of the first picture, 4th seat in, the seat is up. In the two seconds it took me to step half a foot to the right and snap another picture, the same seat is down. Neither Becca nor I touched it in the few seconds between pictures. 

Seat is up like we had it

3 seconds later, the seat is down

Running short on time, Becca and I put up the seats once more to run the experiment again. We walked past one of the doors on the side of the stage and the two of us froze at the same exact time; from right in front of us, we heard a growl. Now, though a growl isn't something that's unnatural, when you hear a growl three feet in front of you and you're pretty positive a dog didn't follow you inside, it's a little shocking. 

Since the theatre was pitch-black, I snapped a quick picture just to make sure there wasn't a dog. In our defense, seeing the picture on my small camera screen was a lot more startling than it really was. 

When you enlarge the picture, you can see that the mass
behind the chair is just paint on the board. However, on
a tiny camera screen, it looked like a mass of shadow
crouching in front of us.

I can't even explain how shocking that was to see on my camera screen. And we definitely high tailed it out of there. But, because I knew we wouldn't be good investigators if we didn't go back, we went in a few minutes later and found out exactly what that black mass was:

I've honestly never been more startled by a piece of wood.

So, once we found out that the mass was only paint and wood, we decided to head back to do the last round of chair checks. I assumed Becca had followed me to the chair, going in front of the stage. There were footsteps behind me, and I could feel a presence there, so I didn't question it. So when I turned around and saw that Becca was across the theatre and had gone up the far aisle, and I was alone, that's when I questioned what was behind me. 

All in all, Joshua's chair was down once again, and after about an hour in the theatre, and since we were late for dinner, we ended our investigation for the afternoon. I've gotta say, I think our short little experiment satisfied us, and that won't be the end of our adventures.