Staff Photo Nick Brothers
Adrian Scalf looks down the hallway of a derelict Arkansas hospital during a paranormal investigation.
Adrian Scalf and I were on the fourth floor of a decommissioned hospital in Arkansas — which I can’t name as per request of its board members to avoid inciting trespassers and vandals — on a still Friday evening in October, a week away from Halloween.
The air was musty with abandonment. As we walked in the darkness, chips of paint and various junk crunched under our feet, making for tiny rasps that countered the dead silence.
Scalf and his wife Tina are the founders of River Valley Paranormal Investigation and Research, and invited me to the site during a fundraiser they were hosting to benefit people in assisted living. This was my first time with a professional paranormal investigator in a haunted building. I clung to logic and rational thinking as my shield against losing it in the creepy-as-hell building.
Scalf proved to be an expert companion. He was in his element, in the darkness. This was far from his first time in the building, and his knowledge of its history and his previous investigations made for a fascinating experience.
As an analogy for the darkness, imagine bringing the brightness on your TV screen or monitor to about 5 percent. Beams of moonlight came from the windows and provided just enough light for our eyes to adapt to, but it was barely anything. At each end of the hallway was a large window that was tough to focus on.
Of course, with the low lighting and the distance we were from each window sometimes it would be tough to focus on the lights, and the light seemed to play tricks on my eyes. But I saw some…things.
As we stood in the center of the building looking to one of the hallway windows, the light from the window seemed to completely black out for about two seconds and fully returned. A dutiful investigator, I reported what I saw.
“I saw the same thing. You know, that means something was just there,” Scalf said. “There’s a ton of activity going on tonight.”
We kept walking in that direction, stopping every so often to explore the abandoned facilities along the hallway from more than half a century ago. Looking at that same window, I see what looks like a shadowy figure hunched over cross near the bottom of the window back and forth a few times. I immediately report seeing something move near the bottom of the window.
“That’s funny you would say that. There’s a spirit here we like to call mister grumpy that does that kind of thing exactly,” Scalf said, and proceeded to mimic exactly what I thought I saw at the window.
I swallowed, as the cold hair on my neck stiffened. Suddenly I didn’t feel so alone.
~
Staff Photo Nick Brothers
Adrian Scalf, and his wife Tina, are the founders of River Valley Paranormal Research and Investigation. The group has been featured on the TV show “Ghost Adventures” and has completed more than 200 investigations.
The Paranormal Life
Adrian Scalf is a self-described skeptic, but through several experiences he’s become a believer in the paranormal.
“I used to think people would be so stupid to believe there’s such things as ghosts,” Scalf said. “Now I’m one of those idiots. I’m not out to prove the existence of ghosts. When people say ‘I don’t believe you,’ I”m like ‘I don’t care. I’m not out to prove to you, I know there’s such thing as ghosts.’”
Scalf has been an X-Ray technician for about 30 years, and has resided in Ft. Smith since 1992. Prior to moving to Ft. Smith, he and Tina lived in McAlester, Okla. After a series of supernatural experiences including both of them seeing what looked like a 6 foot long bat-creature move across a well-lit intersection, hearing voices and feeling disembodied touches in their home, it was enough to get Adrian interested in studying theology and the paranormal. Tina has been fascinated with the paranormal nearly her whole life.
A full-bodied apparition of a man with a tucked in shirt and a crew cut once appeared to Scalf in his home in Ft. Smith. Scalf said it stopped him from electrocuting himself from the outlet he was working on.
“When I stood up, he wasn’t there anymore,” Scalf said. “There’s only two ways around. He either had to go out the back door or come right past me, and hee didn’t come past me and door was locked on the inside. So I stood there stunned for a minute and was like, holy crap. I actually saw the ghost. He was standing near the fuse box. I never turned off the circuit breaker.”
After looking through several other paranormal investigator groups and finding their evidence explainable, the idea came to the two to team up and start doing their own investigations the way they saw fit. So, River Valley Paranormal Research and Investigation was founded in 2006, and a team of locals soon formed up. The goal was to help people who felt terrorized by potential hauntings, whether that meant debunking myths or finding haunted evidence and and explaining what it meant.
“First and foremost we’re about helping people,” Scalf said. “Investigation is our last line. It’s not our goal to investigate, that doesn’t necessarily help them. Sometimes evidence helps. Our goal is to make people comfortable with the spirit world that’s out there.”
Since establishing, the group has investigated more than 200 locations — mostly homes — and were a featured part of an episode of Ghost Adventures, where they investigated Fort Chaffee just outside of Ft. Smith.
Staff Photo Nick Brothers
There are many tools a paranormal investigator uses. Some include a temperature probe (pictured up top with probe sticking up) a electromagnetic field reader (left, gray, used to measure disturbances) infrared cameras, and high definition audio recorders.
There are a few rules of thumb that Scalf and his team have picked up on: 1) Someone doesn’t have to die in a place to make it haunted. If the place was a passionate environment, that’s enough for a spirit to remain. 2) Few spirits are malicious. The occasional random knock or so does not mean a horror film will soon take place. 3) About 10 percent of the more than 200 investigations were considered haunted. 4) Never do an investigation alone, and everyone wears microphones.
It’s tedious and demanding work to do an investigation. Investigators could be on-site for four or more hours recording footage and audio. When it’s finished, each microphone and video camera needs to be observed in its entirety to make sure nothing is missed, which could mean searching for three seconds within dozens of hours.
The only thing that truly scares him? The thought of his teenage daughter procreating.
“I think what I’m doing is more like bird watching,” Scalf said.
~
Staff Photo Nick Brothers
The hallways of the hospital were very long, and honestly, were very creepy.
As we wrapped up the interview in the board room, we heard what sounded like a particularly noisy poster or sheet of paper fall and hit the ground in the hallway. Scalf’s facial expression quickly morphed from pleasant to a look of serious concern as he switched to investigator mode.
We stopped talking and moved out into the hallway. Nothing was seen on the ground, and there appeared to be no sign of activity.
Tina is two stories up, maybe 30 feet above us in the hospital and calls to Adrian via walkie-talkie.
“Did y’all just hear something bang?”
Adrian tells her it just sounded like a piece of paper falling and we couldn’t find any evidence. Tina reports back that she heard something similar.
Adrian looked at me and smiled.
“That’s the kind of stuff you get here. You never really know with this place.”
