The show Ghost Hunters just released an episode where they investigate Madison Seminary. (I haven’t seen it yet) I was lucky enough to actually investigate Madison Seminary a few months ago, and while I wrote up my experiences I never got around to posting them. This is just a copy of what I wrote for my journal the next day, only edited to protect identities. It was a long night so this will be split across a few entries. Also because it’s just a journal entry the splits might seem odd or sudden, but there isn’t a good way to chop up a long night’s narrative.
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A friend of mine recently won a night at Madison Seminary, “the most haunted place in Northeast Ohio.” I guess that says all you need to know about my friends: they’re awesome. The prize was a night at Madison Seminary for her and several friends, of which I was fortunate enough to be among. Madison Seminary is available for private investigation for ghost hunters. Not as common as ghost hunters, but sometimes a group like ours attends; people who are perceptive, sensitive, psychic, or at least open to that type of personal experience.
What follows is my experience from that night, along with the history of Madison Seminary.
If you think you’d ever like to explore it as a sensitive and don’t want your perceptions influenced, I’d skip this series of posts.
Because I take it seriously, let me say it again: If you’d like to go to the Seminary as a psychic, and don’t want your perceptions influenced don’t read these entries, as I’ll talk both about the history of the place, and experiences of myself and my friends.
Though Madison Seminary seems to cater more to ghost hunters, in the sense of people with their gadgets talking to ghosts and trying to get some responses on film, they are also familiar with sensitive folks and accommodating for the desire to have less information to prevent front-loading. When you arrive you will get a tour of the seminary which includes the history, and discussion of haunting phenomena, we asked to keep that to a minimum, we’d rather go in without foreknowledge so we can better trust our perceptions. Admittedly, our tour guide did tell us more than I would have liked, but it was good that we were given the option.
Madison Seminary has had an interesting history. Sometimes on a ghost hunting show when someone explains the long horrible history of a place, it can be hard to believe… Madison Seminary is one of those places. The history seems unbelievable, like it was designed for a horror movie. It started off as a school in 1847, since then it has also been, in no real order, a hospital in the American Civil War, a police station and prison, a mental asylum, and a home for “indignant mothers” (I believe that’s essentially “unwed mothers”) and widows. To make this “worse” it was not just all of these places, it seemed like every iteration of Madison Seminary had negative events. (It makes me wonder about the history of the land before the Seminary) Schools in the 1840s weren’t exactly how we think of them now, and there are records and stories of a great many abuses against the teens and young adults attending. When it was a hospital and asylum there was a history of abuse/torture by at least one doctor. As a home for indignant mothers and widows, there was a murder, along with several types of child abuse. The air of Madison Seminary is thick with the history bleeding through. That’s not just hyperbole, I have only felt such overwhelming presence a handful of times.
Our tour starts in the oldest part of Madison Seminary. Our tour guides give us general history, and telling us about hot spots of activity, along with telling us about these hot spots, they also indicate places could trick us, such as a hallway which causes EMF detectors to go off because of the fire alarm system being centred there. I was grateful for letting us know about these false negatives.
It was at the beginning of the tour that I first started to perceive her, an elderly woman, quite literally crazy and babbling, who was trying to get my attention. Now, this is one of those places where psychic phenomena get fuzzy. I wasn’t sensing her ghost, perceiving her in a haunted sense, but I was for lack of a better explanation psychically perceiving our interaction. This is something I’ve had happen a lot in situations like this where I’m investigating something. I was not perceiving her ghost, I was perceiving a future interaction with her, seeing in the future that “this is the ghost you’re going to meet.” It’s the odd place where precognition and other perceptions collide. I don’t know if this is just a quirk I experience, or if other folks get that too, or if my explanation just sounds like babbling.
We moved into the new building, and I started sensing her more. It was still that type of future perception, but I could also feel that we were getting into closer proximity.
I’m not someone easily creeped out or frightened by these things, but Madison Seminary really creeped me out. I realized the next day that part of that at least could have been picking up emotions from investigators and people who might not have as much experience/confidence with these things. I can be downright reckless in these matters, but I said that no one goes anywhere alone, there was just too much activity and too much malicious energy. That wasn’t like me, but I think says a lot about the atmosphere of the place.
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Stay tuned as the next post gets more into the experiences of the night.
