Music and laughter from an empty hotel

by Don Baumgart

The U.S. Hotel on Nevada City’s Broad Street is closed now, but is it still occupied? Some say yes. Reports of ghostly goings-on brought Doug Carnahan and his paranormal investigation team, Xtreme Hauntings Live, to the hotel to investigate reports of visitations from the days of the Great California Gold Rush.

The team made two separate visits to the Broad Street lodgings; first a pre-investigation to see if the hotel was interesting enough for a full-scale look. “We do a lot of pre-screening because it takes a lot of time and money to do a full investigation,” Carnahan said. “We were there the first time for about four or five hours and concluded that it did warrant an investigation.” Three weeks later the actual investigation took place, for more than 20 hours. The team does two or three investigations a month. They don’t charge for investigations, which Carnahan describes as passion driven. “We try to find answers to the questions people have about what might be going on.” 

And what did they find in Nevada City? “Almost anything that had a roof over its head in Nevada City during the Gold Rush, was a brothel,” Carnahan said. “The U.S. Hotel was a brothel at one time and we did come up with quite a few EVPs of women, laughing and giggling.” Electronic Voice Phenomena are one of the ways paranormal investigators search for things not seen by the eye. “We captured voices with our digital recording equipment that we could not hear with our ears.” After the town quieted down for the night sounds in the hotel became more noticeable. “We could hear music at three and four o’clock in the morning, so the local bars weren’t the source of the music and there were no people outside on the street laughing,” he added. “We captured what sounds like a hard-heeled shoe walking on a wooden floor, even though the hotel’s floors now have been carpeted. We heard a drawer opening and closing. We heard a man’s voice calling out a woman’s name.” In one of the rooms they captured what sounded like a loud groan, or moan. On the recording the sound appeared during a conversation between two investigators. “As loud as the sound was, you would think we would have heard it with our own ears,” Carnahan said. The sound was later discovered when the recording was played back.

The then owner of the hotel, Katie Bennett, was talking to another person while the investigators were recording, describing a pair of deaths that had happened in the hotel. A woman died by accident in a bathtub and when her husband returned and found her, he committed suicide. “During the telling of the story,” Carnahan said, “our equipment picked up a voice saying, “Oh, my God! Mary!”

“It’s a very interesting and active place for paranormal activity,” Carnahan concluded. On their web site http://www.xtremehauntingslive.com/ team founders Doug Carnahan and Jessie Garcia podcast videos of their adventures in the paranormal world.

---------

Copyright Don Baumgart, 2011