The onetime proprietor of a one hundred eighty year-old adobe brick building hears the door of a potbellied cooking stove opening and wood being piled inside, but nobody is there.
Mystical rustlings echo in the latest proprietors ear. Things fall off shelves for no obvious reason.
These are merely a couple of of the unusual goings-on that artist Josh Bond, proprietor of the Old Cuchillo Bar in the southern New Mexico ghost town of the same name, has called for the West Coast Ghost and Paranormal Society to look into on his property.
“The creepiest I had was a voice whisper in my ear,” Bond said. “When things fall in the house, I just sort of write it off.”
When he came across an ad about WCGAPS, a Phoenix-based nonprofit organization, Bond believed the group may at least explain what was happening.
Andy Rice, who started WCGAPS about 2 years ago after investigating more than two hundred alleged hauntings and ghosts over more than thirteen years, said the group tries to explain the enigmas their customers relate to them applying science or common sense.
Only around five percent of the group’s investigations can not be explained by electromagnetic radiation, thin walls, defective wiring, lights from passing automobiles or other natural explanations, said Rice, who titled his investigators not ghost hunters, but ghost debunkers.
WCGAPS is booked through July with investigations, primarily in the southwestern United States. Rice said the historic value of the Cuchillo property caused it to stick out amidst the places calling for the group’s services.
The Old Cuchillo Bar dates to 1830 when it was a stage stop. Once, cargo was offloaded and driven by wagon to nearby mines in Winston or Chloride.
The five thousand sq ft complex has housed a general store, horse barn, mercantile, post office, hotel and bar over the years.
“It just has a lot of history, that place does,” said Gayle Shepperd, who owned the property with her husband, Harold, from 1978 to 2006. “I’ve heard tales of poker parties and a lot things like that going on.”
In modern years, the facility was utilized for wedding and baby showers and the trading post was where visitors stopped to inquire which residents were still amidst the town’s tapering population.
At one time it was home to 2,000 people and the hub of the county, Cuchillo has about thirty-five occupants, Bond said.
Like Bond, Shepperd also recalled peculiar things, like hearing the sound of somebody starting the wood cooking stove.
“I distinctly heard somebody putting wood into the fire. I looked in there and there was nobody,” she said. “We said, ‘Well, our ghosts are at play.’ We just discounted it.”
Shepperd put to rest at least one mystery: a trio of guns Bond had found wrapped in a sack in an empty grain bin.
“My mother put those there,” she said, explaining that her mother used the empty bins for storage.
Bond, thirty-six, an artist who builds metal sculptures and home furnishings, purchased the complex in 2006 and has finished up refurbishing the old hotel into a 3-bedroom vacation rental or artist hideaway. He hopes to open a microbrewery in the old bar.
Bond seemed ambivalent about whether the property is haunted.
“These people claim to debunk it scientifically. I write it off to coincidence many times in my mind, but I’d like to see it proved scientifically,” he said.
Rice said he’s not out to sway people to believe in the paranormal.
“Till they have a individual experience, I cannot change someone’s belief,” he said. “I don’t take the time to try to convince them, because it is a useless argument.”
Rice, a business analyst, said he became involved in investigating reports of hauntings after researching a deserted house with acquaintances.
At the top of a staircase while his friends were on the steps below him, he said, someone or something pushed him down the stairs, lifting him off the floor and leaving scratch marks on his back.
The experience led Rice to work about forty to sixty hours per week for WCGAPS, looking into hauntings for free and seeking donations. He hopes in a lot of instances he can put customers’ anxiety to rest.
“I’m hoping to go out and calm their fears. Other than my first experience, I have never experienced anything that’s harmful. I want to explain what’s there, whether there’s something or nothing,” Rice said.
For the investigation at Cuchillo, Rice says he will research area construction codes and the site’s history, talk with occupants, review the property’s title history and look at photos of the original constructions.
He and 7 other investigators will bring cameras and video and audio equipment to record noises or anything discovered in the constructions. Opposed to some other “ghost hunters,” Rice said he does not employ psychics to find ghosts.
WCGAPS’s internet site contains audio links to alleged paranormal phenomena, like voices, which Rice says do not fall under the normal frequency for human voices.
Other than the push down the stairway, Rice said he’s heard or seen a couple of unusual things, like the “full-body apparition” of a adult female he saw move across Monti’s La Casa Vieja restaurant in Tempe, Arizona, which is housed in the city’s original pioneer home.
Did he capture the image?
“It was exactly where we didn’t have a camera placed,” Rice said, but a camera did record his and the other investigator’s reactions to the figure.
Frequently hotels or restaurants hope WCGAPS will substantiate something paranormal because it is good for business, but proprietors of private houses commonly are relieved when their haunting is explained, Rice said.
As for Bond, “I’ve really kind of lived in denial of the fact, but I’m curious to know.”
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