BRADY TWP — In a white blouse and lavender skirt, Patricia Reed hides in the shadows of her bedroom, avoiding the intruding crowd.

Two sit on her bed. Two sit on seats, with another person crouched on the floor.

Quietly, she shares her apprehensions. Her hair is inappropriate for an appearance. She prefers to wear it pulled up — especially before a photograph.Despite the communiqué, only one of the five people seated in the room see or hear from Reed.Cameras can’t capture her presence, either.Paige Seybert, a 13-year-old girl professing the ability to communicate with spirits, is the only portal to Reed.The eighth grader who doubles as a spiritual medium was among the six Beaver County Ghost Hunters camped out at Slippery Rock University’s Old Stone House last week to explore its many accounts of ghosts and spirits.Once a tavern and inn for travelers along the Pittsburgh Erie Pike, the house is now a historical landmark.During the day, the university offers tours through the tiny rooms filled with historic relics, re-creating the building’s past.But sometimes the graduate students who guide the tours hear sounds. They hear footsteps upstairs.Thinking they missed a visitor, they venture out only to find the house vacant. Other times, unwound clocks chime.David Dixon, curator of the house, said things have happened there. Unexplained things.<br></br><br></br>

With video cameras attached to a laptop computer, the group surveilled the situation, capturing activity too quick for the group’s 12 naked eyes as they hoped to find evidence of other peoples’ experiences.There was no spiritual welcoming committee.Despite surveillance that rivals most banks and cameras in each of the six investigator’s hands, little was captured on tape. But Paige was greeted by a 14-year-old named Elizabeth in the bedroom at the top of the stairs.With the small crowd again gathered, Paige relayed the communication calmly, like a one-sided conversation.Holding a small, spiraled notebook and a tiny flashlight, she jotted notes as the contact continued.<br></br><br></br>

There were no candles or Ouija board, just five people sitting in a pitch-dark room waiting for a sign. Some sort of crash, bang or light showing Elizabeth’s presence.Elizabeth, however, was annoyed with the questions. She didn’t want to talk or appear to the rest of the group, Paige said. But Elizabeth opened up to her peer, revealing a story that left Paige in tears.Home-schooled, Elizabeth was lonely. She had no friends, no classmates; only a cat affectionately called Fi-Fi. One day, though, something happened to the cat. With it dead, Elizabeth felt little reason to live.So with a noose and a knot, she left this world. At least physically.While two investigators sat on the bed, Paige yelled for them to move.Elizabeth, it seemed, wanted her bed back.<br></br><br></br>

The communication — a gift first discovered about two years ago — left Paige emotionally exhausted.“I have a tendency to attract the kids because I’m younger,” the teen says calmly.But sometimes the spirits, despite making themselves known as a creak, draft or flicker of light, are shy.Even for Paige, who communicates easily with them, the spirits remain stoically silent.“It’s kind of like a ‘It’s none of your business’ kind of thing,” she said.According to the group’s founder, Rose St. John, spirits like Elizabeth differ from ghosts.A spirit, she said, is the energy of a deceased person who — for some reason — is earthbound.“It may be that they need to finish something, saying they love someone, seeing justice for their killer or watching over someone,” she said.A ghost, however, is a spirit that re-enacts its own death like a rerun, she said.<br></br><br></br>

St. John admits communications like the one Paige had with Elizabeth catch criticism. Psychic ability, she said, isn’t provable. It, like other unexplained activities, needs to be explored.“You always have to try to prove what it could be that you know,” St. John said.That’s why the cameras and other equipment — like voice recorders and electromagnetic field detectors — are so important.As EMF meter readings increase, so does the likelihood of spiritual activity in the area, St. John said.Voice recordings from the night, which St. John said sometimes captures spiritual communication at a frequency unheard by the naked ear, provided little clue as to who may stalk the house centuries after its initial construction.Maybe it’s Julius Halliday and his family.Halliday, a member of a gang of counterfeiters, and his family died from a diphtheria epidemic, Dixon said.Or maybe it’s Margaret Wigton and her five children.A night after an Indian raftsman named Sam Mohawk was kicked out of the tavern and forced to sleep in the woods, he murdered the Wigtons, who lived nearby.According to Dixon, counterfeiters and bandits weren’t uncommon after the house’s construction in 1822.<br></br>

The Stone House had an unsavory reputation and was a meeting place for many highway bandits, Dixon said.But the name Patricia Reed isn’t mentioned in the history books, Dixon said.That doesn’t mean Reed never lived in the house, however.According to Paige, Reed lived there after the house was a tavern.At that time, Dixon said, the house was a rental property and the surname Reed was common in the county.But even with little documented history to support the findings from the October Friday night, St. John said she believes the house has residents. About four of them, in fact.To the cynics, the evidence is at best inconclusive.To believers and the curious, the pictures and stories stir wonders and possibilities. No full-body apparitions danced before the cameras, but orbs — transparent balls believed to be spiritual energy captured on film — float in some photographs.<br></br><br></br>

It’s the pictures, in fact, that provide something substantial to supplement Paige’s communications.In one photograph, an unexplainable streak of light shines through the dark. In a picture taken immediately after: nothing.St. John said no one else was around when the photo was taken. Streetlights from outside, which surround the house, would light other pictures as well, striking it from the list of possibilities.Only a passing car on the heavily traveled Route 8 remains as a skeptic’s option — but it, too, is unlikely. Given the distance from the road to the house, the beam is far too narrow for a headlight.Another photo, taken as St. John left the house, shows more possible evidence. St. John said she felt watched from the house’s attic as she walked toward the parking lot.Save for a graduate assistant, the house was empty. And, in one photo, she said a form is visible in an attic window.Even with the spiritual activity, it’s the things St. John didn’t see that piqued her interest most.“You can definitely feel the difference in the rooms,” she said.