Brooksville, Florida – March 18, 2023
Background information: This is the SPIRITS of St. Petersburg’s 4th time going to the May Stringer House in Brooksville. This historic house dates back to the 1850s and belonged to one of the founding families of the area. It has long reputed to be haunted and is considered one of the most haunted buildings in Florida. As a historic site, it does rely heavily on its paranormal reputation to maintain a budget. The house has recently had work done on the foundation, and there is at least one crack that runs up the center of the structure. It is sound, but the cost to refurbish was extensive and went over budget.
The site offers history tours, ghost tours, and then allows groups to rent out the building for 6 hours on Saturday nights. We had to book months in advance and they quickly fill weekend spots. The cost to do this has risen from $200 to $250 as of January 2023 to do this.
The SPIRITS of St. Petersburg discovered something rather different with this investigation. There was more physical response (knocking) and at least one quickly captured video that is still an enigma, but for the most part the ghosts are tired. The response rate was much lower than any prior investigations, and we were told that activity has slowed considerably, even for a recent paranormal television show that recorded an episode in the building.
We had 4 SPIRITS members present so this was quite the task to work through the entire 3 floor structure. We started in the attic where, 8 years ago, we had a strong encounter with a male ghost who is not fond of women. Team members had to leave the attic as they were so uncomfortable, one person felt scratched on her back and another was scratched on the face. No marks were left, but it was a surprisingly powerful encounter.
This year, the only real phenomena was the sounds of knocking in the room just outside of the attic. The team briefly split into two sets of two, one staying in the attic and the other going to see if we could find the source of the knocks. Those who were representing the historic organization were on the first floor and they had made no noises. In fact, while we were with them, the knocks in the attic continued. Comparing the sound of the knocks with items falling on the roof also proved that the knocks were different, and much more internal to the structure.
The video below is a “double knock” we had in the attic. You may have to scroll down on this frame.
It was during the walk through trying to find the source of the knocking sound that a video of the structure was made. The camera passed by the communications room, which is one of the areas of higher activity, and caught a very faint flash. There was nothing electronic on in the room. The flash was so fast that it was only discovered during a review of the footage taken during the investigation. It was caught by Brandy Stark, and constant review has not found an explanation of this oval shaped blip that appeared for a fraction of a second on the video. Brandy believes that the ghosts, who are a bit resentful of the constant request to interact with paranormal team after paranormal team, were staying out of the team’s way most of the night. The capture on video was inadvertent, and she suspects that the entity was caught by surprise. It attempted to move quickly out of the way.
Another element that was unexpected is that we had hoped to live stream the event for the public and for the SPIRITS members who were not able to come. Despite attempts on the house’s wifi and hotspots hosted by three different servers, the live streams would not go through. The team tried different phones, a computer, and a notebook and none of them would live stream. At one point, about a minute of the live stream did activate, but it was viewed by the off-site SPIRITS members as high pitched (“chipmunk voices”) and unintelligible. Attempting live streams throughout the night in various parts of the site also failed. The only live stream that worked was when we were sitting in the car in the parking lot of the May Stringer House, preparing to leave. That live stream worked on one of the phones and services where it had failed through the entire night.
Our sensitive believes that the live streams were absolutely being blocked by the entities in the house. They were, again, not cooperating and tired of countless live streams.
The message that our sensitives picked up was pretty much that they wanted to be left alone. They were tired. We did end up ending the investigation about 1.5 hours early, giving the remaining time to interviewing the society’s representatives and letting the spirits have some time to themselves.
For readers who have extra interest, this is an 24 minute video compilation of cell phone video including the history of the house, other phenomena as reported to us through the May Stringer house representatives. This includes the larger section of video footage hosting the “blip” image (shorter slowed down video posted above) at approximately 19:23, with more emphasis around the 20 minute mark.