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DEER LODGE - Is there anyone here? .... Nancy.
Erik and Kris Bratlien keep the three-second sound bite on a computer at home in Missoula.
Itpis a woman's response, apparently by a disembodied somebody, recorded in the dark and eerie anteroom of maximum security at the long-deserted Old Montana Territorial Prison.
We're on a ghost hunt here. Inquiring paranormalists, not to mention us normalists, want to know. Montana being Montana, surely someone out there does.
Understand the circumstances. The Bratliens and their team of spirit stalkers, Tortured Souls Investigations, first brought their avocation to the 1870-vintage penitentiary a couple of years ago.
They caught the subdued voice, presumably of a woman named Nancy, on their first hunt, in an area of the prison that housed the most hard-bitten of men.
It wasn't until later that night they learned that maximum security used to be the women's wing from 1908 to 1959.
It's just eerie enough to make you want more. And most times, the prison delivers for TSI.
They've videotaped unexplained orbs and a cool, full-fledged ecto-mist. They've conducted middle-of-the night investigations in places fraught with ghostly possibilities, and they've recorded temperatures drop 20 degrees in a matter of seconds.
They've been trailed by unexplained breezes and scared out of their wits by slamming doors and sudden blankets of darkness.
"I'm a skeptical believer," Kris Bratlien says. "Whatever people think of ghosts as, like, full-body apparitions walking along the walls and stuff, I've never seen that.
"I've experienced things, I've seen doors close, I've got things on video, I have pictures. But I've never actually seen something that I can point to and say: aThat was a ghost.' Some people have. I actually don't know what I'd do if I did see one."
 The old style keys are still used at the prison |
By day, Erik Bratlien, 42, makes dental tools for a living. He loved stories of ghosts and UFOs growing up in Helena, and was fascinated in the 1970s by the rash of Bigfoot sightings and mysterious cattle mutilations.
"So I became interested and terrified in the paranormal, but it almost made me think that there were things out there we couldn't explain, and I wanted to learn as much as I could about the unknown."
So too did his son, Kris. A 21-year-old Sentinel High graduate who works at University Motors, Kris Bratlien delves into the spirit world with every bit the gusto his dad does.
The two started these ghost hunts in 1999, when Erik took Kris across town to St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery on the night of his son's 13th birthday.
"We snapped some pictures, took some video and we were hooked on the adrenaline rush," Erik said.
The TSI team roster has waxed and waned, but these days it boasts six full-time investigators, including another Bratlien, 16-year-old Brooke. A sophomore at Missoula Big Sky, she's her father's ghost-hunting partner.
Among the three newest members is Connie Burk, a nurse from Butte and the TSI case manager. David Dick and Kyle Solum, both of Missoula, are the team's technician and designated skeptic, respectively.
In Deer Lodge, the team is often joined by locals Julia Brewer-Smith, business manager of the Old Prison Museum, her son Mike and daughter Jaime, and Marlene Olmstead, who's on the Deer Lodge City Council. All have scary or mystifying tales to tell.
It was Brewer-Smith who felt a presence behind her as she walked across the prison yard one night and clicked a photo over her shoulder. There was nothing back there when she looked, but the photo revealed a vaporous mist the TSI crew said must be ectoplasm.
Ectoplasm is believed to be the spirit of someone who has died, a step up the ghost scale from the orbs that dip and dive across video screens. That's supposed to be the most convenient way for a spirit to travel.
A former guard who gives tours of the prison didn't cotton to ghosts until he saw the photo, Erik Bratlien said. When he looked at the mist, he could pick out the faces of four inmates who died violent deaths in his time there. Now the guard's a believer.
A senior in archaeology at the University of Montana, Dick has a background in science and electrical engineering. He tuned into the puzzles of the supernatural last year in a downstairs restroom in Main Hall after seeing in a mirror a janitor <> or someone <> enter the bathroom and walk into a stall. When Dick turned, the stall and bathroom were empty.
Months later, UM's Kaimin ran a story on Tortured Souls Investigations, giving Dick a contact with other paranormalists <> or would-be paranormalists. So there he was, in a dark and ominous prison on a dark and recent October night, flashing a strobe light and taking readings with a laser thermometer. Like the rest of the TSI gang, Dick was accommodatingly and a bit desperately helping a photographer, a reporter and his family find signs of life after death.
Maybe they were successful, maybe they weren't.
Suffice it to say, said journalists and family are still with us today.
There were a few near-ghost experiences <> maybe some orbs on a digital photo and a spooky light up in a guard tower. The latter turned out to be the reflection of a streetlight on Main Street, randomly blinking on and off. We think.
"I have actually joined them on some of those excursions, and when I'm there, I don't think anything has ever happened," said Ellen Baumler, TSI's team historian. "And it's not just those guys. I've been invited along on several others. Nothing ever happens."
Baumler lives in Helena, where she works as an interpretive historian for the Montana Historical Society. She's also an author of history-oriented books, including "Spirit Tailings" and "Beyond Spirit Tailings" <> stories of the unexplained from across Montana.
This week, Baumler is busy giving haunted tours of Helena, so she's a good one to have in the TSI fold.
"I guess I go at it from a historical standpoint," she said. "To me, the history behind whatever happens is what's important. I think those guys have that at heart, and they understand the importance of looking at the historical threads that might tie in."
Indeed, a ghost tour of the prison is also a history tour. It starts in the east cell block, where two inmates started the deadly riot of April 1959 on the third level of cells. Twice on one November day, Kris Bratlien said, separate pairs of tours noticed two men leaning over the railing on the third level. There's no plausible way to get up there, he pointed out.
"Coincidence? I don't know," he said. "I haven't seen them. Every time I come here, I look to see that but I never do."
The tour also ventures into the guard tower where the men who started the riot, 44-year-old Jerry Myles and 19-year-old Lee Smart, ended it with a murder-suicide. That was after they'd killed Deputy Warden Ted Rothe in his office in the administration building, which has been restored to look as it did that day.
Such stories are always part of the ghost hunters' repertoire, Baumler pointed out.
"You look at the investigations they do on TV and it's just so annoying, because they never look at historical facts behind the stuff they say is going on or they think is going on," she said.
Still, the Bratliens pay rapt attention to such television shows as "Ghost Hunters" on the Sci-Fi channel. In fact, they aspire to be on them. They're upgrading their Web site, tsimt.net, and they follow strict procedural guidelines in an effort to gain the legitimacy they need to become Montana's representative.
"The Atlantic Paranormal Society does that, and they have a group from Boise, Idaho, covering
Montana. That really bothers me," Erik Bratlien said.
At Tortured Souls Investigations, the approach is to do everything to prove a supposed paranormal experience isn't that at all. If that's not possible, the Bratliens say they leave it up to others to interpret their evidence, be it a photo of orbs, a video of a slamming door, or an electronically recorded voice out of nowhere.
They don't charge for investigations and their methods are as scientific as possible. Alcohol and narcotics are expressly forbidden.
"It's hard for people to believe the stuff we do and believe anything that we put to evidence anyway, but if they find out somebody had been drinking and could have been hallucinating, then nobody's going to believe them," Erik said.
The team's ultimate goal, he added, is to do its thing on TV on a regular basis, on perhaps the History or Travel channel.
Most of the other ghost hunters around these parts work as individuals, said Baumler, though it's not unusual for an investigation to include a number of independents. A loosely organized group recently spent the night at the Grand Street Theater in Helena. They came from Billings and Great Falls to join several others from the Capital City.
Ghost hunting and haunted tours "seem to be the coming thing," she said.
Erik Bratlien agreed. It's not taboo, he said, to talk about ghosts these days.
"It's becoming very popular again, the way it was at the turn of the century," he said. "I think if you had a bed and breakfast and you listed it as haunted, and you put it on the Internet and some places, you would do tremendous business, because people are flocking to this stuff."
"There always will be skeptics," the elder Bratlien said. "We can actually capture an apparition, but somebody that doesn't want to believe it won't ever, unless they actually see it for themselves, and even then they will probably just say their eyes were playing tricks on them.
"We just collect evidence and if you want to believe it, fine. If you don't, that's fine also."
Indeed, the uncertainty <> the mystery, if you will <> is part of the charm of ghost hunting.
 A steep staircase leads to one of the guard towers at the old prison where, in 1959, two inmates where found dead from a murder-suicide during a prison riot. |
Which brings us back to Nancy.
Whose could that voice be? It's not haunting but subdued, not pleading but certainly sad.
Is anyone here? an investigator asks. There's what sounds like a splice, and then: Nancy.
In seven years of trying to capture EVPs (electronic voice phenoma), the Bratliens have been successful just three times. One was at St. Mary's Cemetery in the early days, another at Rankin Hall on the UM campus, and the third was at the spooky maximum security block in Deer Lodge.
Nancy.
There are no stories about a Nancy at the prison before the women's cells were moved across the street in 1959. The voice could be that of a Native American.
Nancy.
"Without a last name, it's almost impossible to look up," Kris Bratlien said. "It's very hard, all the women who passed through here."
If anyone has leads, let the TSI folks know. But someone should try to find Nancy, Baumler said. Records from the women's prison are on file at the Montana Historical Society archives in Helena, as well as in Deer Lodge.
"They should do that right away, because it can substantiate the claims that they have gotten this voice," Baumler said.
Still, if Nancy's identity isn't found, it's left to the imagination what happened to her. Maybe history suffers, but the rush remains.
Baumler allowed as much.
"I think if we were able to totally explain these things, it wouldn't be fun any more," she said. "If we had all the answers it would really make life a lot less interesting."
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at (406) 523-5266 or by e-mail at kbriggeman@missoulian.com.
Reach photographer Kurt Wilson at (406) 523-5244 or by e-mail at kwilson@missoulian.com.
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