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With reports circulating that the Hippodrome is haunted, Brandon Burns, technical director for the Waco Performing Arts Company, agreed last fall to participate in a paranormal investigation conducted by McLennan County Paranormal Investigations (MCPI).
Mike Jacobus, founder and investigator at MCPI, said it is a Christian organization and all of the work done is pro-bono.
"We go into a place, not to prove that it is haunted, but to prove that it is not," Mike said. "Once we go in, we try to debunk what we can. What we cannot debunk is what we focus the investigation on." Mike said they investigated the Hippodrome on Nov. 14 and Jan. 9. They confirmed Friday that the Hippodrome was haunted.
"Any time you do theater correctly, it will be haunted," Burns said. "You can't bring characters to life and expect them to go away." Burns said he has personally experienced paranormal activity at the Hippodrome and was not surprised when the investigations deemed the building haunted.
"One of the reasons I agreed to the investigation was because I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye when going up the stairwell," Burns said. "It is like a mob of people heading out of the building, and I see it more on one side of the building."
Mike also used to work as a night assistant manager at the Hippodrome in the 1970s when it was the Waco Theatre. There, he would play on the catwalks. "One night we went up there and I started up the stairs," Mike said. "The guy that was with me said, 'Who is up on the catwalk?' and I said 'Well, nobody.'" The man told Mike again that someone was looking at them.
"When I looked up, I saw a black figure looking at me," Mike said. "I walked up there to look and didn't see anything. I got chills and did not go back up there again until the second investigation."
Mike had not returned to the catwalks of the Hippodrome until January, during the investigation. During the first investigation, MCPI found mists that were unaccounted for and they caught voices using extremely sensitive digital recorders. When one team was leaving the area so another team could investigate, the leaving team said, "We are leaving now. Have a good show."
The response recorded was, "That you must see."
Cindy Jacobus, founder and investigator of MCPI, uses a sensitive flashlight to communicate with spirits. She sets the flashlight down so that the spirits can touch it and make it flash. "I like to use the flashlight," Cindy said. "You loosen the back of it and make it real sensitive and sometimes I seem to get responses to questions I ask." Cindy said she uses the flashlight to ask yes/no questions. She tells the spirits to flash the lights once for yes, twice for no. She said she had very good results during the investigation at the Hippodrome.
"Just as soon as a question came out of my mouth, the flashlight would come on," Cindy said.
During the second investigation, MCPI collected voice evidence and also recorded images with a thermal camera that registers hot and cold images. Mike said there is a theory that spirits are different temperatures. "So wherever they are at, they are showing a cold signature or a hot signature, according to what kind of spirit it is," Mike said. The camera records cold areas as a dark, bluish gray, and it picked up a thermal image in the shape of a person in the balcony at the Hippodrome.
"The one in the balcony I got it to where you could see it. This blue figure [was] walking up and down the aisle and around the seats," Mike said. Cindy said she firmly believes the Hippodrome is haunted, especially because of the evidence collected by the thermal camera.
"That is one of the things that convinced me. We don't catch things like that very often," Cindy said. Burns said while he is excited about the certification, he is not surprised. "We got certification on something I already knew," Burns said. "So it didn't make a difference to me if we actually got certified."
Cristina Uptmore, the box office manager, said she has not experienced anything unusual in the theater. "In a theater you hear things and it's an old building. It's creaky," Uptmore said. "I have never attributed it to paranormal activity, but it creeps you out just the same."
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