Seeking Beyond Paranormal

Old South Pittsburg Hospital
Paranormal Research Center

May 2, 2026 | 6:00pm — 4:00am

The Claims | Equipment and Setup | The Investigation | Our Results

Back in early 2026, we were contacted by Bluff Paranormal to see if we'd be interested in collaborating with them on an investigation at Old South Pittsburg Hospital. We've been itching to return anyways, so it was a no-brainer to accept the invitation.

Over the months leading to the investigation, more names would get added to the collaboration, but misfortune would strike on the day of the investigation forcing our hosts to stay home with illness. However, all the money had already been paid to the venue so the reservation was maintained, and we'd go on to investigate OSPH with Liminal Shadow Paranormal and fellow paranormal investigator Doug Holt. But don't worry, we actually scheduled a second collaborative investigation with Bluff Paranormal for July 2026, so we'll catch up with them soon enough!

The Claims

The claims of paranormal activity at Old South Pittsburg Hospital remain unchanged from our previous investigation, but a basic rundown of the major haunts is as follows. The first floor is home to Jim, a former groundskeeper who lived onsite and was found in his room several days after he died. The cafeteria, also on the first floor, reportedly has the spirit of a young boy named Logan who always thinks it's his birthday. The second floor is home to three notable spirits: Nurse Betty is said to haunt the nurses' station where she died of heart complications, John haunts the "Body Box" next to the secondary ER waiting room, and Buddy haunts the ER. On the third floor, a tall shadow person (who is believed to be a former doctor) is said to roam the halls, while Nellie (a dementia patient said to have been left at the hospital by her family) and the Candy Man (a drug rehab patient who died of a drug overdose) are said to haunt their respective rooms.

There are certainly other known spirits who occupy OSPH, but those named above make up the "primary character list," if you will. And of course, being a hospital, the numerous deaths of patients throughout its years of operation could have led to plenty of other, lesser-known hauntings throughout the facility. Some areas are even just known for the activity in them and not any known spirits. Additionally, Native American spirits and the spirits of Civil War soldiers are said to occupy the grounds, as the area was used by both before the hospital came along, so not everyone there is related to the hospital.

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Equipment and Setup

As usual, we brought our whole kit, as shown on our Resources Page. And since this was a collaborative effort, we had additional equipment for use during the investigation as well, most notably a trip wire (similar to this one, it's basically just a series of EMF detectors on a long cord). What made this investigation more unique was that since the collaborators all brought equipment, we were all able to spread the load, making everything more mobile than our usual setups. That is to say, we were far less tethered to our break room than our previous effort at OSPH.

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The Investigation

We as a group didn't have a game plan going into the investigation, and Bluff Paranormal calling out sick sort of threw us for a loop in that regard. However, I knew that as far as Seeking Beyond Paranormal went, we had a bit of a check list for our return to OSPH since we missed out on some areas our first time around. First, I wanted to be sure we hit the secondary ER waiting room and an area called the "Body Box." This is an area occupied by a spirit named John, and he's supposed to be a particularly nasty character that hates men and has some pretty colorful language. Second, we wanted to hit the chapel, as our team got lost trying to find it on our previous attempt. Lastly, I wanted us to visit Nellie on the third floor again, as we had some wonderful experiences there that most of our team didn't get to witness before. The group at large decided to follow our lead since we at least knew where we wanted to start, and we'd let the rest of the investigation follow the group's desire as we checked items off our list.

There is history to the Body Box for which I don't remember all the details. Off the secondary ER waiting room is a small bathroom. Sharing a now-opened wall with the bathroom is the room known today as the Body Box. Supposedly it was a make-shift holding room for dead bodies, but not in the same vein as a morgue since it wasn't a refrigerated unit. It does have a door to the outside, so workers would be able to load the room out of view of patients and visitors, but beyond that, my knowledge of the room ends there. This room is where John likes to hide out, and it's where we began our night with a pair of Estes Method sessions.

The little bit of lore I was able to pick up about John is that he was involved with a police incident and was brought in with a gunshot wound, which he subsequently died from. John has picked up a bit of a reputation over the years with other paranormal investigators as being a particularly nasty character, and if we were indeed communicating with John during our Estes Method session, we got to witness our fair share of that character. During our sessions, we got called numerous swear words and slurs, which you can see in the video below. I say this a lot in our videos, but it's worth repeating here for extra context. The Estes Method utilizes radio frequencies for potential spirit communication, and the FCC bans most swear words and certainly all racial and sexual slurs. So for such words to come through, it has to be something else contributing to the audio feed.

While Jecca and I were conducting our Estes Method sessions in the bathroom and Body Box, the rest of the group was communicating with any present spirits in the adjacent secondary ER waiting room. Several paranormal photo apps were used for experimenting, as was the trip wire mentioned back in the equipment section of this post. The trip wire is nothing more than a series of electromagnetic field (EMF) sensors strung together on a wire, and it's used as a proximity sensor. Users are able to visibly track the supposed positon and movement of a spirit interacting with the device by watching which LED lights along the wire light up. Jecca and I didn't directly utilize the trip wire, but if you watch the video below, you'll note that we call out several instances of the trip wire lighting up, which was in our periphery during this part of the investigation. Interestingly, the trip wire activity was suggesting that something was coming and going from the bathroom to the waiting room, which lines up with our apparent communication with John. Not only were Jecca and I apparently communicating with John, but the rest of the group appeared to be chatting with him as well.

The next part of our investigation took us right next door to the ER. Funnily enough, during our first investigation of OSPH, we were looking for the secondary ER waiting room and Body Box but couldn't find it. As it turns out, we were passing it all night long as it was literally right next to the ER, which we investigated that first time around. It just goes to show how maze-like the place is in the dark!

Lore has it that Buddy was a little boy that was brought into the ER after sustaining multiple venomous snake bites while playing in his family's yard, where he subsequently died from the trauma. However, it's my understanding that this is actually a common story told at multiple hospitals. So whether it's true or false, it's an important lesson for investigators to be mindful of fanciful stories being told and known, traceable supporting facts. Elements of the story here could certainly be true, and the story may have evolved over the years. But unless we have the actual hospital records (which, thanks to HIPAA, we can't legally have), we just have to rely on the known facts.

Regardless, the entity investigators regularly interact with here goes by Buddy, and apparently he has his favorite toys and likes to interact with visitors. During this part of the investigation, we were attempting to elicit responses with catballs and EMF meters, primarily because of the colorful lights and simple operation which is ideal for children. To our amazement, Buddy (or whoever else was present) seemed to respond very well to the EMF meters, regularly causing their lights to go into the orange and red range (that is, strong EMF was detected). There isn't any power in the room, so of course none of the equipment works in the room. But if there was any strong electrical source in the room causing the EMF meters to light up, it would follow that the lights would be on in a constant state (you can test this for yourself by holding an EMF meter next to a refrigerator or an wifi router). However, this was not the case — the EMF meters lit up seemingly in response to our questions and statements, just in an incredibly strong manner.

In additon to the catballs and EMF meters, Jecca and I decided to utilize our Infinity Deck here with Buddy. The Infinity Deck is a "ritual card deck" invented by Celina Meyers and is used as a means of potential spirit communication. Some liken it to a Quija Board, but it is played using your intuition (or your sensitivity, if you are a spiritually gifted individual) to select a card after asking a question. We figured Buddy's room would be an ideal place to bring it out since it's a "game" of sorts and kids love games. We tried to evoke Buddy's interaction by telling him he could move Jecca's hands around or otherwise tell her which card to pick. To our surprise, though, we may have been interacting with a soldier from the Civil War, as indicated by some of the responses to our questions. In the very least, Buddy wasn't alone here.

As it happens on so many investigations, the investigative work sort of fizzled out after the game, and some of the group stayed in the ER to have an impromptu chit chat, while others in the group went over to the X-ray room across the hall to have another Estes Method session. This time, Chris (our guide) went under the headphones, while Keith from Liminal Shadow Paranormal asked him questions. I meandered between the two groups, often stopping in the hallway to peer into the darkness to watch for any shadow movement. On several occasions, I actually heard some faint crashing noises down the hallway, and on one occasion, I even heard the sound of fabric rustling only a few feet away from me, which was startling to the say the least.

Our next stop for the investigation was downstairs to the chapel. Staff members on both of our OSPH investigations have told us that this was never actually a real chapel, but for the sake of the clean-up efforts it has been turned into a makeshift chapel. That isn't to say there isn't paranormal activity in it, though. In fact, we had interaction with our flashlights, EMF meters, and even a bit of interaction with our Mel Meter in this room. It took lots of coercing (re: begging) to get any sort of interaction with the flashlights, but once the spirits figured them out, they went to town with them and we had a pretty lively flashlight conversation with whoever was there. We also had several laser grids set out, as supposedly a black mist has been seen in the room on several occasions, but aside from a quickly debunked IR shadow from yours truly, we didn't manage to see any interaction with the grids.

You never know when you're going to capture an EVP, and if you had asked me, I would have put money on capturing one from John in the Body Box, or even Buddy in the ER given the strong EMF activity we received. But it was here in the chapel where we captured our lone EVP for the night. It's really, really faint, but if you turn your volume all the way up, you can hear a faint cry behind Rachel's voice as she says "be like a hole..." toward the end of the audio clip. Try replaying the clip multiple times and honing in on that last segment if you have any trouble hearing it. It often takes several replays to hear EVPs.

We probably could have planned our route a bit better, because our next stop was up to the third floor to see Nellie. If you recall, last time Sherrie and I got to experience some light anomalies here, and we even captured an EVP in this room. This time around, aside from one little blip on the REM pod right at the beginning, most of the activity we got in the room was Dead Bell activity. The little else we managed to capture ended up being one of the more surprising moments of the night — we all heard a disembodied voice (and captured it on multiple devices). It wasn't much more than a little moan, but if I recall correctly, we all heard it. In the audio clip posted here, we were discussing another patient (the Candy Man) and his death, and you can clearly hear a moan right after "his friends brought him drugs as like a..." You can even hear Rachel respond to hearing it. This audio clip was recorded on our voice recorder, but in the video below, I play back the audio from the video camera's mic, which is even clearer. It's instances like this that lend a significant amount of credibility to the field because a room full of people heard it, whereas EVPs can sometimes be written off as some kind of electronic interference when doubt comes into play. In this instance, there is no doubt.

Our last stop for the night was Jim's room on the first floor just off the main entrance. As mentioned in the claims section, Jim was a groundskeeper who lived onsite. He had a whole suite to himself, in fact, and some of our team investigated his recording studio last time we were here. Reportedly, after Jim died in his room, his body wasn't found for 10 days. Not pleasant.

Jim evidently has a limited window in which he interacts with investigators. Liminal Shadow Paranormal got him to interact with them rather late (or early, depending on how you see it) during their previous time at OSPH, so with them with us on this investigation, we were hoping for a bit of interaction at this point in the night. It was around 1:00am by the time we got there, which is usually too late for Jim. However, LSP brought a trigger object when them, having promised to bring him some alcohol during their previous investigation. We were hoping the alcohol would entice him to interact with us.

Right off the bat, we got a little bit of Dead Bell activity, but it wasn't as lively as Nellie's room. In fact, the activity tapered off quite a bit early into this segment. At a certain point, I figured we'd try switching up our sit-and-listen approach by trying the Estes Method again. Curiously, it was mostly silent. There was a fair amount of music playing, no vocals, and hardly any commercials that the typical audio output would pull from. It just felt like no one was there. If you subscribe to the theory that spirits are just going about their lives, or that what we perceive as a spirit world is actually some kind of time slip, this literal radio silence might indicate that it was indeed too late for Jim and he was off to bed.

However, we didn't leave Jim's area empty handed. We managed to capture some kind of sound that some of us heard. I wouldn't classify it as a disembodied voice because it doesn't have any vocal quality to it. But it was certainly audible enough and odd enough for it to stand out in the moment. When I listen to it, even now a few weeks later, it almost sounds like a cricket in late summer making its chirp sound. But this was May 2nd, not the right time of year for that sound, and we would have called it out as such as we were tagging audio all night. Perhaps it was some kind of residual sound of some piece of hospital equipment, beeping along. It's hard to say what it was, paranormal or otherwise, but it was just a weird sound that a lot of us heard in the moment.

That bring us to the end of our second investigation of Old South Pittsburg Hospital. We were offered a chance to fill out the last our of the reservation by investigating one of the first floor hallways, but we were falling asleep and wiped out from the evening's efforts. There's so much to explore at OSPH that there's always a good reason to return, so we'll be back at some point! But until then, please enjoy our investigation video below!

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Our Results

There's so much to explore at OSPH — the many long hallways, operating rooms, floors, and it's incredible list of haunting characters that you'd be hard-pressed to find any two investigations of this location that would be remotely similar. Not only that, but the dynamics of different teams and different combinations of methodologies are sure to make every investigation a truely unique experience. As such, our investigation this time around was so different and exciting in new ways from last time. Here are our results.

We'd like to thank the administrative team at Old South Pittsburg Hospital for making this place open to investigators like ourselves, as well as our guide Chris for showing us around and joining us for the evening. We'd also like to thank Liminal Shadow Paranormal and Doug Holt for being a part of this investigation with us, we're so happy to have made new friends and colleagues! Last but not least, we'd like to thank Bluff Paranormal for setting this up and allowing us to continue in your stead. We're so sorry you guys got sick the day of, we were really looking forward to meeting you and investigating with you. But July will be here before you know it, so we'll link up soon!

by David Reimer, posted May 14, 2026

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Who We Are

Seeking Beyond Paranormal is a team of paranormal investigators based in Huntsville, Alabama. First started as a fun way to visit some of the country’s most haunted locations, Seeking Beyond now explores the realm of paranormal investigation.

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