Seeking Beyond Paranormal

Woodruff-Fontaine House Museum

May 24, 2024 | 7:00PM to Midnight

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

The Woodruff-Fontaine House Museum is an historic mansion near downtown Memphis, Tennessee. It has served as a museum since 1964 and is operated by the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities. It consists of three main floors, a basement, and a 2-level tower structure, with an additional carriage house and children's gingerbread playhouse on the property.

The original owner Amos Woodruff, had the mansion built in 1871. From there, it served as the Woodruff family home until 1883, when it was sold to Noland Fontaine. The Fontaine family stayed in the home until 1929. The available information at this specific point in the house's history is sparce, but in 1929 it was sold to become an would-be antique store that never had a chance of opening, likely due to the stock market crash and the oncoming Great Depression. In 1930, the house sold to Rosa Lee to expand her art school, the Free Art School, which later moved to Overton Park in 1959 and eventually became the Memphis College of Art. The house sat vacant until 1961, when the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities raised enough funds to restore the house. In 1964, the mansion-turned-museum opened to the public, albeit it an unfurnished state. Over the years, period-correct furniture, clothing, artwork, and other artifacts have been generously donated to populate the interior and bring life back to the Victorian-era mansion.

The Woodruff-Fontaine House Museum now serves as an historic museum, offering daytime tours, twilight tours with ghost stories, rental space for weddings and other events, and seasonal exhibits featuring period-correct decor and staff clothing. The museum is known to have paranormal activity, and does offer rental time to paranormal investigators for nighttime investigations, which is how we landed this particular investigation.

The Claims

Online sources state there were five deaths in the house: Mollie Woodruff's unnamed baby, Egbert Wooldrige (Mollie Woodruff's first husband), Noland Fontaine, Elliott Fontaine, and Virginia Fontaine. Staff members suggest that there were probably more deaths, noting that the birth dates of some of the living children imply the deaths of earlier unnamed infants and/or stillbirths. As such, records in that regard are likely incomplete.

The Woodruff-Fontaine House Museum has quite a list of claims of paranormal activty. As one would expect, the staff recommends caution when looking up claims online, as claims are often exaggerated for effect or made up to generate clicks, likes, and follows. Despite this, staff members themselves offer personal experiences from their time in the house, the most incredible of which (in our opinion) involved a chair flying across a room during a tour. Other staff members report additional physical interactions such as tugging at clothing, and even getting pushed on the stairs. Furthermore, staff and prior paranormal investigators have reported finding an impression in the bed sheets in Mollie's room, where it appears someone had sat on the bed, and this has occurred on multiple occasions. A personal experience revealed by a staff member at the end of our investigation even reported a once-lost dress suddenly being found in the ballroom, along with a fabric furniture covering being thrown off. All of this is just the physical activity!

Additional claims include multiple disembodied voices, partial and full aparitions, shadows / shadow people, the sound of footsteps, EMF activity, and electronic voice phenomena (EVPs). Lastly, there is a claim of a "negative" entity in the house (socially negative, that is, not spiritually negative), which has been corroborated by staff. Spoiler alert, we may have had the distinct pleasure of experiencing this fellow — more on that later. The claims tend to be associated with numerous members of the Woodruff and Fontaine families, likely due in part to the location of the activity relative to the known family members' rooms (e.g. the bed impression in Mollie's room being attributed to Mollie).

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Equipment and Setup

This being the second investigation since I purchased our two Wyze Cam Pan v3 cameras, and our second opportunity to get them to work since Pope's Tavern, I made a concerted effort to test and retest these things before even leaving town. Prior to our previous investigation, you were supposed to be able to operate these cameras off Wifi so long as you had the firmware updated on the device and everything synced with the phone app. The backup trick was to establish your phone as a hotspot using the same credentials as the camera's home Wifi. So I did some extensive testing, walking around my neighborhood trying to get away from my home Wifi (pictured), and even driving around to a spot where there were no found Wifi signals. Everything seemed to work on my end, but unfortunately I just could not get these to work at the Woodruff-Fontaine House. So, once again, these came along for the trip, but did not aide us during the investigation. I think it's time to hand them over to our technology consultant to see what she can figure out. I'm disappointed, particularly because we were teased with such cool footage at Pope's Tavern from the same exact camera, but it was certainly worth the effort to put in my due diligence in this kind of new tech, and I'm happy with how I approached the testing.

The next piece of camera equipment we brought along for this investigation was our brand new XLS camera. I'm going to spoil this up front, mainly because it didn't really factor into our investigation at all, but we didn't capture anything with it this first time using it. That's to be expected, certainly, but I think there's still some ins and outs I need to learn with it. Additionally, I still have some modifications I want to make to it before we can really implement it in a long-term manner. Primarily, I want to build a bracket to hold a GoPro camera that can point right at the screen so I'm not burning precious storage space and battery power on the XLS itself. That's all beside the point, though. I wanted to include it here because testing out equipment, finding what works, what doesn't work, how to make it work, or weeding it out is all part of the logistics behind ghost hunting.

The rest of the equipment we brought consisted of our basic kit: two K-IIb EMF Meters, our REM Pod, our Olympus WS-852 voice recorder, our assortment of light-up cat ball toys, and the big red vinyl ball from our previous investigation. We also briefly used the two iPhone apps again (Necrometer and Spirit Talker), but since we implemented them late into the investigation, we didn't use them for too long.

After getting a quick tour of the house, we decided that we'd approach setup in a floor-by-floor manner, setting out equipment each time we investigated a new floor. The house was so big that we really couldn't focus our attention on more than the immediate spaces we would be occupying, but setting out the REM Pod in the central hallways, and setting up the cat balls in the various doorways would be good enough at alerting us to activity elsewhere on each floor. The only caveat to our limited reach on this investigation was the big red vinyl ball. Since there was known physical activity in the house, I set the ball at the top of the stairs — my thought being if something decided to knock it down the stairs, we'd be alerted to it from anywhere in the house. For additional context, the two Wyze cameras would have been monitoring the ball at the top of the stairs the whole night if they worked. So in terms of covering more space, we're working toward it, but we're not there yet!

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The Investigation

We've only done three investigations prior to this one, so there are still plenty of things we've yet to experience. This time around, we had several things happen during the tour before we actually started the investigation. Unfortunately, that means there were no cameras rolling or any other active investigative equipment that would assist in documenting these occurences. As someone still learning the ropes of being a paranormal investigator, I feel I have to be fully present on the tour and be receptive to the staff and the environment. However, since our final product is this very article, I feel I have to apologize for the lack of photos and/or video for the tour. We're definitely still learning how to conduct these investigations, and we weren't prepared to cover anything like a tour as part of the investigation. As I've mentioned before, we'll get there!

The first experience during the tour happened on the the first floor in the central hallway. We were looking into one of the rooms, and I saw two shadows pass over a door frame on the far wall. I was unable to tell if it was two parts of one shadow or two separate shadows, but they were about the size an adult person. As we entered that room, I went toward that doorway on the far wall. As I approached, a fluttery, cloud-like, white mist at the ceiling caught my eye for just a moment, and then it was gone. I've never seen anything like that, and it was absolutely incredible to see it with my own eyes.

The second experience was on the third floor in Ogden's room. Jessica entered the room and immediately felt an intense heaviness and a strong desire to leave the room. On these investigations, she's been having more experiences with sensitivity like this — we aren't certain yet exactly how sensitive she is, or if her sensitivity will expand or intensify, but it's something we'll be looking into as we continue to investigate. While that sensation was a negative experience for Jessica, though, as investigators it meant we would definitely have to investigate that room further, and it would tie in later on with one of our Estes Method sessions. Additionally, one of the staff members briefly corroborated Jessica's sensation, noting that other sensitives have had similar experiences in that particular room.

Once the tour concluded, the investigation began in earnest. We started on the first floor, and the first thing we did — as we've done the last two investigations — was a sweep with our EMF meters. There are two main reasons to implement this practice: 1) So we can find early on if there are any spots that might give our equipment false positives, and 2) So we can possibly debunk claims that might be influenced by electromagnetic frequencies. Worth noting is that paranormal theories suggest spirits are made up of energy and can draw from man-made energy sources, so an area with a high amount of EMF (such as this hallway) might be rife with paranormal activity. That may certainly be the case, but there is no way of determining that using EMF-sensitive equipment because nothing can be isolated from the surrounding EMF. During our sweep of the first floor, our EMF meters were pinging solidly in the yellow throughout the central hallway, and EMF would drop off almost completely a few feet into each room off the hallway. We assumed — and staff would later confirm — that there was wiring running throughout the hallway, and that a good portion of the wiring was original (or at least older), which would give off high EMF.

After the EMF sweep, we introduced the REM Pod to the house and conducted our first voice recorder session of the evening. The REM Pod would later be brought to the other floors as well, and it did not go off all night. The voice recorder session in the first floor hallway was fruitless as well, although there was a lot of noise pollution interfering with the quieter audio in the recording, so we cannot objectively determine if something was there or not. However, the first floor was certainly very active for us with some of our other equipment. Per usual, we set out the light-up cat balls, one in each major room of the first floor. In this investigation, we operated in low-light conditions because the house was packed with priceless antiques, and we wanted to move about freely without bumping into anything. That being said, it was still dark enough in the house that if one of the cat balls illuminated, the brightness of the LEDs would stand out quite a lot. The ballroom on the first floor is a known hot spot for activity, and one of the cat balls in the ballroom did go off two or three times, which drew us into that room to investigate further. This is where we would conduct out first flashlight session of the evening, and it would end up being one of the most intelligent flashlight sessions we've had yet. Even after conducting the session there in person, watching the video after the fact still amazes me. The video below shows the session in its entirety.

After that first flashlight session, we brought everything upstairs to begin investigating the second floor. As before, we scattered cat balls around and set the REM Pod out. Still reeling from the flashlight session downstairs, we decided to immediately conduct another flashlight session out in the hallway. We do have video for it (click here), but it's 20+ minutes long, so I'll just run through the highlights here. I don't mean to diminish this second video by not including it here, though. In fact, during this second session, we encountered something we've only seen happen to other teams.

During this second flashlight session, we get only a little bit of interaction with the flashlights, and none of it seems to be responsive to our questions, nor does it seem understand the difference between the two flashlights. In the middle of the session, I recall an idea I've had about what spirits might see and suggest that perhaps color has no meaning for them. We have been saying "blue flashlight this" and "black flashlight that," but perhaps color just isn't even a concept when you're an entity made of energy in a phase of reality we don't understand. So from then on, I start making an effort to identify the flashlights by their location instead. I won't say that switching from flashlight color to flashlight location "fixed it" or anything definitive like that, but I will say that the latter half of the flashlight session seemed to garner more cohesive interaction.

But the most interesting part of this second flashlight session is that part of the way through, the camera stopped recording. Ordinarily, we might write that off as just a hardware fluke, and in the moment we didn't really acknowledge it. However, once Jessica got the camera recording again, she noted that the screen kept turning off and on repeatedly. It happened 10+ times in a row, and then the focus started going really blurry. If the battery was naturally running low, there would be indicators that just didn't show up, and even then that doesn't account for the odd focusing issue. We've never experienced this before, but we have seen other teams encounter identical camera issues on their own paranormal investigations. The leading theory for this odd camera behavior is that because the camera rig is a lot of energy in one little spot and a spirit may see this energy and try to draw from it. On our end, we see this as the camera equipment going haywire. The theory is so prominent because it often happens before stronger or more interactive activity occurs, and we believe this was the case here because from this moment on, the flashlight interaction starts becoming more cohesive.

Proceeding from that second flashlight session into Mollie's room, we started our series of Estes Method sessions with our Spirit Box. The Spirit Box is a modified AM/FM radio made to cycle through all available radio stations rapidly, based on the theories that spirits can interact with radio waves and static noise, and the Estes Method introduces elements of sensory deprivation (a blindfold and noise cancelling headphones) to remove external influence. Jessica wanted to go under for this first session, and interestingly she felt the need to lay on her back, which may have been her intuition and sensitivity tapping into something here. We did get some feedback during this session, but most of it was partial words that Jessica couldn't make out, and what she could make out didn't seem cohesive enough to suggest we were communicating with anything.

Continuing our series of Estes Method sessions, we went across the hall to Mrs. Virginia Fontaine's room (after observing the house rules and politely requesting permission to enter). This time I (David) went under, and I had even worse luck with the Spirit Box. I changed the cycle speed several times, and even switched from FM to AM at one point. I did call out a few words, but for the most part when I wasn't getting partial words, it was just noise. However, during this session I had a really unique sensation that felt like someone appeared in front of me close enough that all I could "see" were their legs, then they stepped to the side of me. You can see my reaction to this in the video below.

Nearing the end of our investigation, we moved up to the third floor. Even though there was known activity at the top of the stairs involving tugging at clothing and pushing on the stairs, Jessica and I wanted to continue with our Estes Method sessions and headed straight of Ogden's room. During the tour, this is the room that Jessica felt the intense negative feelings in, so we really wanted to address that. Before we got started, though, I set up our brand new XLS camera looking down the hallway. Two of the staff volunteers shadowed us all evening for the experience, and I had one of them monitor the XLS for anything while we were investigating Ogden's room. With this fancy tech, you have to expect nothing to happen, and I may have even set up something incorrectly on it, but the volunteer reported that nothing appeared on the screen. It was a hasty setup, if I'm being honest, and we really need to spend some time with it more intentionally. Our next two investigations will be perfect opportunities to work with it more.

Ogden's room is where several elements fell into place for us. During this session, we felt we were definitely connecting to something negative. Earlier I mentioned "socially negative" instead of "spiritually negative." To elaborate, it didn't feel like we were connecting to any lesser entities or "demons" or anything like that. It just felt like a bad person, not even like a murderer or anyone terribly dark, just kind of a sleazy, unhappy jerk. Staff members did tell us there was some animosity between Ogden and his brother Elliott over Ogden's participation in the Civil War. Our Estes Method session didn't really reveal that animosity to us, but we definitely felt like we got a distinctly negative personality coming through, especially on the sleazy side of things, as you'll see in the video below (after the next paragraph).

Two particularly interesting things occurred during this Estes Method session. The first occurred during the session itself, and was only revealed during the review of our findings. We managed to capture a distinct and clear EVP (electronic voice phenomena) after a specific question was asked. Knowing about Ogden's service and injury during the Civil War, and the negativity associated with his room, I was trying to see if the symptoms of PTSD resonated with who we may have been speaking with. This is pure conjecture, but my thinking was that perhaps Ogden's time at war caused him some significant mental trauma, and this negative personality we encountered may have been his way of coping with it. I asked if the disorder sounded familiar, and something in the audio seemingly provided a direct response — yes. I've isolated it here in this audio clip, but you can actually hear it in the video below as well. It's clear that it came over the noise of the Spirit Box, but it didn't sound like any of the other bits of sound bleeding through the headphones, and Jessica didn't have any reaction to it in the moment. My apologies to your ears — I'm no audio editor, so I had to really crank up the volume on this clip to make it a bit easier to hear.

The second thing that happened was revealed to us by the two staff volunteers shadowing us. During the session, they reported hearing hissing coming from the other end of the third floor hallway. Hissing is something many investigators come across when dealing with any kind of darker entity. Was this Ogden showing more of his personality in an attempt to scare our shadows? Or is there something else lurking at the Woodruff-Fontaine House? The staff reported that they've never heard hissing in the house before, so perhaps our investigation is adding more to the paranormal story of this location than expected. I only wish I heard it myself, but it seems we were all dealing with Ogden in our own ways during that Estes Method session.

We wrapped up the investigation with a final Estes Method session in Elliott's room on the third floor. This session was a bit rushed as our time was running out for the evening. Right out of the gate, there was some discussion about money and financial troubles, but it didn't fit with what is known about Elliott. Staff later informed us that they didn't know of any financial trouble coming from Elliott. As such, we aren't sure what to make of this last session. Was it anything related to the Woodruff or Fontaine families at all? Or was it random noises we pieced together in an accidentally scandalous way?

One final experience really capped the night off nicely for us, but like the tour at the beginning, we didn't have any equipment running at the time to capture it. In fact, we were packed up, saying our goodbyes, and almost literally heading out the door as it happened — Jessica even missed it because she had just stepped into the rear entryway to leave the building. Our host for the evening was coming around the stairs making her final checks when she asked if we left anyone behind upstairs. We were all accounted for, but as we were talking about this, the CLEAR sound of someone walking around on the second floor could be heard. Most of us there in the first floor hallway heard it. It wasn't even a terribly shocking experience at the time because it sounded so... ordinary. It was so distinct and clear — someone was walking around, and you could hear the sound of the shoes scuffling along on the floor. Except no one was up there. It's still such an astonishing experience to have heard that, even as I write this.

Post-Investigation

We were in Memphis for an extra day after the investigation, so on the advice of the Woodruff-Fontaine staff members, we drove over to Elmwood Cemetery to see the graves of the Woodruff and Fontaine families. We weren't given any reason to suspect there might be any kind of activity at their graves, but our gear never left our vehicle from the night before, so we decided to poke around with some of the basics. Finding the graves was easy enough with the Cemetery's online map and grave finder, and the first set of graves we came upon was the Woodruff family. The plot held a number of graves, some of which couldn't be determined by name, though Mollie Woodruff's stood out. Surprisingly, we actually got some flashlight activity on her grave stone. It didn't seem intelligent, at least in that it didn't seem to be responsive to what we were saying. It was just turning on and off at its own pace, but still interesting nonetheless. I can't imagine what would be causing that from a slab of stone, but who knows? Perhaps Mollie Woodruff likes it when people visit and she was just waving hello. We couldn't stay and chat for too long, though, as our feet were being absolutely destroyed by ants, made evident by the constantly shaking camera in the video below. After wrapping things up at the Woodruff plot, we then found the Fontaine plot. They (the ants) were much kinder to our feet, though it didn't seem like anyone was home as we didn't get any activity at any of the Fontaine graves.

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Our Results

We certainly didn't know what to expect going into this investigation. There are so many claims at the Woodruff-Fontaine House Museum that encountering only a small handful of them might equate to a busy night at other, smaller locations. And we certainly got our handful of experiences at this astonishing Victorian mansion!

Looking at that list almost two weeks after the investigation is absolutely incredible. One thing we learned before taking the plunge into ghost hunting is that paranormal activity often varies in how it presents itself to different people. Regular occupants of a location might experience activity daily (which seems to be the case with the staff here), while investigators spending one night in that same location might not get a peep. Thankfully, that wasn't the case for us! Personally speaking, I could have left completely satisfied by the shadows and mist I saw during the tour, or by the incredible flashlight activity we got in the ballroom. Even just remembering the sound of those footsteps at the very end still gives me a rush! We came to see what we could find, and the Woodruff-Fontaine House Museum didn't hold back. It's entirely possible that a multi-day investigation might garner even more activity and possibly even more intense activity (what investigator doesn't want to see a chair slide across the floor??). Even a single return trip could do so now that the occupants are familiar with us.

We'd like to personally thank Ms. Georgia Cooper, the Museum Operations Director for the Woodruff-Fontaine House Museum for coordinating with us and hosting our investigation. We'd also like to thank the rest of the staff and volunteers for facilitating our visit and educating us about the history of the house and its residents throughout the evening. There is a lot more to Memphis than the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid Graceland, Beale Street, great music venues, and barbeque, and being only a few hours' drive from our home, we're sure to make a return to see what paranormal curiocities wait for us!

by David Reimer, posted June 6, 2024

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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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