Shawn Kelly’s first foray into ghost hunting was a trip to Restland Memorial Park in Monroeville. Legend has it the cemetery is home to an apparition locals affectionally call Walkin’ Rosie, a woman in a flowing white dress who likes to wander after dark. Another story goes that Rosie can be summoned by shining a light on her gravestone, and photos taken at the site reveal “unidentified orbs.”
But during Kelly’s first investigation in 2006, he encountered something else all together.
“We just started walking the cemetery and snapping pictures,” he remembers. “We got home the next day, and I was looking at them, and on the road, no lie, floating in the air … was an [orange orb] that looked like a pissed-off Smiley Cookie. No lie, it was so orange, and it looked angry.”
Kelly had just returned from a ghost walk of the Gettysburg battlefield, still considered one of the most haunted places in America.
“I was hooked right away,” he says, and that orange Smiley Cookie orb kicked off a nearly 20-year stint leading paranormal investigations. Meeting with friends, fittingly enough, at Eat’n Park, Kelly founded the Pittsburgh Paranormal Society, one of the first groups of its kind in the region. Because it was 2006, they put out a call for members on Meetup.com. The group soon got enough interest to investigate Blue Mist Road, which Kelly still identifies as Pittsburgh’s “most haunted area.”
“I don’t believe in the word scary, but it became very uncomfortable,” he says. “And we got a lot of orb[s] that night.”
Pittsburgh City Paper recently spoke with Kelly about the city’s many haunted restaurants and the National Aviary, where he led one of only two paranormal groups invited to investigate. Listening to Kelly’s experiences, I had to learn more about the group’s history before the heyday of paranormal TV shows, and how they investigated the region’s spookiest sites, some of which are inaccessible today.
The first thing to know about 2000s-era ghosting hunting, Kelly says, is there wasn’t a widespread cultural understanding of it. Ideas about trauma or “negative energy” being stored at a location weren’t mainstream, he tells City Paper, “unless you were in the metaphysical field [or] you were a witch or a Wiccan.”
In the beginning, Kelly and about 10 Paranormal Society members made mostly house calls. Residents then did not want to coexist with ghosts, Kelly says — influenced by possession movies like The Exorcist — and saw the group as providing a needed service to resolve hauntings.
“My group alone did more private residence[s] than any other group in Pittsburgh,” he says.
A spooked homeowner would reach out to Kelly by email, reporting what they’d seen: rearranged furniture, objects flying, unexplained shadows, “things falling apart.”
“Believe it or not, I never really advertised. Everything was done by word of mouth,” Kelly says. The Society also never charged for its services. “All I asked was… maybe [can we] have coffee and some doughnuts and some unsweetened iced tea.”
The Paranormal Society would do a walk-through before conducting a full investigation, logging two to three each week. The team set up a camcorder, made the room “pitch black,” and spoke to specters with a K2 meter (or EMF reader) in hand. The device detects spikes in the electromagnetic field said to indicate the presence of ghosts and was “the most important piece of equipment we had back then, and even today,” Kelly says.
“Spirit is pure energy,” he explains.
Kelly headed up the “spiritual side” of the team who worked in tandem with the “scientific side” or “techies,” as Kelly calls the latter. He also remembers the group using a four-megapixel digital camera to catch anything not readily visible, like floating orbs, and that members were floored when a 12-megapixel camera was released — “oh my god, that was the top of the line.”
They met up at Eat’n Park most Sunday nights to pore over photos. Sometimes, he says, the group found nothing, but still tried to treat each client with consideration.
Frequent investigation requests came from houses built near the Bushy Run Battlefield in Westmoreland County, whose location is believed to create spillover between worlds (something even acknowledged on the battlefield’s website).
Similarly, the Monongahela Valley region remains “the most haunted place in the state of Pennsylvania,” Kelly says. Walking the Great Allegheny Passage starting from the Boston trailhead in McKeesport, “you could actually see spirits carrying lanterns” or “a bunch of shadow figures.”
By 2008, the Paranormal Society had investigated more than 100 cases, and Kelly spoke with CP. He says the interview helped the group take off further, and they gained access to the Point Park University Pittsburgh Playhouse — where the university now has a webpage dedicated to the theater’s hauntings, including another Lady in White.
Their caseload expanded to include haunted businesses, hotels, and marinas. Kelly helped friends at a Monongahela funeral home, and at Molnar’s Lounge, a bar and grill in Elizabeth. Tim’s Secret Treasures, a Charleroi antique store, reported hearing disembodied whispers and footsteps and seeing moving furniture. After Kelly’s investigations, the shop ultimately landed on a ghost hunting show on the Biography Channel in 2012, which explored the building’s history as a former funeral parlor, scrap yard, and speakeasy.
Throughout all this, Kelly worked as a meat cutter, staying out at investigations until 2 or 3 a.m., then showing up to his day job five hours later. Now in his 60s, he says eventually “it took a toll.” In addition, when he started out, Ghost Hunters (starring the still-popular The Atlantic Paranormal Society or TAPS) had premiered less than two years prior. The show blew up, spawned imitators, and changed the nature of the hobby.
“The fad wore out,” he tells CP.
Today, retired from the Pittsburgh Paranormal Society, Kelly still works with local paranormal groups including Bump in the Night Society. But the model for running a paranormal group has changed: most charge money to go on investigations, visit historic places more than they cleanse homes, and, in Kelly’s opinion, often bring too many people along to conduct a true investigation.
“I’m old school,” he says.
Evolving with the times, he now devotes his energy to a paranormal-themed podcast, Into The Night, which you can catch Tuesday and Sunday nights on United Public Radio in New Orleans.
For those wanting to go an old-fashioned ghost hunt, Kelly offers some suggestions. In the city, Greenfield’s Calvary Cemetery remains a hotspot, and just across a bridge, the Carnegie Library of Homestead (which sometimes leads ghost tours).
In Beaver County, Kelly and the Paranormal Society picked up evidence of ghosts at Grove Cemetery in New Brighton — and you simply can’t go wrong in the Mon Valley, where you can sometimes glimpse ghosts walking the streets, he says.
Kelly also asserts it’s a common misconception that witching hours run midnight to 3 a.m. In his experience, most activity takes place earlier, from 10 p.m. to 1a.m.
Spirits aren’t so different from us, he explains, and are sensitive to our rhythms.
“People are starting to settle down,” Kelly says. “You know how you’re running around all day long, but around 10 p.m. everybody starts to relax? That’s when they decide to come out.”
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2024.
