Paranormal believers take over 'spooky' inn for weekend

By KIM LAMB GREGORY

Paranormal investigator Heather Woodward sat in one of the rooms at Santa Paula's Glen Tavern Inn, her eyes closed, her pen moving across a sheet of paper.

Her sister Sarah Woodward sat next to her asking questions as Heather's pen looped and scratched.

"Who is this? Can you give me your name?" Sarah asked.

The pen in Heather's hand moved, but there were no legible words.

"Are you the lady in white?" Sarah tried again.

"Yes," Heather's pen wrote.

"Are you French?" Sarah continued.

"Yes."

"Pretty?"

"Yes."

The pen kept moving.

"Sex," it wrote. "Mistress. Lover. Tall, dark, handsome. Mustache."

There was more.

"Killed. Miscarriage. Bled to death."

The session was an example of automatic writing, in which the spirit of a dead person allegedly communicates through a living person, or medium. In this case, Heather believed she was channeling a French perfume saleswoman who supposedly died during the 1930s in the Glen Tavern Inn. Before the session, Heather had explained that she goes into a trance while the spirit uses her hand to write.

Automatic writing is just one of dozens of paranormal practices that will be discussed and explored during the 2007 South Coast Paranormal Convention on Friday and Saturday at the historic inn.

Other workshops will include discussions on paranormal sound phenomena, enhancing psychic abilities, the use of technology to document the paranormal, two seances and an all-night investigation into the spirits who may have never checked out of the Arts and Crafts-style inn.

The convention is sponsored by a Southern California group of paranormal investigators who call themselves The Real Deal. Heather, the founder and lead organizer of the event, said the location choice is no accident. Those who believe in all things otherworldly say the inn is exceptionally haunted.

"It's like spook central," said Ventura County historian and ghost hunter Richard Senate, who will speak at the convention.

Senate said that "any older hotel worth its salt is haunted" because of the number of human beings who pass through, but, according to believers, the Glen Tavern has some supernatural geography that makes it the perfect storm of opportunity for paranormal activity.

Glen Tavern night innkeeper Susan Gallagher is among those who say the ghostly happenings are all too real, although she stressed that the occurrences are not frightening -- just intriguing.

"It's not a scary place," Gallagher said, leaning against one of the overstuffed couches in the tavern's carpeted lobby. "It's very warm and inviting."

According to Heather, who led a recent visitor through the inn, the third floor was a hotbed of gambling, prostitution and bootleg liquor.

"Here's the mother lode of all rooms: 307," said Heather, pausing outside a room at the end of the third-floor hallway.

Heather, who has written a book called "The Ghosts of Glen Tavern Inn," said she believes much of the gambling took place in the notorious Room 307, along with a lot of other human drama.

The paranormal convention will include two seances in different rooms at the inn, said Heather, who added that she and the eight-member Real Deal team have been researching the inn by going through and picking up impressions, testing those impressions with electromagnetic-field detectors and other devices, and looking up history.

One of the seance rooms, on the first floor, was supposedly occupied by a madam Heather calls "Pearl."

"We don't know her real name," Heather said. "She was of French descent. She wanted to be a star. She really liked her money and liked to count her money. She has a very hearty laugh."

The perfume saleswoman that Heather believes she channeled through her automatic-writing session has been detected through smell, according to another member of The Real Deal, Chad Saunders. Saunders said the overwhelming smell of perfume will sometimes permeate a hallway in the hotel.

"I want to say violets. It's very floral," Saunders said.

Convention guests, who already number about 100, will tour the rooms thought to be the most haunted during an all-night paranormal investigation.

"We're going to do a full-on investigation," Heather said. "We've rented out all the haunted rooms."

Although a 2005 Gallup poll found three out of four Americans believe in some type of paranormal phenomenon, skeptics like Robert Carroll scoff at all of it. Carroll, who holds a doctorate in philosophy and taught critical thinking at Sacramento City College from 1977 to 2007, runs a Web site called skepdic.com, which categorically addresses every paranormal phenomenon from A to Z.

A selection on ghosts, for example, suggests there is a naturalistic explanation for all ghostly activity, but often the details needed to explain it are not available.

"We must rely on anecdotal evidence, which is always incomplete and selective," Carroll wrote, "and which is often passed on by interested, inexperienced, superstitious parties who are ignorant of basic physical laws."