We went ghost hunting at this haunted club in Westfield

WESTFIELD, Mass. (WGGB/WSHM) – It’s that spooky time of year again as Halloween is quickly approaching, and that can only mean one thing here at Western Mass News: our annual ghost hunt with Agawam Paranormal!

We’ll take you with the team as we spend the night in an almost 100 year old building in Westfield.

Outside, as the moon was just beginning to rise one evening in late October, Robb Goff and members of Agawam Paranormal gathered in his kitchen to discuss our plans.

This is now our 11th year hunting ghosts with Rob, and although we have explored haunted houses in the past, on this occasion we were prepared to go to a haunted ‘clubhouse’, you might say.

“So it’s a three-story building,” Goff noted. “It’s an old building, it’s vintage, and there’s been a lot of paranormal activity.”

Sounds completely creepy for our job: finding signs of the paranormal.

But before we left, Rob mentioned something else, something new that we are going to try this year.

He’s come up with an original way to detect the presence of ghosts, which he calls the Iconic Experiment: two people on a stage surrounded by a dazzling array of hi-tech equipment, the likes of which we’ve never seen before.

“The reason we’re doing it this way is that now we will have multiple devices that are not attached to each other, potentially providing supporting evidence to each other,” he explained.

Evidence we hoped to gather with the tools the team began loading up. Boxes and suitcases filled with infrared cameras, motion detectors, cords, cables and monitors.

The team then began attending the Westfield Women’s Club, founded in 1914.

Located just off the roundabout on Court Street, the building features an imposing building and large white columns and was built in 1926.

With three floors, the main feature is an auditorium. Together with the balcony there is a large space that can accommodate hundreds of people.

However, this evening it was just us, along with some members of the Westfield Women’s Club, who decided that they too would like to try and find out what happens that night.

After all, they are the ones who experienced it:

“I don’t know what the explanation is. There may be explanations. There may be explanations that I’m not aware of and don’t know, but did things happen here? Absolutely, I guarantee it, and I guarantee I’ve seen some of these myself firsthand,” one member claimed.

Longtime member Kathleen Palmer said unusual sights and sounds are not that unusual at the Westfield Women’s Club, especially after dark.

With the setting, we could only hope that we would have more than an apparent chance.

It had long been dark when we arrived at the club, a large brick building with imposing white pillars that have become a familiar sight on Court Street.

Built in 1926, it features a top-floor balcony overlooking an auditorium on the ground floor, and an open basement with a kitchen on the lowest level.

“We’ll start in the basement and on the balcony, switch when they’re done, and then all together on the main floor,” Goff planned.

We asked club members about their experiences with the paranormal in the building.

“You know when you see someone out of the corner of your eye? And you think, “Oh, that’s something, but you know it’s not? That was my feeling. I kept looking and thinking, ‘No, that nothing, no,’ but it was there. And when I looked at it again, it was gone,” Kathy Palmer recalls.

From apparitions to phantom footsteps, to even piano playing without a player, Palmer claimed that she and other members have experienced much of the unexplained.

Like the time she heard someone whisper “hello” in her ear in the basement.

“So my first thought is, ‘oh, you know, there’s someone up here,’ because the vents in the building are strange. It’s an old building. And I just thought, ‘Oh, it’s just an old building,’ so I left the meeting, came up the stairs and it was dark and there was no one here.”

When we were there, however, there were twenty people walking around the property hoping to spook evidence, because while Agawam Paranormal founder Rob Goff will never definitively say whether ghosts are real or not, his team has found plenty of things that aren’t easily explained.

At one point a motion detector went off in the darkness of the empty basement just after 7pm, and again less than half an hour later, before going off twice more with different bulbs, including one that zoomed and rotated into view and went back to the road they came from.

On one of the balconies, our cameras captured an orb racing from bottom left to top right, and minutes later another appeared from the top center, pulsing and zigzagging downward.

But perhaps fittingly, it was on the main floor stage that we witnessed the evening’s strangest events.

Agawam Paranormal set up the Iconal Experiment, which involved two people sitting with a long string of detectors. One person wore red, glowing Delco glasses that reportedly put him in contact with spirits, while the other operated a spirit box, an instrument that scans low band frequencies and supposedly sends messages from the other side.

Before we could even start, that trip wire, equipped with electromagnetic field detectors every ten feet, went loose.

Keep in mind that each EMF detector is independent of each other, so only one is allowed to go off at a time, and yet our night vision cameras captured them all at the same time, just 20 minutes apart.

Most disturbingly, our cameraman Cole turned his back to the stage around 9:06, and as he slowly walked away, the sensors went off together again. Maybe someone or something is teasing or following him.

It was a moment that begged the question of whether we are really the ones trying to contact us, or if they are the ones trying to contact us.