Our team has completed another season of Paranormal Adventure Tours at Fort Delaware on Pea Patch Island with Delaware State Park staff. This amounts to over 60 hours of time on the island or the Delafort ferry heading to the island. We’re so grateful to have completed another season, and especially so given that this was our 15th year! You can find 15th-anniversary DSGI merch in our online store.
If you’d like more of the history on the Fort, I do include some in a past post where I talk about my experience with the ghost cat Bill. I definitely talk about Bill the cat during most of the tours I lead, it was after all my very first paranormal experience at the Fort.
For two of our tours, we had the pleasure of including Daryl Martson. He is a co-lead investigator of A&E’s Ghost Hunter TV show and an author. Daryl has been a part of over 400 investigations all over the country but his home base is Middletown, Delaware. Daryl’s most recent book The Horrors of the House of Wills: A True Story of a Paranormal Investigator’s Most Terrifying Case, tells the tale of an experience he had at the House of Wills in Ohio, but it leads by acknowledging that his first paranormal encounter was at Fort Delaware when he was much younger.
Nearly 3,000 people died at Fort Delaware
Contrary to past publications or urban legends, there were not any dungeons at Fort Delaware. They did not starve prisoners, they received two meals a day. Granted the prisoners were fed bread and water, which is certainly not a five-course meal.
Source Name: Miller, Francis T., The Photographic History of the Civil War Volume 7
Many of the prisoners who lived at Fort Delaware were from other places in the country. They came from multiple battlegrounds as far as Ohio, but also from Vicksburg and Gettysburg, by steamboat. So knowing this information, knowing the facts as we’ve researched them, is all very important when we conduct our paranormal investigations. It helps to know how old people were, where they came from, and what they possibly endured during their time at war.
We know there were a handful of violent deaths on the island, but the majority of people who died there died from sickness. I’ve read letters written by Sergeant Bishop Crumrine while he was stationed at the Fort thanks to Fort staff, Edward Binasiewicz, who shared the letters with me. Bishop wrote a lot about the rebels who were brought to the camp and how quickly they would die. Sometimes they would die within a day or two and were immediately taken to Delaware City and buried. In one letter he wrote to his brother that the rebel bodies were “planted” and that by spring there would be a forest. Yikes. We know that many Union officers who died were sent across the river to be buried at Finn’s Point National Cemetery.
There has also been research done regarding prisoner escapes. When you consider that there were more prisoners than soldiers, and the prisoners stayed outside of Fort walls, it’s no surprise that this could have been the case. “At one point, there were only 300 Union soldiers to guard nearly 12,000 prisoners.”
Throughout, the season each of us on the team had numerous experiences in various areas of the Fort. I had the opportunity to lead tours in areas portrayed as the officers’ kitchen, the laundry, Battery Torbert, the ordinance, the mess hall, and the officers’ quarters. I really enjoy hearing the history from the Fort staff and I use that when I’m investigating. Being able to tell people the names of those who were stationed on the island, I think really amplifies the investigation. It is more real when you can say Captain Clark, are you here with us at the ordinance?
Is there anyone here with us?
Torching and spirit box sessions were the most successful modes of investigating for me this year. Setting up maglites, which we call torches while investigating spirits who would not know what a flashlight is, and then using these lights to communicate is always pretty spooky. The idea is that the ghost can turn the flashlight on and off to answer yes or no questions. A spirit box is a device used in paranormal research to communicate with spirits or ghosts by detecting EVPs (electronic voice phenomena). It is a small handheld device that scans through radio frequencies, creating white noise, and spirits can use these waves to communicate with us.
When you ask a question like “Is there anyone here with us,” and a flashlight sitting five feet away turns on by itself while you’re sitting in the dark, it’s just a really cool feeling. However, when you ask the question and the flashlight turns on while you’re also hearing a distinct “hello” come through the spirit box, that is a whole other level of awesome. If this goes back and forth long enough it really feels like something is communicating with you. Especially when combined with the fact that there are other times when nothing turns on or makes noise at all.
When it comes to Fort Delaware, we hear a lot of the same things. It’s clear to me that there is residual energy left behind. You have an old military fort that was home to a lot of young officers and prisoners for a long period of time. There was a war happening outside of those walls on the mainland. Within the Fort there was a lot of tension, sickness, and a constant state of questioning what’s going on and what are we doing here. The Fort never saw a battle, so when I think of these young men I have to wonder if they almost felt guilty that they weren’t out in the frontline. Is that why there is so much repetition, so much of the same sounds and movements because their structured routine is how they got through the day? As an aside, I’m grateful to everyone who has served and continues to serve in our military. No matter your station or your role, please know you matter.
The public reactions
When you’re part of a team and you’re investigating a place, you’re very familiar with, like Fort Delaware, sometimes the best part of the night is seeing the reactions of the public. We know Fort Delaware is haunted, there is no doubt about that. Even during nights when it feels dead, pun totally intended, we know there are spirits on that island.
When people come out to investigate, we can only hope they will experience something paranormal, or at least something that makes them question. We’re not hiding in the dark and jumping out of places. We’re not putting things in areas to force interactions or to make it seem extra spooky. Our team is actually more likely to debunk the rattle of a window or the sound of water drops than we are to feed into it. So, when someone is using dowsing rods or a KII meter and they see the lights turn up or the rods cross, it’s awesome to see their reaction. I love those “Oh shit, did you just see that!?” moments when it’s like, yes, exactly, this is what we’ve been telling you!
The public reactions truly help to validate the stories and occurrences we talk about happening at Fort Delaware. For those of you who attended and it was literally just a lot of dust, darkness and looking at historical artifacts, that happens, too. These spirits aren’t using Signup Genius and lettings us know when or where to find them. You can spend hours investigating a space but end up with zero evidence. That’s part of being a paranormal investigator.
The 5-hour extended tour
First of all, it was the night of the full moon. The Fort was lit by the light, bathed in the flow of a gorgeous blood moon. Depending on your faith, you may or may not know how strong the pull of the moon can be during that time. Especially, since we were surrounded by water. During the extended tour we can explore additional places around the Fort which is always exciting.
Adam and I were paired together for the five-hour tour. He’s a great person to investigate with because he uses humor to put people at ease. We know there are people who call in requesting him as their tour guide. He has a lot of paranormal equipment he brings to the table, so I was excited to hear the rem pods and music box go off in spaces. Sadly, we didn’t hear the music box at all that night. We did have rem pod activity, especially in the officers’ quarters and in Battery Torbert. There were times when the lights and the high-pitched noise just would not shut up. This prompted me to reset and move it each time, because clearly it was faulty. Hahahaha. However, it still caught interactions even after being moved. We had constant torching activity and a couple members of our group hung on to the dowsing rods most of the night, because they were getting definitive interactions.
It wasn’t our blue group, though, that experienced the paranormal wow-factor. Christina and Ken’s group experienced something that none of our team or the fort staff have ever witnessed on the island. I won’t give details that I don’t know, because I wasn’t there, but I will say that I have complete trust and faith in my team and I believe what they saw. It happened in Battery Torbert, and unless there was some kind of mass hysteria or illusion, they witnessed a rem pod levitate a foot off the picnic table at the end of the hall. When I think about the strength it must have taken for a spirit to hold the device, lift it and move it like that, I’m just amazed.
Once the public left, we all went to the location to see what we would find. We didn’t see anything levitating, but we did hear footsteps and something moving above the location. To me, it sounded like something heavy being dragged. Andy said it sounded like a deep humming. We all felt a different energy there. It makes me wonder, was something brought to the island that night? Our team knows the Fort, but we did not know this type of activity at the Fort. It’s hard to wrap my head around, but I do believe that people can bring energy and attachments to places. I’ve seen it in my own life. I think that might have been what happened during the extended.
For those who are still non-believers
Good. I mean it, seriously, don’t ever let anyone try to talk you into something you don’t believe. That’s not what this is all about for us. There is a reason why no one has been able to offer 100% unrefutable proof that ghosts exist. We all experience interactions with the spirit world in different ways. Some of us feel goosebumps, some of us hear a whisper or a tapping on the wall, some of us see shadow figures or mist in a room. Depending on the experience it is perfectly normal to explain it away as a fluke, and in many cases you can’t replicate what happened.
So, I get it, I get how hard it can be to open yourself up to believing in something you may never be able to prove. I can’t prove anything that happens after someone dies, aside from their physical body decomposing. But their physical body isn’t their spirit and many people believe that spirits go to heaven or hell or some other place, right? You can’t prove that either.
Sometimes people will ask us, “why is the ghost here, why haven’t they moved on?” To that I say, what makes you think they haven’t moved on? Do I think some spirits are sort of trapped in a space due to unfinished business? Sure. But I also think there are some spirits who travel freely. Maybe you smell oranges out of nowhere and then believe your great-grandmother is nearby checking in on you. Or you sense someone walking behind you when you’re in your favorite garden or on your favorite hiking trail and you know it’s a lost family or friend. It’s my belief that spirits aren’t locked in anywhere. I think spirits can check in with their loved ones.
Until we meet again
We’ll return to Fort Delaware again, and again and again. We’ll be there for our team overnight in the summer and we’ll return for the paranormal tours in October 2024. We hope to see all our readers out there, too. And we encourage you to consider visiting the Fort during the daytime. History feeds the paranormal. You’ll have a better understanding of what might be haunting the island if you know what it was like when it was a functional base.
Thank you again to everyone who came out this season. We couldn’t do this without you!