“Knock once if you’re a male, or twice if you’re a female,” Scott Hamilton asks in a back room of a massive old industrial building on Roosevelt Drive in Derby.
There’s a noise. It’s faint. Sounds like a tap.
“Hear that?” Hamilton asks John Fredericks, his partner in ghost hunting.
“Yeah,” Fredericks says.
“Can you do that again, if that was you? Hamilton asks. “Knock once if you’re a male or twice if you are a female,” he says.
Five seconds later there’s an obvious “tap.”
Is the wood settling? Is it a loose part of the roof?
Or is it a malevolent force out to destroy all who enter Roosevelt Tower Antiques and Salvage at 253 Roosevelt Drive?
I dunno.
And neither do Pat and Nadine Civitella, who opened Roosevelt Tower in 2013.
Since opening, Roosevelt Tower employees said they’ve been hearing footsteps when there’s no one around.
Things randomly fall onto the ground, they said.
And, most creepily, a neighbor on Park Avenue in the back of the property has allegedly seen a woman in white in a window, in an area of Roosevelt Tower that is not used by the business.
So Civitella called in the Family Haunts School of Paranormal Research, a lower Valley group of ghost hunters, to check the place out.
The Valley Indy did a story on the group awhile back.
Civitella learned about the ghost hunters through Fredericks, a Derby resident who shops at Roosevelt Tower so much he has his own parking space.
(FYI, Civitella also owns Mr. Junker, through which he gets a lot of stuff. Roosevelt Tower is a warehouse full of used items of all kinds, from washing machines to cars, to furniture, to a poster for the 1982 movie “The Junkman,” which supposedly holds a world record for car crashes).
Fredericks, his son Charles, and Hamilton, an Ansonia resident, spent several hours roaming through Roosevelt Tower Thursday afternoon into Thursday night.
The Valley Indy tagged along for the first two hours.
The buildings are well over 100 years old. There’s about four connected buildings stuffed into about 2 acres. Total square footage is about 50,000.
About 30,000 square feet of that is empty — save for the leftover stuff left there by the various business that have taken up space there over the years.
It’s a very cool place to wander around.
Check out these photos:
The ghost-hunting trio also ventured into two basements under the big buildings.
Those were not as cool.
They were dark. Very dark.
And the second, larger basement along Roosevelt Drive was dang creepy. Family Haunts had done a walkthrough of the place before Thursday. The basement and a few other areas had been identified, based on the employee information, as “hotspots.”
The Family Haunts guys were armed with cameras, video cameras, temperature gauges and all kinds of audio equipment to see what they could capture.
A few weird things happened during the investigation. First, there was the tapping stuff explained at the top of this story.
Then, once in the big basement, the crew seemed to think they were hearing things on the “ghost box” audio scanner.
Hamilton asked a bunch of questions in the basement while snapping photos with a digital camera in an attempt to engage with whatever spirit might have been in the place.
“Are you a male or a female?” he asked, while Fredericks listened intently to a device that scanned different frequencies.
“Do you want to talk to us?” Hamilton asked after a long pause.
Hamilton heard what sounded like “No” from the audio device.
“No,” Hamilton said.
“That’s what I heard,” Fredericks replied.
“Why don’t you want to talk to us?” Hamilton asked.
No answer.
Then, things got a little weird.
Charles Fredericks had been sitting quietly in a metal folding chair while Hamilton roamed the darkness looking for a spirit.
Fredericks got up at some point, walked across the basement, then returned to his seat.
He claimed a screwdriver was now sitting on the chair — and that he hadn’t put it there.
“Did you do that? Did you do that?” he asked.
No one said yes.
Watch the video below.
Charles then threw the screwdriver about six feet away, toward the wall.
There was a break in the action about 5:30 p.m.
Hamilton said it would take five or six hours to review the video and audio they recorded before he would issue an opinion on the investigation.
“There’s definitely a little bit of activity, like when we were upstairs and heard the knocks,” Hamilton said. “It was pretty cool.”
The hunters were awaiting a few more crew members as the Valley Indy cleared out.
