Do You Believe in Ghosts? Plenty of People in Marion Do

Curt Strutz opened his paranormal presentation by asking those who’ve had paranormal experiences to raise their hand.

Half of the approximately 100 attendees raised their hands.

The cast member of the TV show "Paranormal Generation" gave a joke-laden presentation at the on some of most haunted buildings in the United States, all of which he has been to.

Have you ever encountered the supernatural in Marion? Tell us about it in the comments.

He spoke on one particularly infamous haunted locale, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, in West Virginia. He said the asylum eventually held 10 times the number of patients that the facility was designed for. According to Strutz, many have claimed to get scratched, pulled and pushed inside the Civil War-era kitchen area. He himself claimed to see a moving, human like shadow in the room.

He added that part of the asylum was used for a community ballroom. Strutz said in a deadpan tone that at one high school dance a distraught girl, ditched by her date, set herself on fire in the corner of the ballroom floor.

"They obviously didn’t commit her fast enough," he said, met with loud, genuine, uncomfortable laughter.

He described some of his methods for finding the paranormal: His use of multiple exposures to capture "ghost orbs" taping of silence in supposedly haunted areas to later amplify to discover voices of the dead.

As to what powers these experiences — the ghosts and the occurrences he said are yet unexplainable?

He has a theory.

"If you look at places that are notoriously haunted, they have a lot of high emotional energy before they die, like prison asylums and hospitals," he said.

He then made a parallel to modern physics.

"Where does that energy go when we die?" he said. "Physics tells us that energy never dies, it just transforms. What if emotional energy is the same?"

So, did his presentation reach the attendees?

Audrey Eggleston can't speak for everyone in the audience, but she found it enlightening, given her belief that ghosts exist.

"Yes I believe there is ghosts' energies out there," she said. "I think I learned some things. You know, I am not a ghost hunter or anything, I just found it interesting."