It all began with a magic show….
  My name is Craig Campbell, and I am a magician in the Salt Lake City Area. While getting ready for a performance in Magna Utah in 2007, I had some experiences occur that I could not explain. I had felt a hand brush the sweat away from my forehead, felt cold columns of air, seen what I thought was a shadow move and watch me, even though I was the only one in the room and nowhere near the area, that light could cast my shadow. And the clincher, having my shirt tail grabbed and pulled away from my body.
  I had always been interested in the possibilities of ghosts, and up until that moment in time I was one of the biggest skeptics around, and to this day even with what happened to me I still am. I mean I could feasibly explain the feeling of the hand wipe my forehead, it was hot and I was sweaty, so the nerves on my forehead firing off to cool down my skin, could explain the wiping sensation, I could even think of ways to explain the columns of ice cold air in an area that was well over 90 degrees on a hot summer night and being able to see my breath in the column. But the shadow and the shirt tail being grabbed….I guess what I saw and experienced opened the possibilities and opened my curiosity to find what is out there.
  In all my years of performing you always hear that every theater has its resident ghosts, and it always seems that it is always an old man, and old woman and a little girl. So I grabbed a couple of friends, a camcorder, a digital voice recorder, and we went back to the theater to see what we could find.
The first time we investigated just shortly before Halloween, we really didn’t hear or see anything. For 3 hours walking around in the dark, I found the “hunt” to be well, rather boring, felt like an idiot asking questions in the dark, and talking to myself, I was expecting to see an apparition to pop out and do some sort of Ebenezer Scrooge thing. So to say the least, I was disappointed, so much so, that I didn’t even review any of the footage or listen to the recorder for about a week. I guess I was hoping that the timing of the year and that we were in a very old theater we would see something. Stories were all over the place of the actors seeing the little girl, the old woman sitting in the theater seats, and even a couple of stories of people actually conversing with the old man.
  So I really wanted to have the experience to find out and try to explain what I had seen with the shadow and the shirt. But after a very long night of questions fleeting into silence and the embarrassment of talking to one’s self in the dark, I figured what was the point of listening to the audio or viewing the footage of the camcorder.So a week passed by, and I finally got around to watching the camcorder footage, and just as I had expected….I only had one cassette and it was 1 hour of nothing, not a shadow, no voices other than those that were there, no evidence of paranormal activity at all. The Halloween show was just around the corner, so again I held off on even listening to the Digital recorders, because at this point I was beginning to lose interest in the whole ghost in the dark thing. 
  The night before the show we held our cast Halloween party, and we slept over at the theater on the main stage and watched scary movies and just relaxed, we had worked hard and deserved a fun time. We all had blowup beds and were laying on them, and about 2 am when most of us were asleep, I heard one stage crew member say loudly.."Stop touching me!" and the assistant that was laying on the bed next to him said to him "I am not doing anything", that woke me up because all of us had gone to sleep. the light from the projector was illuminating the room, I could clearly see everyone (once I put my glasses on). The room was eerily silent as I scanned the room, them the next thing I know I was feeling off balance laying there on the mattress, I looked to my side and physically saw the mattress go down and go back up like someone or something had just stepped on it.   I was awake the rest of the night.....
  So needless to say after the show was over and the night following I turned to the Digital voice recorder that I had used on the improvised hunt we had. Then the curiosity factor jumped a hundred fold. There wasn’t anything spectacular, but I did pick up what actually sounded like a little girl laughing, and some whistling. Listening to that the hair on the back of my neck stood up on end, we didn’t hear any of that while we were there.
  So of course with my curiosity even higher I had to go back……I wanted to get a larger group together and cover 2 building on one hunt this time. It took 8 months to find people that were interested in going, but I was able to get a group together, and in June 2008 we went back for another investigation.
  Once again the beginning wasn’t so spectacular, but as the night drew on, more things started to happen. Around 3 am the flood gates opened up, we were hearing footsteps, audible mumbling, and even one of the persons on the hunt, standing in the middle of the stage, nowhere near the walls or anyone else, suddenly said “something just bit me!” thinking it was a spider or some bug we went to look, and right down the center of her back was scratches!
  I was on fire; I was hooked, I had to do more. We picked up a lot of EVP’s that night, and I was amazed! Even though I am still a skeptic of ghosts, I love to explore the world around me, seen and possibly un-seen.
  After a month or so after this investigation, I got the idea, there has to be others around me that want to investigate this stuff, I mean after all the internet is flooded with ghost hunting sites. So after talking with my magician assistant’s and friends from work I decided to form Salt Lake Paranormal Research Society, were began to investigate paranormal claims at other places and private homes.
After a year and a half of running our organization under the name of Salt Lake Paranormal Research Society, we came across another organization with a simular name, so we changed our name to Salt City Paranormal, to avoid any confusion with our fellow researchers.
So what is in store from this point on? Well only the future will tell, but if it is anything like it was that June night, I am positive that my curiosity will only continue to grow, and in the process, maybe we will discover answers to questions unasked…………………

 

Craig Campbell
Founder  Salt City Paranormal