DOWNEY — The Downey Historical Society may have some ghostly neighbors.

Nestled behind the Historical Society’s building at Apollo Park lies the Dismukes House, a small home built in 1887 by Downey Pioneer Edwin Price Dismukes for his family.

After being saved from demolition in 1986, the home was donated to the Historical Society and moved from its original location near the corner of Rives Avenue and Imperial Highway. The building has been opened up for tours in the past, however most of the items in the home – save for an old band hat and a bible – is unoriginal to the family itself.

The house was recently investigated by the Paranormal Activity Research Team (PART), which was founded in 1988 by Alain Camiling.

“We’ve found that there are many other people out there that have had experiences and kept it to themselves for fear of judgement, risking their jobs, or other things; it can have a heavy toll or consequence when you admit something like that,” said Camiling. “We turned it into a service where we go out and help people document these strange activities that they have.”

Admittedly, the Dismukes House is probably not the first place that would come to mind when speaking of Downey’s potentially spooky and supernatural urban legends and myths.

Historical Society President Bob Thompson offered one alleged story of a woman who had been distracted and pulled away from a bath she was drawing, only to return to the tub later and find the water had been shut off despite her being the only one in the house at the time.

Still, PART’s initial investigation – which took place on Friday, Sept. 25 – began with very little to go off of.

“We only got a handful of stories, a handful of incidents,” said Camiling. “We kind of came in here – I don’t want to say blind – but with our guns blazing, meaning every piece of equipment we had to try and capture in this short period of time some kind of event, whether it’s an orb, voices, or footsteps.”

Review of initial footage and audio yielded results in the form of some light “orb” phenomena and a potential shadow object.

This helped the team fine-tune their focus a little more when they returned last week.

“We got a lot of light anomalies, and we were able to determine that they weren’t dust, they weren’t bugs because of the environment and the surrounding opportunities that we had to look at some of the other portions of the house,” said Camiling. “All the light anomalies kind of corroborated and came together with the other equipment. That was neat to find. We were able to target a little bit better some of the areas with our cameras this time.”

During their second investigation last Friday, Camiling said that the house was “pretty active right away.”

“We weren’t able to get a good baseline reading on some of the equipment because it was just going crazy the whole time, which is exciting because it does indicate that there is a lot more presence than normal, for us anyways,” said Camiling.

Specifically, PART believes that they may have witnessed what seemed to be a coherent conversation or argument between two potential spirits, using technology comparable to some voice to text apps.

“What’s neat this evening is I think we were able to have them comfortable with us, and they were able to discuss things in front of us,” said Camiling. “There’s conversations where they seemed more personal today, with us.”

“For me, [the highlight] would literally be sitting through what seemed like a conversation between either a husband and wife or some other couple, between two different applications on two different machines. They went back and forth with each other, it seemed like a coherent conversation, and we could feel the emotion; like if mom and dad were arguing at the dinner table and you just had to keep quiet and listen to them go.”

Photo by Pam Lane, DowneyDailyPhotos.com

It is unknown at this time if PART will get another chance to explore the Dismukes House and any of the other-worldly secrets that it may hold, however Camiling says that he and the team are “always excited to get more data and come back to any location that will have us.”

“Just being witness to these things, whether it’s repeated or not, is exciting to me,” said Camiling. “Being able to give answers to the historians that are here and connect the dots that they have from actual documented facts and sightings is fun for us.”

Dead at Dismukes: Pioneer home investigated by paranormal team