CNHI News Service

JOPLIN, Mo. ? Beneath a waxing moon, a team of paranormal investigators haunted the old Prosperity School recently and declared that some of the inhabitants were not among the living.

They trained infrared cameras on halls and stairways, swept the building with electromagnetic sensors and dowsing rods, and held seances in the hope that this would be the investigation to yield irrefutable evidence of the afterlife.

"My mission is to capture a full-bodied apparition on videotape," said Karen Shillings, the director of the Central Arkansas Society for Paranormal Research, or CASPR. "Ultimately, that is what every ghost hunter is seeking."

The two-story, brick school was built in 1907 and named for the two-fisted mining camp that sprang up in the decades after the discovery of lead in a field. Although Prosperity is now little more than a handful of houses along County Road 200 northeast of Joplin, at the turn of the last century it was a thriving but sometimes violent town of 1,500 residents.

By the 1940s, however, Prosperity's luck was running out, according to local historian Brad Belk. The school closed in 1962 and sat vacant for 30 years before being renovated into a bed-and-breakfast.

It is now owned by Janet and Richard Roberts, who moved from Dallas after purchasing the school over Thanksgiving 2002. The couple say their guests have reported some unusual experiences, such as ghostly knocking and otherworldly voices. Janet Roberts, 53, said she hasn't seen anything unnatural, but 56-year-old Richard Roberts allows witnessing "a dark figure" of a man walking from the kitchen to the front door.

The Robertses also say they have heard rumors of a murder that took place in the 1950s in the building, but so far they have failed to turn up any evidence to substantiate the story.

Belk said he had researched the school on behalf of previous owners but had never discovered any murders. He added, though, that his area of expertise was the 1930s and '40s, and he may have missed something that occurred later.

Shillings said she heard about the allegedly haunted school from her brother, who was working in Joplin at the time, and she asked the owners if her group could investigate.

Not 'ghost busters'

Shillings doesn't like the term "ghost buster," because CASPR (like the friendly cartoon ghost) isn't a spook-elimination service. On the contrary, the 40-year-old Hot Springs, Ark., native hopes the spirits will stick around while the team does its work. And although the group didn't capture a "full-bodied apparition," psychic Kay Tope said it gathered enough evidence to conclude that the school is, in her words, "actively haunted."

An active haunting, according to Tope, a 49-year-old registered nurse from Hot Springs, occurs when "anomalies move and engage in different types of activity." She said this is in contrast to a residual haunting, which is an echo of a past event that keeps repeating, as if on an endless loop. There also is a distinction between spirits and ghosts, she said: Spirits visit from the other side, while ghosts are spirits who are stuck on Earth.

But Joe Nickell, a forensic expert and regular contributor to the Skeptical Inquirer, a magazine published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, is skeptical.

"I don't know them," Nickell said. "I wasn't there."