Clay Haus Restaurant Investigation #2

Location: Somerset, Ohio

Date: Saturday night, January 18, 2003

Moon Phase: Full

Solar Weather: Normal solar flares, geomagnetic field unsettled

Investigators present: Hillary M., Paul M., Shonda A., guest investigator Brad

Equipment: Olympus C-3000 digital camera, Kodak DC280 digital camera, RCA digital voice recorder, Sony digital video camera with Nightshot, Pentax PC-550 35mm camera, Extech EMF meter, Olympus 2000 Digital Voice Recorder, Sony Digital-8 Handycam, Extech IR thermometer

History: The history of the Clay Haus building can be found on the restaurant's website at http://www.clayhaus.com/history.htm. Further information can also be found in our report from our first investigation of this site.
Scott Snider, the owner's son and manager of the restaurant mentioned during this visit that the ghostly activity increased before and after our first visit. About a week before that first investigation, the motor to the dishwasher blew. A few days after our previous investigation, an employee was carrying a pie inside the middle dining room, when the pie, plate and all, flew out of her hand. She insisted that she hadn't dropped it, but that someone had knocked it out of her hand.
Scott also mentioned that the activity picked up about a week before this investigation. In fact, the main electrical breaker board actually melted down on January 15, just three days before our second investigation, causing electrical chaos. Since all the wiring in the restaurant is new, Scott was at a loss to explain the event. Interestingly, the main breaker board is located in the furnace room, where Scott has often sensed a small boy hiding.

Investigation: We arrived at the Clay Haus around 12:45 a.m. Since the upper dining room was so active last time, we decided to start there. I set up my infrared video camera in he far corner, and Shonda set hers up just inside the door, aimed into the stairway. We sat down to begin an EVP session at about 12:50. Five minutes into the session, I got a big pink orb at the front of the room. Since we had a great deal of interaction with a pink orb during our first investigation, we found this to be pretty exciting. I then moved to the other side of the room, and got a moving orb above my video camera! Things then quickly settled down, and we didn't get much of anything for the next ten minutes or so.
This is when Brad decided to try to stir things up a little by verbally coaxing the spirits into the room with us. He actually watched orbs entering the room on Shonda's video camera. I immediately took a picture and got a moving orb above him! Paul also got a number of moving orbs during this time, as well as some nice pictures of stationary orbs.
From there, we headed down to the basement. Paul got a couple of nice pictures at this time, but the rest of us didn't get much of anything, so we moved up to the main dining room. None of us detected any activity there, so we eventually headed home at around 3:30 a.m.

Conclusion: Much like last time, we experienced the majority of the activity in the upper dining room. The pink orb that seemed to communicate with us last time was only rarely seen on camera this time, though. It is also curious that we got so little activity in both the basement, and the main level dining rooms, considering that these areas were quite active during our last visit. In our experience, some hauntings seem to have more of an electrical nature than others. Due to the electrical problems that seem to be prevalent here around the dates of our investigations, we believe that the Clay Haus is one of these hauntings. It will be interesting to see what happened there after this last investigation, as well as what will happen before our next one. We look forwarded to studying this site further in 2003.

Thanks again to Scott Snider and the entire Snider family for their incredible hospitality.

Submitted by Hillary Murdoch