POWHATAN — The flashlight flickered when Beverly Sebourn asked aloud for it to turn it on.
It illuminated, startling Sebourn and others with Sebourn Paranormal Investigations, who jumped in the dark courtroom of the Powhatan Courthouse State Park.
“Thank you,” she said as they laughed nervously.
The light darkened again when she asked that it be turned off, then tried the trick again - and it worked.
“This is the best [paranormal] experience we’ve ever seen,” Don Sebourn, Beverly’s husband and owner of the ghost-hunting company from Searcy, said after he completed his late-night investigation of the state park grounds recently.
Weird activity like that has paranormal investigators from across the state inspecting the courthouse and jail at Powhatan Courthouse State Park near Black Rock in Lawrence County.
At least one Saturday night each month, park superintendent Corrine Fletcher lets a group poke around the place with electromagnetic-field detectors, video cameras, digital cameras and tape recorders in hopes of catching a haint.
The park has become so popular with the ghost hunters that Fletcher levies a fee on teams to pay for the overtime employees accrue while overseeing the searches.
But the popularity doesn’t spook Fletcher and her employees. Instead, she hopes it will boost tourism at the quaint park perched on the banks of the Black River.
“It’s not the best thing for the employees, but this little park needs as much publicity as it can get.
“We don’t want to seem like a stodgy old place,” Fletcher said. “We want this to be a happening place.”
Greg Butts, the Arkansas State Parks director, said the ghost stories are part of the interpretation and culture of the Powhatan park, regardless of whether they are factual.
“These stories connect Arkansas to its roots,” he said. “Who knows what it is there? It’s part of its history.
“There’s public interest in this, and parks are used by all folks,” he said.
Joe Nickell, an Amherst, N.Y., author who investigates paranormal mysteries, myths and frauds, said parks, hotels and other tourist attractions that use ghost tales to promote business are skirting an “ethical issue.”
Nickell, who has appeared on several television programs about paranormal activity, debunks ghost stories with science.
“They say the end justifies the means,” Nickell said. “But at what price? They are absolutely betraying the rational principles of science. For a state park to lend its reputation to pseudoscience is shameful.”
Fletcher said visitors come to the park more because of its historical look at the pearl-button industry and steamboats that once thrived on the Black River. But she won’t turn back anyone interested in the ghostly mystique of the place.
The imposing, Victorian style courthouse looms atop a bluff on the western side of the Black River. A stone-block jailhouse, a telegraph building, an old school and church are also on the park’s grounds.
The courthouse was built in 1873 but burned down. Workers built a second one on the same spot in 1888, and it served as a circuit court for Lawrence County.
The jail, which still houses the black iron cages that kept prisoners, is about 50 yards from the courthouse.
According to historians, Sharp County authorities arrested a black man named Andrew Springer in the late 1800s in the assault of a white woman, then moved him to the Powhatan jail, Fletcher said. The next day, a posse hanged him from a tree near the courthouse.
“Our ghost is supposedly Andrew,” she said.
Fletcher is a skeptic; she’s more amused than frightened of the ghost stories around the park.
“No ghosts have ever introduced themselves to me,” Fletcher said.
But weird things have happened there.
Doors close by themselves, and employees hear weird noises from the upstairs courtroom.
Ladonna Maxie, an assistant at the park, said her cell phone constantly turns off when she’s in the courtroom or jail. It works fine elsewhere, she said.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “It’s weird.”
Even Fletcher experienced an oddity, she said.
Once, when a paranormal investigation team from Little Rock visited the park, she held divining rods and asked questions out loud to whatever investigators thought haunted the jail.
“I asked one question and the divining rods crossed,” she said. “I could feel them turning in my hand. I wasn’t moving them.”
Don Sebourn heard stories about the Powhatan Courthouse State Park from other paranormal investigators and thought he’d inspect the grounds.
“There’s a lot of activity,” he said. “I wouldn’t call it the best place in Arkansas. The Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs is. But we’ve found facts [at Powhatan] and we’re 100 percent sure something is here.”
Others have also recorded something here, too.
Dana Crow, an investigator from Clay County, has visited the courthouse twice.
“There is more residual activity there than a lot of other places,” she said.
Angela Williamson, who owns an investigation company in Wynne, discovered the Powhatan park when she did an Internet search for haunted places in Arkansas, she said.
She also likes the low fees that Fletcher charges. Paranormal investigators pay $5 per head to inspect the courthouse and jail from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. on Saturdays. Other places charge anywhere from $50 to $300 per person, Williamson said.
“This place has generated a lot of interest,” she said.
On a recent Saturday, Don Sebourn, his wife, son and daughter and a friend placed electromagnetic-field devices in the jail and on a bench in the courtroom to monitor changes in electrical impulses.
“Are you here?” Don Sebourn asked, knocking on the wooden bench. “Do you feel you were unjustly hanged?”
The meter flickered.
“Do you want your day in court?” Don Sebourn asked.
The meter flashed from green to red, indicating an electrical surge.
“That’s about as good an answer as we’ll get,” he said.
The next day, while replaying audio tapes, Don Sebourn said he heard voices in the jail.
One voice sounded like someone urging the investigators to “get out.”
When leaving the jail, Mitch Sebourn said a voice on the tape said, “Keep going.”
Fletcher said of the ghost hunters’ interest, “It’s part of the recreation at this park, as far as I’m concerned.”
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 01/03/2011