- Did you want me to leave, or are you okay with me staying here?

Oh, it switched.

- [Person] Yep.

Sure did.

- [Andrea] Oh, wow.

- [Person] Well, if you want her to stay in and you want me to help keep the guys out, hit the bell for us, go touch it, go ding it.

Ding it.

(laughs) - Can you make a noise for us?

(bell ringing) Thank you.

- [Person] Three seconds.

- [Person] Electromagnetic.

- [Andrea] Thank you so much.

- [Chris] The Orson Starr House, a historic 19th century farmhouse preserved in period-accurate style as a museum, much like something you would expect at Greenfield Village, but hidden in plain sight along Main Street in Royal Oak, just south of 13 Mile.

It is also famously said to be haunted.

- It had a history or a reputation through the city workers that it was haunted, and that's kind of always been that way, so when I came in, I was very skeptical, so I didn't really believe it until something happened to me.

- [Chris] I stopped by the Starr House to learn about its history from Royal Oak Historical Commission chair Alexandra Kerrigan before our "One Detroit" team of myself, Andrea Riley, and Nate Turner joined a paranormal investigation of the house with its resident ghost hunters John Yost and David Boyer of Flyer Paranormal.

- You have a family that came in and was pioneering, essentially, setting the economy for this area.

13 Mile Road was Starr Road, we have Starr Presbyterian, so they were... You could tell that they had an impact on the area, they were quite a prominent family.

Orson Starr, him and his wife Rhoda came from upper state New York in 1831, and they were looking for land and to continue manufacturing cowbells.

This area is perfect for manufacturing cowbells, the soil is just the right mixture of clay and sand.

Five generations in all lived here, and then, the family line decided to sell it, and the city took over and made it into a museum.

- [Chris] Alexandra leads the open house tours of the Orson Starr House that happen one Sunday a month from fall through spring.

She also joins Flyer Paranormal on their once-a-month ghost tours.

- She will give our groups the... Basically a history lesson on the Orson Starr House, and then, once that's over, we start our investigation.

- So what do we know as far as the historical record goes about who died here?

Who these ghosts are thought to be?

- Right, so the family had 10 children in all, and only five minute to adulthood, so you had five children passing away, like I said, three in one week, Mr.

Starr dying, and it was presumably in this house, there's not a lot of record as to why or how, and for a time period, there was a descendant who had a husband who was a funeral director, so there was also funerals being held here.

- What was that first experience that made you think the stories of this house being haunted might be real?

- Well, I was here cleaning one day, it was in April, and April's a big month for the house because it's a lot... When a lot of the family members had passed away.

Beautiful sunny day, you wouldn't expect, you know, to hear anything on a, you know, bright sunny day, and I was in the master bedroom cleaning and I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and at that point I thought, well, you know, maybe it's just somebody on the front porch and I'm hearing an echo, so I go to the front door, there was nobody outside, there was nobody around the house, and I hear footsteps upstairs in the children's room walking across, there was nobody in here, and so I'm like, "Okay," the first thing that everyone had described is their experience in the house... (indistinct) But for me were... It was the footsteps.

- Do things like that happen often when you're here?

- I have heard footsteps since then, I've had the doors be left open that I know I've locked, I've had my hair touched in one of the rooms, I could feel someone touching it.

- [Chris] John and David from Flyer Paranormal have had their share of equally spooky experiences.

- I'm in the kitchen at the counter and I notice something come to the kitchen door, there was a figure that came to the kitchen door, and I thought it was my wife, and I turn around and I look and there's nothing there.

I go back to, you know, doing what I'm doing on the computer and next thing you know, it comes back, so I see it out of the corner of my eye and I turn real slow, and this time, this shadow figure stayed in my eyesight a little bit longer, and then, it disappeared, and I'm shaking my head and go back to doing what I'm doing, here it comes a third time, on our way home that night, me, David, my wife, I said, "Hey, I gotta tell you guys about an experience," and my wife cut me off and she said, "No, I have to tell you what happened," she said, "John, when you were in the kitchen, someone kept walking up to the kitchen door," and she said that she seen someone walk up to the doorway to the kitchen and watch what I was doing three separate times, and that was our very first night here.

- Yep, the very first night.

- So when you do a tour here, what do you do?

- I try to interact with spirits before we start any... Using any kind of devices, I want to try to get interaction as far as feeling what kind of energy is in the room.

Are you coming to see what we're doing in here?

- [David] Well, maybe find a good spot.

- You can join us.

- [John] Feel free.

- Yeah, come say hi.

- [John] Come join our circle.

- We'll do, like, a baseline K2 reading or EMF reading, and we'll set up a REM pod.

- [Chris] EMF, electromagnetic field, which spirits are said to give off and which the devices used in this investigation measure in different ways.

- Get it off green.

Help me out here.

We'll have that... We'll all sit around in a circle, maybe say our names, you know, respect the spirits and have them, you know, get to know us a little bit better and go from there.

- We've got new friends.

Yep.

We've got new friends here.

And we ask the spirit for communication, if there's any way that you can let us know that you're here, give us an indication, give us a sign and, you know, questions and basically games, "Can you play with us?

Is there anything that you can do for us?"

And, you know, we get hits on our devices and whatnot.

- Can you push it just a little bit my way?

- [Chris] We got quite a bit of device activity in the children's bedroom.

- I'd really like the ball back.

- [Chris] Where the legends of the house say that the spirits of the Starr family children who died on the property might reside.

- [John] Yeah!

That's what I'm talking about.

- Can whoever's in here say their name?

- [Computer] Connected to... (indistinct) (bell ringing) - What did you just ask?

- The name.

- One of them is Arissa.

Ethan.

Lidia.

- Is Arissa here?

(faint speaking) Is Ethan here?

- [David] Hey, John, I'm about to run that... (indistinct) For a minute.

- [John] Yeah, go ahead.

- [David] To get a little sense of what that sounds like.

(bell ringing) - [Chris] Whoa, was that...?

- Was that Ethan?

Ethan, if you're there, make the bell go off again, or you can say something to our friends out there.

- Yeah, say something to this device, make it go off.

(bell ringing) Oh, that was quick.

- [Andrea] Hi, Ethan!

- Knowing the history that we know, we will go into questions about Orson Starr, Rhoda, some of the kids' names, and we will try to get, you know, verification using our devices, "If this is so-and-so, can you do this?"

And we've gotten names, multiple names of the kids here in the house, and that's just by asking, "Who's here with us?"

We'll get those names repeated, kind of incorporating the history into our questions and how we go about, you know, getting those answers.

- [Chris] John tried communicating with Rhoda Gibbs Starr in her bedroom.

After he felt a cold spot that he found unsettling, he asked if we were unwelcome in her personal space.

- We'd definitely respect your wishes if you let us know somehow that you wanted us out, whether by the bell or... Okay, there's the lights.

Out.

- [David] See you later, thanks for the communication.

- [Chris] John later went back into Rhoda's bedroom to try communicating again using a different method.

- We did an experiment called the Estes Method, and it's a sensory deprivation experiment where you use noise cancellation headphones, an eye mask, and you listen to the spirit box.

- [Chris] The results were pretty spooky.

- "I'm trying to tell you.

I'm telling you.

Kids."

- They should be in bed by now, don't you think?

- Yeah, they should be asleep.

- Are they upset...?

Are you upset because we're keeping the kids awake?

- "Yeah."

- They said "Yeah."

(laughs) (Chris groaning in dismay) We're sorry.

Is that you, Rhoda, that's trying to communicate with us?

- "In the morning."

- Are you wanting to go to sleep?

So it feels like someone's putting their arm around my neck.

Around the back on my neck.

Is someone in here right now?

- [People] No.

- Huh?

- [People] No!

- I can't hear you, touch me if you're in here.

- No!

- Okay.

- [David] "Okay," what?

- All right.

All right.

Yep.

Done.

(Chris exclaiming in shock) - [Chris] We took that as our cue to wrap things up for the night.

We can't offer an explanation, but we can say that it was a fascinating, extremely memorable night where ghostly local legend intersected with very real local history in a way that rewarded curiosity about both subjects.

- We get a lot of different folks, different backgrounds, different beliefs, and you can tell that when someone comes in with, you know, excitement, and they're ready to figure out what the heck's going on on the other side, we tend to see more activity.