Case #3: Des Moines Marina Park



Intro

We had heard a few years ago that some activity occurred every January 8th at the Des Moines Marina Park in the city of Des Moines. There were two sources that we found. The first was the website www.theshadowlands.net. The Park was listed under their "Haunted Locations Index." The other source we had was from another paranormal group that had investigated the park. We decided that we couldn't miss this opportunity. The activity that people claimed occurred was #1: The ghost of a little girl was seen on the beach and #2: A swing in the playground would swing by itself. We decided to concentrate our efforts at these two places.

The Investigation

We entered the park at 8:00pm on January 8th. We brought with us a digital camcorder, a High8 camcorder, a Mini DV camcorder, two digital voice recorders, a digital EMF detector, an ELF zone EMF detector, and a Digital Thermometer. We started out the investigation by doing an EMF and temperature sweep of the area in which the playgroup used to be (the city had done some remodeling of the park and had taken out the playground). Since we were outside in winter with the wind speed very high, the thermometer could not get an accurate reading. There were no EMF spikes, the readout stayed at a .1. We then proceeded to record the area with our cameras and recorders. Unfortunately for us, the world was against us that night. There was high speed winds, there were people coming and going all the time. This park also sits fairly close to the flight path of the Sea-Tac Airport. We didn't have any experiences in the playground area, and our cameras were not equipped for filming in complete darkness. We realized that we probably weren't going to catch much with our equipment, and anything we could catch with our audio was going to be drowned out by the wind. We then decided that maybe we would just sit and see if we could experience anything without our equipment. We didn't have any experiences, so we decided to move on to the beach area. The beach proved to be just as bad with the nearby stream drowning out anything on the audio, though I tried to keep one voice recorder running for most of the investigation, as well as a little bit of video. Unfortunately, we also didn't catch anything here. Throughout the rest of the night, we did try to sit it out at both places, but we didnt have any experiences.

Reviewing the Evidence

We went over all the video and audio, but couldn't see or hear anything out of the ordinary. However, even if we did catch something, there were too many factors that ruined our evidence. There were the following things that interfered with our equipment: wind, living people, our feet splashing in the mud, airplanes, a helicopter, the stream flowing, people honking their horns constantly, and many more.

Conclusion

Due to all the interference and not being able to debunk anything, we've decided to classify this location as: inconclusive. We are hoping to come back to this location at another time and hope for better conditions.

Evidence

Watch and listen to our evidence for the investigation, maybe you'll catch something we didn't. Keep in mind all the interference that we had, and I would suggest not listening for too long, the sound of the wind may give you a headache.

Video #1
Video #2
Video #3
Video #4
Video #5
Video #6
Audio #1
Audio #2
Audio #3
Audio #4