Bump in the Night

It's a 150-year old building that used to house the criminally insane. Inside its crumbling stone walls, demented inmates once howled, misinformed doctors dug into patients skulls and pierced their gray matter with draconian lobotomy tools and young people with treatable mental disorders were labeled "nuts" and subjected to a lifetime of agonizing institutionalism. What was once the Johnson County poor farm and asylum now sits abandoned. With a past that echoes the premises of many a B-rate horror film, the foreboding gray building begs the question- do tormented spirits still mill around the building's hallways, unable to escape from the raw trauma they were once exposed to? Is the building haunted? Apparently, some people are eager to find out.

Though the plan has come under fire in recent days, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors is kicking around a proposal by the county Historical Society to send a team of paranormal investigators to the sight to conduct research.

The Carroll Area Paranormal team would conduct the tests for free, using thermal-detection equipment, hyper-sensitive recording devices, and special "aura" detecting gear to capture any unusual activity at the 153- acre sight.

Officials say the investigation is not prompted by any particular spooky occurrences, but is instead a chance to look into an often-asked about possibility. In what could be dubbed a preemptive search for ghosts, the team will try to find "them" before they find us.

Tours of the site are conducted on a regular basis and tourists frequently ask if the place is haunted. The county board of supervisors hopes to clarify the answer by allowing the paranormal team access to the sight.

But, the build up and hype surrounding this issue is quickly spiraling out of control. Many Iowans are pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole concept. Why should we allow a troupe of tech-savvy nerds who've watched one too many episodes of the X-Files conduct a pointless and utterly inconclusive experiment.

Ultimately, the storm of publicity induced by this proposition can not hurt the Johnson County Historical society or the poor farm. Anything that forces people to reassess an oft-forgotten facet of history is a good thing. Sometimes, it takes a jolt of the bizarre to grab peoples' attention. And, in that regard, Casper can act as just a viable historian as Howard Zinn.