The Paranormal Investigation of the Ione Hotel
By Belinda Bentley
The streak of light I am 100% convinced it's a spirit. We'd been snapping pictures from 3pm until 3am and all we got were orbs. At 10am I told Rubbie to ask the spirits to appear as streaks of light instead of orbs. The next shot was a streak of light!
We started our afternoon with a drive over to Preston Castle. You can feel the spirits on the property. I didn’t have to walk up to the gate or call out to them to get a sense they were there. The area was full of them. It was as if they were waiting on us. Waiting for something. Something I would find out later in the evening. We took a few pictures and drove away.
There were over 60 investigators at The HPI Scouting Mission at Ione Hotel. This is just the account of what happened in the eyes of Belinda Bentley. It started with us checking into our hotel room. It was the last of 14 rooms and was not reported to be haunted. The haunted rooms as I remember it 7,3, 9 and 12.
My roommates and I went downstairs and at that moment I saw my sister and her friend Janci enter the hotel. Moments later Paul Dale Roberts called everyone to do the séance. Bobby Marchesso from “Conversations With a Serial Killer,” brought the group into a meditative space to help us open up so we can be available to the spirits that wanted to talk.
Paul Dale Roberts led the séance that I wasn’t feeling compelled to be a part of, but I had brought friends and didn’t want to abandoned them so I stayed. My feeling was to move to a smaller group. Psychics don’t always listen to themselves. After calling the spirits in Paul said “Belinda if you want to share any feelings,” I nodded, but was trying not to connect. In a room of 60 people, the energy was to strong and the fact we were all holding hands didn’t help. The energy was flowing through the group, through me. That’s not always a good thing for a psychic. The next thing Paul said is “Use my psychics.” I think my energy just perked up and said “Ooh me, pick me!” When what I
Seven years of investigating and I have never seen this before. Orbs are round, this is oval. I'm not sure if this is ghostly or dust. It's labeled UGA
consciously thought was “Not me!”
The next thing I knew I was feeling energy come into me from the right shoulder. It spider-ed into my veins like ice. Down my arm, through my heart, my hands and a my arms started to shake. I was nauseous immediately. I let go of the two hands I was holding. When I felt normal I grabbed their hands again hoping to be a spectator now. Paul was speaking to the spirits and for the life of me I can’t remember anything he was saying. It was like observing things from far away. I can remember hearing a woman say “She broke the circle.” When I let go of both hands for the second time. and told the person to my right and left “Don’t touch me.” As I touched them I started to leave my body. Something else was taking over. The woman next to me Corinna Gross, said she felt something go through my shoulder. I opened my eyes and things were foggy. So, I broke the circle and left.
I was walking along side the wall that separated me from the group. I knew someone was following me because they had on loud shoes like boots. They were following me so close if I stopped they would have bumped into me. I could feel them. I assumed they were trying to catch up to me to check and make sure I was OK. It’s embarrassing to make a scene in front of a group of people. The stranger must of known how I felt. I turned to the person to say, “I am fine,” but when I turned around no one was there. No one!
When I returned, I sat alone. I sensed there were a few spirits upstairs that didn’t want to be a part of the big group and they were studying a few investigators that were there investigating.
The spirits downstairs were making a point of saying “We aren’t going to talk and we just want you to leave us alone.” I got the sense that they wanted the psychics to convey that, but why was I the only psychic it was responding to? I was confused. Four other psychics were present. Reading the article Paul wrote about last nights investigation he said, three people got sick during the séance. I guess I wasn’t the only one. At the time I could only focus on me, but thinking back. A few people had left the room. Now I know why. As Paul says, “They are not circus clowns, they won’t perform on demand.” This experience for me is part of the dangers of the paranormal and one must always be prepared for it.
During the seance something was entering my body. This psychic Janci looked like she could be having the same experience. Something going in or coming out of her mouth. Could this be validation?
Paul asked photographers to snap pictures. I can’t just dismiss this photo. My photographer of the night was Rubbie Salinas. She had captured a photo of an orb coming from my sister’s friend mouth (who I might add is also a psychic.) It was beyond strange. After my experience of the entity going into my body, could this photo be validation? Maybe, maybe not. It will go into my pile of the unexplained.
Going through some of Rubbie Salinas’s photos she captured a picture of a door. Nothing special, but in the next photo seconds later we see a man down on the floor. It looked like a real person to me. I asked the spirits to confirm it’s a spirit or to find the living person in that photo. After I asked I let it go. We were in search of a man in an orange shirt.
The owner told me the back room was haunted when I told him I felt I was being lead to the back, to a dark place. They took me back there with a nice couple that came to make sure I was OK after the séance. He allowed us to walk around. I immediately felt a man saying “This is my space. They need to pay attention to me and respect my space.” Maybe the same spirit from the seance. Farhan said “There is a man back there. This is where most of the activity is.” The spirit doesn’t like negative people. Farhan then mentions he’d seen an apparition in the kitchen one day. It was a man in an orange shirt.
I brought Farhan up to my room and Rubbie showed him the picture of the guy in the orange shirt. He told us that it wasn’t the spirit he had scene. The apparition he saw had a neon orange shirt on. We showed the couple who had went with me to the kitchen and the male said, “That’s me.” He was on the floor fixing his camera. Rubbie was disappointment it wasn’t an apparition. She is new to ghost hunting and like us all – in the beginning want desperately to capture something. I was thrilled. Debunked! Unidentified Ghostly Apparitions (UGA’s) drive me insane! This was now identified.
We spent a few hours listening to the owner tell stories about Ione Hotel. Then he shared with us his ghostly experience at home. Which
UGA - Unidentified Ghostly Appartition now identified! Debunked
reminded me a bit of Paranormal Activity. He welcomed us to come investigate. He has bodies buried in his yard from the 1800′s. Doesn’t that get you in the mood to ghost hunt? It was time to go back out there and start investigating.
1:20am when we all departed I decided to walk around and do an investigation. Rubbie and I ran into Bobby. While sharing our experiences Champagne Richardson a teenager saw an apparition of a little girl holding a bear or doll. There was a claim that a little girl haunts the building.
I joined a group of people including Shannon McCabe, and Bobby into a haunted room. Bobby picked up that the energy was by me and another lady next to me. The woman next to me described a series of things. Her muscles shaking, a bad taste in her mouth, hot and then cold, and I found it amazing that I was having the exact same experiences at same time either moments before her or after her. She described everything that was happening to me. Bobby was right the energy was over here!
I started to feel like I was breathing in smoke, clawing at my throat, smoke in my ears, eyes burning. I felt I was dying from the smoke, not the fire. I felt someone was vomiting acid from their stomach and a third person whose throat had been cut. I then felt I wasn’t getting information from just the hotel, but also Preston Castle which was a 3 minute drive away. I got a psychic impression that tunnels led from Preston Castle and spouted out and I saw tunnels near the hotel. I felt there was smoke in the tunnels. I picked up on a woman who was stabbed in the stomach and paralyzed from the waste down and I also had the feeling she was raped. I normally see spirits, but they were having me feel them tonight.
Bobby told us he picked up on a woman who drank poison earlier that night.
Shannon heard rumors of tunnels. in the morning I was told there are tunnels, but there were also mines that many men would have died in and the smoke would make sense. They blew up the tunnels to expand them and there were fires in the mines as well. I was also told in Preston they would tie some boys to the bed and a few died in a fire. (I wasn’t sure if that was rumor or fact). Chantal informed me the next morning the Ione use to be a brothel. I remembered one detail I got was a woman died in the hotel because her corsets was to tight cutting off her air supply. I also got the name Rachel and Brigitte, sounded like an English accent, not American.
I plan too take another trip to Ione library soon to do some historic research. Maybe I’ll find facts to validate what I felt. It would be nice to get some information on the spirits I connected with. Though my investigation didn’t give me much as far as physical evidence the personal experiences were amazing.
We did happen to find another UGA. What strikes me as odd is that the person seems to be as tall as the windows located at the top of the door. It could be the angle of the shot. It appears the person is trying to open the door. Will the real Slim Shady please stand up? If this was you Sunday morning. Let us know. As of now, it is unexplained.
We did capture an orb that looks like a cat. Rubbie Salinas lost her cat a day before the investigation. She died in the early morning. The next night Paul Dale Robert lead a seance where he called in spirits not specifying only the ones in the hotel. The cat answered. Seven out of eight people saw a cat in the orb, Rubbie was the only one that didn’t. When she got home she broke down in tears. It was her cat. In the photo and in the orb you can see a problem with the right eye. She had an eye infection as a baby and the eye always looked someone lazy afterward. RIP Ziggy.
This was taken after the seance. Paul Dale Roberts called in the spirits adn they answered! At the Ione Hotel.
UGA Unexplained Ghostly Apparition! The teenager says it looks the same as the spirit she saw. You can see it looks all grey there is no color to the apparition.
