Investigtions

OKPRI: Case Files

The Stone Lion Inn

Click Here For The Movie Documentary
Click Here For Channel 4's Media Coverage

Media Coverage for "A Haunted Evening at the Stone Lion Inn"

Date: 10-4-05/10-24-05/1-29-06
Stats: Normal, Quiet
Moon: New Moon, 0% of full
Temperature: 61F. Cloudy (For 3rd Investigation)
Wind direction and speed: North at 8mph
Humidity: 21%
Barometric Pressure: 29.78 Rising
Member’s Present: Christy, Roger, Kevin, Marcia, Jim, Donna, Dana, Kristen, Nichole

Special Thanks is Given to Becky Luker (owner of the Stone Lion Inn) and to Heather Holeman with News Channel 4 for covering the one of our investigations here. We had a blast as usual and look forward to working with you guys again next year!

To visit the Stone Lion Inn Website, Click here: Stone Lion Inn Website

History:

The Stone Lion Inn: Originally built in 1907, the year of statehood, by F.E. Houghton, the founder of Cotton Oil Company and owner of the first car dealership in Oklahoma. The Houghton’s started out in a little house that once sat on the vacant lot next door on the East side of the Inn. Although this little house is no longer there, the Houghton’s lived in it until they had their 6th child and needed more living space. 1906 they began construction on this home completing it in 1907 at a cost of $11,900.00 which at that time was a great deal of money since the average home at that time was being built for between $800.00 and $1200.00. In 1907, the Houghton’s new home was the most expensive house built in Guthrie, Oklahoma. The home is 8,000 square feet on 4 levels, each level being 2,000 square feet.

The Houghton’s moved into the house in 1907 and proceeded to have 6 more children. All of the 12 children survived childhood except for one daughter, who died BEFORE the Houghton's moved into the Stone Lion Inn. This young child, in childhood from being over medicated NOT by the local doctor, but by the maid who overmedicated this child with cough syrup, which contained opium, a common form of cough syrup for those times. There are historical records that report that the young female child did indeed die, but there are no mentions of her name or any other information that can tell us anymore about her. For a long time though, many paranormal investigators and various people, including the owner of the Stone Lion Inn, Becky Luker, believed that it was the Houghton's daughter's named Augusta that died of the whooping cough when she was 8 believed to haunt the Stone Lion Inn. This "legendary ghost" has been written up in countless numbers of newspapers and magazines and at least 5 television news stories have been done on her.

"When she was 8-years-old, she contracted whooping cough and what is believed to have happened is that, the maid overmedicated her with cough syrup and she died," explains Becky Luker.

Luker purchased the Stone Lion Inn in 1986 and converted the house into the first bed and breakfast in Oklahoma. While converting the house, Luker and her family lived upstairs on the 3rd floor. Luker says Augusta, on several occasions, has visited her family. "My younger son's toy closet would be played in and his toys would be scattered around," Luker says.

In the 1920’s the house was leased to Smith’s Funeral Home and became a mortuary. The Smiths lived upstairs and the embalming as done in the kitchen. Today, the owner uses the beautiful porcelain embalming table as a buffet in the hallway where guests can find refreshments all day long.

Luker purchased the Stone Lion Inn in 1986 and converted the house into the first bed and breakfast in Oklahoma. The Stone Lion Inn is most known for its Murder Mystery Weekends which it does every Friday and Saturday night.

Luker says, "Many guests report that they're awakened in the night between 2:00 a.m. and 2:30 a.m. They're awakened when a small child comes into the room and pats them on the cheek, but when they come to full wakefulness, there's no one there."

"We also hear a woman's laughter sometimes around 4:00 a.m. upstairs," says Becky Luker. "On a number of occasions we've had guests who have heard something or were frightened by something and have gotten up and left. Something has remained of someone who has not moved on."

The Stone Lion Inn has six guest suites with private baths. 4 suits have sitting rooms and claw-footed bathtubs. Becky Luker has also restored all the original oak woodwork, paneling in the dining room and beautiful staircase. There are 3 fireplaces, 8 bathrooms, 6 bedrooms, 2 dining rooms, 5 sitting rooms and an apartment on the 3rd. floor. The historical home is 4 levels with each level being 2000 square feet.

Our group has known for a long time about the Stone Lion Inn and it’s rumors of being haunted by little eight year old Augusta Houghton. We decided back in October of 2005 to do a full investigation of the location so we got into contact with the owner, Becky Luker, who graciously agreed to let us come in and investigate the Inn. We had the chance to visit with Becky for quite a while and she told us many stories about things that had happened there at the Stone Lion Inn, including stories about her weekend guests who have been frightened away in the middle of the night. Becky is a wonderful writer and story teller and we thoroughly enjoyed our visit with her.

After our group had conducted a few investigations at the Stone Lion Inn, we invited our friends at TAPS to come over and do an investigation there with us. They took us up on our offer and arrived at the location on Feb. 15th 2006 to investigate and film with Sci-Fi for their show Ghosthunters. The filming took hours and it seemed like we were on the set forever. No one really knows all the work and effort that goes into making the show until they are there and living it! The findings of the Stone Lion Inn by the TAPS team will be revealed when the airing shows on May 17th, 2006.

We were also contacted by News Channel 4 in October of 2005 and asked to film a story for their annual Halloween airing again so we gladly agreed to do the story with them and since we were already investigating the Stone Lion Inn, we decided to do host the story there at the Stone Lion. Becky agreed to let News Channel 4 come in and so we would like to extend a big thank you to Becky and Heather Holeman with News Channel 4! We thought that Heather did a great story covering one of our investigations there at the Stone Lion Inn.

The Investigation:

Since the Stone Lion Inn was such a big place, we wanted to make sure that we investigated the location thoroughly. We decided to do a walk through of the Inn to make sure that we knew all areas of the location, in order to set up equipment, etc. It was still early in the evening hours, around 6:45pm when we entered the 3rd floor. The third floor is an open room with 4 platform alcoves that are on each of the 4 sides of the room, next to the windows. We were looking around and I (Christy) happened to open one of the doors that led to a single bathroom. I assumed that some of the other members would want to take a look inside the bathroom, so I just pushed the door too, but didn’t close it. At this time, everyone else was on the other side of the room as they had not made their way around towards where the door was. I took about 10 steps away from the door and stopped to look around the room. All the sudden we heard a door slam LOUDLY! We all stopped talking and exploring the attic and said, “What was that?” I turned to look and saw that the bathroom door had slammed closed. Unfortunately we didn’t have the camcorder going, but we did have the audio recorder going and captured that on audio. SLAMMING DOOR AUDIO CLIP We tried to go back and recreate the door slamming, but were not able to. The door had to be physically pushed shut, so it wouldn’t close like that on its own. We found this out when we tried to recreate it.

Other things that we noted while doing the investigation at the various times throughout our visits, were strange burning smell in one of the upstairs room. It wasn’t however the same reported burning smell of a cigar pipe that has been reported by many others. This smelled like the burning belt of a vacuum cleaner, but what was strange is there was no heat on in the house or any other type of source that should have caused the smell.

There is one bedroom downstairs on the first floor that we refer to as the "Blue Room." In this room on our first investigation, a couple of the members (Jim, Marcia & Dana) had just finished up doing the sweeps of the room so they proceeded to leave. When they were walking out of the room, one of the doors to the curio cabinet opened up all the way by itself. This caught their eye and so they went back and tried to see if they could recreate it to make it happen. Jim had noticed before they walked out of the room that both of the curio cabinet doors were completely closed so this is another reason why it caught their attention when it opened. Whenever they tried to create it, they noticed that the right side of the door would come open if the left one was opened. They closed both the doors securely and then tried stepping on the floors a bit hard to see if they're footsteps could have caused the door to come open, but the doors remained closed.

On the second floor, Roger and Kevin were doing a photo sweep prior to the investigation, when Kevin heard a loud audible voice in the door way, telling him to get out. He came down stairs and told us and so I asked him to go back on his audio recorder and see if the voice was there. I told him that if he heard it audibly that it should have been picked up on his audio recorder. Sure enough, upon review of his audio, we could plainly hear the "get out" that he had heard. Later we went upstairs and Kevin showed us where he had heard the audible voices. “Get Out!”

Also on the 2nd floor when we were doing sweeps one room which connects to a smaller nursery room, we had set down our K-11 meter on a trunk chest that was at the foot of the bed. It was about 30 seconds after the K-11 was placed on the chest that it started activating. I immediately wanted to see if I could find a source for the EMF activation so I tried to open up the trunk, but could not get it open because it was locked. Later on when reviewing my audio, I heard what sounded like a woman’s voice saying, “It’s locked” around the same time that I was trying to unlock the trunk.

One of the other strange things that we noticed while we were there, and this happened on our 3rd investigation, was correlating EMF meter activations. We were just getting started, setting our equipment out on the table and we had 3 of our EMF meters, two K-11's and one gauss meter setting on the table, a bit apart from each other and apart from all other sources that might set them off. We were discussing who was going to start out using which piece of equipment when I said that I would start out carrying the camcorder, but would probably have someone switch off with me after a while. That is when all meters started to activate simultaneously. After the meter activation stopped, we looked for a direct source that might have caused the activations, but could find none that could duplicate the source as it had originally happened. Here is the audio clip recorded from that incident. Audio Clip of 3 EMF Meters Correlating Simultaneously

On the first investigation, we did a sit down on the 2nd floor in the large room with the nursery connected. This is also the same room that we had the K-11 meter activation on the trunk. We were sitting quietly there when we heard footsteps in the hall and then a loud THUMP. We happened to record this thumb on audio and you can hear us talking about how we heard the thumb which sounded to us there, like a loud footstep on the stairs. "Loud Thump"

Later on whenever we were in the upstairs on the 3rd floor again conducting our sweep, Marcia and I went downstairs to retrieve a doll to put upstairs as an experiment. When we went downstairs, we heard loud footsteps following us on the second floor which seemed to follow us all the way up to the 3rd floor again.

On our last investigation at the Stone Lion Inn, we were going down into the basement to conduct our sweeps whenever one of our team members happened to fall down the basement stairs. Upon review of the audio, one our members, Kevin, recorded what sounds like a woman making a comment about Dana falling down the basement stairs.

We also have a very unique time in the Bordello room on the second floor. We were in the room taking sweeps of the room. Dana took a seat in one of the chair in order to log information in on the log sheet. Marcia felt like she needed to take a picture towards Dana so she did and a mist going from the floor to the ceiling showed up in her photo. I started taking photos toward Dana as well and came up with some very interesting mist photos too. We continued taking photos for approximately 15 minutes straight. During this time temperature fluxuations were also noted, ranging in differences of 6 degrees. Several members reported feeling cold spots and Dana reported feeling cold the whole time and stated that she felt the back of her head and shoulders being touched. (Video & audio are still under review and will be added here). We looked for sources that could have caused the mist while there and could not find a cause. We ruled out reflection on several of the photographs and ruled out a “mist condensation” caused by breath or by cold, wet temperatures since the temperature of the room remained in the area of 58 degree F to 64 degrees F. One of these photographs revealed what appears to be a transparent face of Dana in the door that was approximately 3-4 feet behind Dana from where she was sitting. We had these photographs all analyzed by several different photographic experts and their reported findings are listed below.

Psychic Investigator's Comments:

When I first laid my eyes on the Stone Lion Inn I was fascinated by its beauty and the mystery which it seemed to hold inside its walls. I can honestly say that at all 3 investigations I was a bit uncomfortable there and told myself and other members that I didn’t think I would feel comfortable staying a night (to sleep) in the Stone Lion Inn by myself, nor did I think I would want to stay the night there even with one other person there with me. It seemed that from every corner of the house we were being watched and several times I caught myself looking back over my shoulder expecting to see something or someone standing behind me.

One of the first connections I made in the home was in the basement where I saw a older gentleman (possibly in his early 60’s) in a gray colored suit. He had a mustache and had a smoking pipe in his mouth. After I saw him, I quickly got a glimpse of a few caskets up against one of the walls. I then saw clouded lungs, heard coughing and heard the word “cancer,” so I assumed his physical death had been caused by cancer. Due to the impressions that I had received from him, I felt strongly that this gentleman was associated with the Stone Lion Inn during the time that it was “Smith’s Funeral Home.” The man seemed to be a bit bothered by us being down in the basement and quickly hurried out through on of the walls in the basement.

It was on the second floor that I saw a woman in one of the upstairs rooms which had a nursery attached to it. I have to admit that I was taken a bit by surprise whenever I entered this room. We were getting ready to do the sweeps of the room so I was the first one that entered in order to find a place to set the K-11 meter down. As I entered the doorway, I looked up and sitting on the bed near the window was a younger woman (possibly in her 20's or early 30’s) with long dark hair wearing a long white dress with no shoes . I wasn’t expecting her and out of reaction jumped back. I then saw her dissipate upward and she was gone. After a few moments I entered the room again but of course this time looking over my shoulders. I chose the trunk at the foot of the bed to set the K-11 meter on. The rest of the team entered the room and after just a few seconds the K-11 meter started to activate. I began looking for sources that could have caused the meter to go off so I tried to open the lid to the trunk but it wouldn’t come open. This is when later upon review that we found out that we had recorded an audio clip of a woman’s voice saying, ***** “It's locked” *****

The sit-down was very interesting in the sense that we chose to do it in the Bordello room on the 2nd floor where we had earlier captured the weird mist anomalies in our photographs. Once we were set up in this room, I felt a group of about 4 people coming forward towards us, but then they stopped and I saw a bright red line drawn on the ground. I was a bit baffled by this and didn’t really know what to think of it.

I focused in a bit more on the group of people and saw one of the them that I had already made contact with, the man from the basement who then gave me his name as “Edward.” I saw an older woman that looked like she might have been in her 60’s. She gave us the name of Sarah and was very upset with anger. There was another gentleman in this forties that was standing with them, but he gave no name or information about himself. In the back behind them was a young lady in her twenties with long brown hair. She seemed a bit nervous, but gave her name as “Emily.” It was very weird, but I saw this woman reach out towards Dana (one of our members) but then drew back her arms when the older woman Sarah stepped in front of her and blocked her. I then saw Emily lower her arms and she quietly took a step backwards.

I then saw Sarah point at the red line drawn on the floor again. We still didn’t know what she wanted yet so we started asking some questions. We asked them if they were mad that we were there and we were told no. We asked Sarah why she was angry and she replied, “The followers….disrespectful and they crossed the line.” We still were baffled by this and didn’t quiet know what she meant but assumed that one or some of the visitors or even another paranormal group had come to the Stone Lion Inn and had upset them. Even Becky herself had previously told us that the house seems to protect itself and all of the staff there at the Stone Lion also claim that when paranormal groups come into the Inn, the house usually acts up trying to "get attention" for a couple of days afterwards. We assured Sarah and the others that we had come to visit them in peace and it seemed that the feel to the room became more relaxed.

All the times that we were there, I felt the man (Edward) which I first encountered in the basement, the strongest out of all the spirits there. Strangely enough I didn't directly pick up on a little girl there so I can honestly say that the spirits that I did pick up on seemed to be those that were associated with the Inn when it was Smith's funeral home. Do I feel the Stone Lion Inn is haunted? Most definitely and I can say that there were many times that I did not feel comfortable being in the Inn and would be looking over my shoulder to see who or what was behind me. I would have a hard time spending the night there (to sleep) even with another person or two, let alone by myself!! The Inn however is very beautiful and a great place to conduct an investigation.