A Peek into the Spirit World: The Chair

There are many objects in this world that are said to link us to the spirit world. Ouija boards, the infamous Annabelle doll, and here at Plymouth State, we have the chair.

The chair was brought to Plymouth State for when the Silver Center for the Arts ran the show, Sweeney Todd. No one is exactly sure where the chair came from, but some say it carries a dark presence. This presence doesn’t have a name, and we don’t know if it has a purpose, he is simply known as The Man in Hannaway. There have been many sightings of him, but he has only ever been seen and a silhouette or a shadow, roaming around on the catwalk and other dark corners of the theater.

Clay Harbert, the president of the Paranormal Research Team and lead investigator, said this about The Man in Hannaway, “I’ve been investigating the Silver Center since spring of 2016, and every single time I've come in here for an investigation we interact with a male who won't tell us his name. People have seen him as a dark figure in the catwalk. There have been people who have associated him with this chair, I don’t know if I believe that necessarily. So tonight we will do some tests on the chair, to see if it’s haunted. If it is we will try and see if there is any connection to The Man In Hannaway.”

When we started investigating the chair we weren’t met by any possible spirits at first. It wasn’t until one member expressed doubt that anything was associated with the chair that we made any contact. There was a spirit that said he was a man, who lives in Hannaway. He claimed to be associated with the chair. We lost contact for a while, but when we began to express doubt over what happened, the spirit came back.

Clay, when doing preliminary testing on the chair last Saturday, said that he noticed a pressure on his arm that caused him to lose feeling in his finger. A couple days later, he noticed a thumb-sized bruise on his forearm where the pressure was. When we asked this spirit if it was responsible for leaving the bruise on his arm, it said yes. 

This isn’t the only time there have been weird experiences in the Silver Center. Jessica Neufell, a senior investigator in Plymouth State Paranormal Research, told me about a time she investigated Silver Center.

She said, “It was last year, it was my first investigation, we split up into groups. We didn’t get anything in the recital hall, or the prop room, but we did get a lot of EMF in Hannaway. We were all standing in the main lobby when we heard a huge bang from upstairs. We all thought it was one of the other investigators, but as we started to go investigate the noise, the investigator walked out of the bathroom behind us.”

I, however, don’t believe that the chair is haunted, for more than just the thought that I don’t believe in ghosts. If The Man in Hannaway is tied to the chair, and the chair is stored off campus, then why would he still be here? 

This may be something that needs more research, or maybe it will just remain a mystery till the day Silver Center closes down. Maybe The Man In Hannaway is just an overactive imagination, or maybe, just maybe, he’s our peek into the spirit world.