East Las Vegas group checks out haunted locations statewide

Clearly, east valley resident Chuck Klenus isn't afraid of ghosts. In fact, he's giddy when he talks about the many times he's seen a full-body apparition.

"I've seen dozens of them," he said. "I've been interested in the paranormal since I was a kid."

Klenus is the founder and lead investigator of the Nevada Paranormal Task Force. He and his crew of 17 paranormal investigators have visited scores of potential ghost sites in the Las Vegas Valley and around the state. The calling has them lurking around old buildings in the dead of night, setting up and monitoring a wide assortment of equipment to detect the presence of spirits. The tools range from simple digital audio recorders to thermal imaging cameras and the latest tool in their arsenal, video game peripherals.

"We've started using Xbox Kinect," Klenus said. "It detects movement the eye can't see and converts it to a stick figure on the screen."

The Kinect is a sensor that is used to detect where a player is in a room and what movement the player is making. The device is designed to allow gamers to do things, such as swing their arm, and have the sensor translate it into movement in the game. The members of the Nevada Paranormal Task Force hook it up directly to a laptop computer, which gives them a graphic representation of the unseen movement in an investigation site.

"We were in Beatty a while back, and it picked up movement in a part of a building where no one was," Klenus said. "The Kinect saw it first, but then I looked up and saw a full-body apparition walking down the hallway."

Klenus has been investigating ghosts for more than a quarter of a century, predating his move to Southern Nevada. He began by answering an ad in upstate New York seeking people interested in paranormal investigation. With a large number of old buildings and a few centuries of occupants, it was easy to find places that had ghost stories attached to them. Here, where most of the buildings are less than 50 years old, it can be trickier to find leads, he said, but he and the group are contacted regularly to track town unexplained noises and phenomena. Some of the homes are so new that the investigators believe the spirit is attached to the land it was built on instead of the house itself.

"I've had to create a second group called Coyote Paranormal to take care of residences in the valley," Klenus said. "That's seven investigators in addition to the 17 in the main group. They are mostly people who, for various reasons, like family commitments, don't have the freedom to travel out of town much."

The second crew allows the Nevada Paranormal Task Force to investigate old buildings across the state, many of which have been abandoned for decades. On Oct. 9-11, they made their annual excursion to Pioche to investigate multiple buildings. Much of what they do involves setting up audio and visual recording equipment and then later poring through hours of footage looking for anything unusual.

"I'm converting iPhones to infrared cameras now, so we can set up several of them at one location," Klenus said. "There's an app and a piece of hardware you can add, and it costs $200 to $300 for an infrared sensor instead of the $5,000 we were spending before."

The Nevada Paranormal Task Force doesn't charge for its services, and the members end up sinking a lot of money into equipment to further their research. The recent trip also brought them to Eureka, where the owner of the Jackson House Hotel had asked them to investigate.

The team has investigated sites as far away as Virginia City and Reno, Tombstone, Ariz., and less well-known Nevada towns, including Manhattan and Belmont. Locally, they have investigated the comedian Redd Foxx's home, two of Liberace's residences, the Old Las Vegas Mormon Fort, the Harrison House, Spring Mountain Ranch State Park and Floyd Lamb Park at Tule Springs. They have a few they haven't been able to get permission to examine yet, but Klenus is hopeful.

"I'd love to get into the Hartland Mansion," Klenus said. "I'd also like to get into the Huntridge Theater, the Golden Steer, the Boulder City Hospital and the Riviera, before it gets torn down."

Klenus adds that they are always looking for more investigators. Visit nevadaparanormaltaskforce.com.

— To reach East Valley View reporter F. Andrew Taylor email ataylor@viewnews.com or call 702-380-4532.