white poison industries

Mention the Coronado Apartments to many long time Des Moines residents and they’ll likely remember that the building was destroyed by a tragic fire in 1977. Five people were killed and the current owner of the property thinks some of them still linger in her house.

The Joie de Vie tea house in Sherman Hill sits on the lot at 20th & Center St. where the Coronado Apartments once stood. The shell of the apartment building was razed after the fire and the lot stood empty for nearly 20 years. When Drake University sought to expand its campus in the 1990s several historic homes were moved out of the neighborhood and planted on new foundations around the city. The Joie de Vie house is one of these and it sits on the spot that was once the northwest corner of the Coronado Apartments.

Kate Lydon is a paranormal investigator with the Supernatural Research Society of Iowa (SRSI) in Des Moines. She and several colleagues formed the group as renegades in early December 2008 after splitting off from IPART (Iowa Paranormal Advanced Research Team) She gave me some inside information about what goes on during a paranormal investigation. Like the investigators on the Sci-Fi show, Ghost Hunters, the team seeks to capture technological evidence of paranormal experiences using audio, video, electromagnetic field (EMF) detectors, and infrared cameras.

The lot this property stands on may have a jumbled mixture of ghosts and spirits. Not only are there entities associated with the Coronado fire, but the 106 year old house that now stands on the lot may have brought some restless spirits with it in the move from its previous location in the Drake neighorhood.

According to the property owner, footsteps can sometimes be heard running down this hallway. The sound seems to go on beyond where the hallway ends. The investigators think this may be the sound of a woman named Fay Warwick running down the hallway of the Coronado Apartments trying to escape the fire. She didn’t make it out and died in an upstairs apartment.

A male spirit is said to linger around the area of this fireplace. He’s known to be mischievous and play pranks like a child. He also seems to be more “active” when a woman with sex appeal is nearby.

Another spirit is known to have an affinity for children and seems to be protective of toys. The investigators monitored a room full of toys from many different eras in the hopes of capturing that spirit’s attention. A lamp in that room is reported to turn on and off on its own.

After the team sets up their equipment, a lot of the time during the investigation is spent sitting quietly while the audio and video recorders take down evidence to be reviewed later. The investigators use information from the property owners and independent research they’ve done on the history of the property to try communicating with the spirits. They try to create situations and an environment in which the spirits might make contact in some way they can record.

This investigation yielded some audio recordings that seem to have captured some unexplained voices.

Now,  keep in mind I wasn’t there myself, but the people who were there have all told me that the voices they captured were not those of the people present and that none of them remembered hearing these voices at the time they were recorded.

This first one captured some of the investigators talking about something in the background while an unidentified voice whispers something and then trails off.

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The next one captured a very faint voice that seems to say “Get out” when the main speaker (someone present) took a pause.

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This last one is the most distinctive voice of all.  It sounds like a woman with the cadence and tone of an urban black person wailing, “I’m sorry!”  None of the people present at the house that day have a voice that sounds like this and none of them identified it as anyone who was physically present at the time.

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The group of investigators is hoping to return a second time to do another investigation and hopefully capture some further evidence to analyze.

Thank you to Kevin Wright for allowing me use of the audio files, and to Kate Lydon for her photographs.