Goosebumps erupt over your neck and arms. A chill runs down the length of your spine. You squint into the cavernous darkness of the corner of your room. Your heart thuds in your ribcage while the blood wooshes into your ears. Did you just see something move? What now? Do you tug the blankets over your head and squeeze your eyes shut hoping it’s just your imagination or do you brave the dark and reach for your lamp on the nightstand?  

For those who are convinced that the things going bump in the night aren’t just the sounds of a house creaking, there is S.A.G.E. - also known as the Southern Alberta Ghost Encounters. The team is composed of Greg Nolin, his wife Jessica Doyon, Desiree Kay, and Mickael Snow. The group only started out a month or so ago, but has found that one social media post on an Airdrie group has given them plenty of allegedly supernatural places to investigate. However, the group goes into all investigations with a healthy dose of skepticism, balancing their belief in the supernatural, knowing that there may also be this-worldly explanations. 

“I've had experiences throughout my past and in my downtime, I've been working on doing this and so we started to get equipment together and we talked to these two (Desiree Kay, and Mickael Snow) and they definitely were on board,” Nolin said. 

Nolin’s spouse, Jessica, said that she has always had a fascination with the paranormal, even as a child. 

“My mom and my Abuela [grandmother] they would share stories of their experiences when they were little. It was mostly on sightings and premonitions and as I got older, I had my own experiences with intuition,” she said. “I've been on the little skeptic side of things [too]. [You] don't always have to go crazy because of the sound you hear.” 

The same can be said for Mickael Snow. Although he said he’s experienced the paranormal, he has also reserved some skepticism. 

“There's been a few experiences that I came across that do actually make me believe, but I’m always skeptical of it,” Snow said.  

Desiree Kay said that she joined the group because she is determined to get solid proof of the supernatural. 

“I’m doing this because I want to experience it. We have all the equipment and I want to really prove that there's something there.”  

On Saturday, March 5th Discover Airdrie tagged along to a paranormal investigation. The place of said mysterious and unnerving things happening? Paw Butler Dog Park and dog boarding located in Rockyview County, just southeast of Calgary’s city limits. Discover Airdrie met up with the S.A.G.E. crew around 11 P.M, though the team often stays an entire night at locations, underlining that activity tends to ramp up around 3 A.M. 

S.A.G.E. had previously staked out the place and talked to the owners, who relayed to them that an individual at one point had been pushed down a set of narrow stairs in one of the buildings, a Quonset, by an unseen force. There were reports of the dogs fixating on a boarded-up window on the second floor of the Quonset and Snow said that he saw a figure standing in the window – even though that very window is boarded up with plywood, nailed to the window frame. In a previous investigation, the team was also mysteriously locked in when they were inside the Quonset. No team member recalled ever deadbolting themselves in.  

Various employees who worked at the facility over the past years have reported, independently, that the dogs will also not go near a certain corner of the property, where there are remnants of the foundation of an old pioneer’s house. Nolin said he believes that the property’s history which was previously on indigenous land may be the key as to why something’s amiss. 

On a snowy, deadly-quiet late night, in the darkened Quonset that has been converted into an exercise/playpen for the canine guests of Dog Butler, the team placed static cameras and motion sensors on both the ground floor and on the second floor. They were also equipped with an electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) reader, which is meant to record voices or noises that may be interpreted as spirit voices. The only thing that can be heard is the whirr of the heater inside the building. A metal chain dangles from the ceiling, though it doesn’t appear to sway in any ominous way. The team heads to the second floor, carefully climbing up the narrow stairs, the same stairs that saw someone claiming they were pushed down from. The second storey landing is littered with various Halloween decorations that cast spectral shadows on the walls. 

Each team member meanders into different corners of the building, listening to any signs of otherworldly beings, looking to see if objects have moved. Their endeavours are all live-streamed on various social media, including Instagram (SouthernAlbertaGhostEncounters), Youtube, Facebook and TikTok. Nolin said that having more equipment guarantees their audience the ability to see things from all possible angles, and also ensures their audience things aren’t being faked. 

“The point is if I can bring really good quality footage from three or four different angles, at the same time as we all have live streams, it’s pretty hard to doctor that,” he said.  

The team also made its way to the far corner of the property that dogs avoid. The eerie silence was punctuated by footsteps in the snow, while an eerie glow from the clouded sky made for a rather tense walk. Nolin posed a series of questions for whomever or whatever might be lurking behind the trees, noting that at one point a shaman was called to the property to perform a cleansing, though might have invertedly opened a portal.  

“Are you friendly?” Nolin asked into the still, cold night air. 

Though the public opinion on ghosts and the supernatural are sharply divided, millions of people around the world claim to have experienced things they can’t rationally explain. Who knows, perhaps those footsteps you heard late at night when no one else is up is just the house settling... Then again maybe it’s not. 

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