Halloween Episode: Live from Hero’s Haven CAC
Content note: This episode includes brief, non-graphic references to child abuse investigations and to staged crime scenes from training simulations. Subscribe on Spotify | View full transcript
What happens when a child advocacy center moves into a building with a past life or three? For this bonus Halloween episode, Robert heads underground with returning guest Kathleen Nolan, Illinois prosecutor and Coursing Justice trainer, and Patty Saunders, executive director of Hero’s Haven Child Advocacy Center. They’re recording from the basement below Hero’s Haven in Clarksburg, West Virginia. The building started out as the Union Bank in the early 1900s and has since been a hotel and possibly a makeshift hospital.
Patty introduces Stan and Dan, the friendly presences her staff have learned to work alongside. She also tells the story of the back elevator that used to deliver everyone to the basement no matter which button they pressed. Kathleen and Robert share their own run-ins, from a cold spot in a basement hallway to a rental car that kept detecting passengers who weren’t there and a midnight pounding on a Parkersburg hotel door. Then there’s the fake blood from last year’s homicide simulation. It’s still stuck to the floor, and it was convincing enough that a new maintenance man called the police.
Between the ghost stories, the three get serious about why Hero’s Haven keeps investing in realistic MDT training, what Kathleen sees attendees take home, and how listeners can support their local CAC when funding is hard to come by. As Robert puts it, Stan and Dan may be scary, but a world without CACs is genuinely terrifying.
Key moments
1:40 — A pool of fake blood that only a sledgehammer can remove
2:30 — The new maintenance man who reported a murder in the basement
5:25 — A bank, a hotel, a hospital: meet Stan and Dan
5:50 — The elevator that only goes to the basement
9:10 — Two children, years apart, ask: “Did you see that person run through?”
10:50 — The rental car with phantom backseat passengers
12:55 — Pounding on Robert’s door in Parkersburg, with no one there
15:00 — The ghost as a silent member of the MDT
19:35 — Why Patty doubles down on training when others scale back
23:45 — How to support your local CAC
Mentioned in this episode
Hero’s Haven Child Advocacy Center — Clarksburg, West Virginia
Child Protect of Mercer County — the CAC that may have brought a ghost home
The Blennerhassett Hotel — Parkersburg’s historic hotel, also said to be haunted
Gary Weaver — Coursing Justice trainer and cover model for a very fictional book
Want to learn more?
Support Hero’s Haven Child Advocacy Center, which served 622 children in a single year.
Find a child advocacy center near you through the National Children’s Alliance.
Hear more from Kathleen in her Season One episode of the Coursing Justice Podcast.
Sign up for Justice in 30, Coursing Justice’s free monthly webinar series.
Bring a CaseReady MDT training simulation to your team. This gives your MDT the chance to work a simulated case together from first response to charging decisions—just like the team at Hero’s Haven.
Episode Transcript
*** Please note that this transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors.
[00:00:00] Welcome to Coursing Justice, the podcast. I'm your host, Robert Peters, former prosecutor, attorney at law, and founder of Coursing Justice. We're a consortium of current and former law enforcement prosecutors and CAC/MDT professionals serving the field through innovative training simulations and practical content for justice and child protection professionals.
Today, we are departing from our regularly scheduled programming. We are talking ghosts. It is our Halloween episode. We're talking ghosts, haunted child advocacy centers, which we are currently sitting in, and some various strange experiences from where we are currently located in West Virginia. I need to describe where we are, but before we do that let me introduce returning to the podcast is my friend and colleague let me find your name here.
Oh, yeah, I know it. It's Kathleen Nolan. Kathleen is an Illinois prosecutor, child abuse prosecution specialist, Coursing Justice trainer, um, and ChatGPT believes you are an, an enthusiastic investigator of the paranormal. I am not, so turns out [00:01:00] ChatGPT isn't always correct. Maybe that's a cautionary tale, but- Perhaps
And, and I remember my name, so that's also a good thing. That, you know, puts both you and ChatGPT ahead of me, which is impressive. Also with us, is Patty Saunders, whose name I fortunately do remember, from Heroes' Haven Child Advocacy Center. Patty, how are you? I am wonderful. Thank you, Robert. Yeah, so we are sitting here, in a room, in the subterranean depths below Clarksburg, West Virginia, though we are, despite the fact that we are underground in, um- An interesting building to say the least.
We're actually not at the bottom of this. We recently discovered, the owner told, tells us there's an entire level below the dungeon we're currently in that maybe is even more haunted potentially. There is a pool of blood in the middle of the room. That is an artifact not from the training simulation that we just completed , but from the prior year at Heroes' Haven.
I believe this was... Is this a four-wheeler wreck, I believe? Yes. And also to clarify, it is not actual blood. It is, like theater blood. [00:02:00] But it certainly looks real. Well, it has congealed, and stuck to the floor, and it cannot be removed, uh, except by a, a sledgehammer regrettably. Now, Patty, we're not, in the bloodiest room regrettably.
In the, the floors below the Heroes' Haven Child Advocacy Center. We should probably note this is not where we actually do forensic interviews. You have a very lovely trauma-informed space, 100 feet or so above us perhaps. But in another room here, there is a lot more blood.
And this was from our homicide case, last year in which your fellow CAC director, Susie Sharf was congealed to the floor by a large amount of blood. And that blood is still in that room, which created some issues recently. Could you share those? Yes. So we recently had a new maintenance man to our building.
And of course, we did not think to tell him about our crime scene. And so when he came down to the basement, he left in a terrified episode straight to Clarksburg PD to report a possible [00:03:00] murder in the basement. And I would say a definite murder just based on the amount of blood that was present, but that's neither here nor there.
Yeah, there was significant, significant loss of blood, for sure. Yeah. So we are here. Credit where credit is due, this is Kathleen's original concept of talking ghosts and CACs. Kathleen, what's your inspiration for ghosts and CACs? So the inspiration for just having this conversation comes from the amount of travel that we've done to train, really across the country, and have talked with so many different folks from different states and different CACs.
And consistently there comes up this theme of odd experiences, things that happen that can't be explained, the odd energies that exist in our child advocacy centers. And in just kind of talking through this and talking through, you know, what we know about our child advocacy centers across country, is that many of them are in borrowed [00:04:00] or refurbished spaces.
They are in old buildings, they are in old houses old hospitals, old bank buildings like we're sitting in here. They've had prior lives before they became child advocacy centers, but then the work that they currently house does involve a lot of emotion and a lot of feelings and energies.
And not saying, you know, anything about anything, but there's a lot of things that kind of come into play when it comes to the work that we do. And when you merge those energies and you merge the historical properties that we're often in when we're doing the child advocacy center work, there just seems to be a lot of things that our staff and folks that spend time in the child advocacy centers can't explain.
We thought this would be a great place to start just because of the history and the background of this building, and some of the things that the, the people that work in here regularly have experienced. Yeah. The, the layout [00:05:00] of this building is wild. Every time I'm in here there's some new space that I did not know exist.
It is quite intimidating, and not just 'cause we're standing in front of a torture room that we adapted for the scenario that we just completed training with some great law enforcement and CAC folks. Patty, can you tell us about this building and has anything unusual been reported by your staff in this building?
So we are constantly having unusual things happen and reported. This is an old building. It was built in the early 1900s as the Old Union Bank. It was also a hotel. It was also a law office. It's been reported to me that it was also a makeshift hospital at one point. But We do, we have nicknames for our unseen things, and we call them Stan and Dan.
But we have a back elevator that is not working. But before, when you would get on the elevator, you would feel a presence come on the elevator, and the door would open like someone was coming in. And every [00:06:00] time that happened, we would go to the basement every time. And if that didn't happen, you would go to the floor that you pressed the button to.
When you say go to the basement, the elevator would automatically take you to the basement regardless of what number you pushed? Yes. Every time. And this is only with that unseen presence arriving on the elevator? Yes. When the door would open like someone stuck a hand or their body stepped in, yes.
Is that terrifying, or have you learned to coexist in a friendly way, or both? So we have learned to coexist. We have had people report seeing movements or things in our office. Couple times during interviews they've reported, and it was friendly. It was nothing scary. So we do feel that they are supportive of our work.
They are child-friendly. We've noticed like last year when we were doing the homicide trainings, the front elevator started to act up, and it's never acted up, and was doing what the back elevator. So we do see the presence, and we do have things move that no one has moved in our office, so yes.
To [00:07:00] the elevator. So the first time I was here, that was 2023, and, uh, I hadn't really heard the stories, hadn't gotten the full history and rundown of what the staff had experienced. And I was down here in the basement getting things set up, kind of just walking around, wandering around myself, and I found myself in a hallway.
I didn't really quite know how I got there 'cause this whole basement is a maze. But I was absolutely walking down this area and hit a point in the hallway where it was just like, oof, this is... It's energy. There's something here. And just kinda walked back the other direction just because it was pretty significant.
And later that day, I think that's when I first heard the story of the other elevator shaft and where that was, was exactly in the part of the basement that I was at. And I had not known that going into this. And so I would agree that there's clearly [00:08:00] something hanging out around that area. So I'm the probably the skeptic of the three of us on the issue of ghosts.
Though I'm a person of faith, so certainly the supernatural is natural to me, as it were. But I will say this is pretty freaky. This building, this building is pretty freaky. Just earlier today after I... when I put on a mask of The Watcher, which is a skull mask, like a real intense sense of heaviness putting on the skull mask down here, so that was freaky.
And then I've had a couple points in here where nowhere near an AC unit, which I have no idea how this building has AC, though it is quite cold. There are like some really sharp points of like just really freezing cold. Is that... Are these typical experiences? Yes. It is very typical. You feel things through different parts of this building.
And when things are going on, you feel things, and it's just unexplainable. There's also been times when my staff has came and said, "Were you yelling for [00:09:00] me?" And no one was yelling for them, but they were hearing someone yell their name. Oh, man. Yes. Yeah. This being a CAC space, have you ever seen it in a forensic interview context?
Yes. Yeah. Actually, a forensic interview I have done, and another interviewer had done, the child actually stopped in the middle of the interview and was looking as they were seeing something. The child said, "Did you see that person rush, run through the building?" A totally non-related child years later did the same thing to another interviewer.
That's freaky. Isn't there something West Virginia specific too about if something calls your name, you're not supposed to respond to it, right? I mean, Pat is nodding. I've heard that, yes. Yes. Yeah, like something within the woods and voices. Yeah, you are, you are not supposed to respond, so maybe that's a good takeaway here.
Another thing is the child advocacy centers in West Virginia, we're all our individual entities, and we like to visit each other to get new ideas and learn from each other. So one of the other CACs came to [00:10:00] visit us, Child Protect from Mercer County, and we were talking about our Stan and Dan. They left here, and weird things started to happen at their center after that, so we told them they took one of our friends down there.
Do you know what happened at their center? I know things were getting moved, things were being knocked off, just the feeling of things. You may have had a similar experience yeah. So, it would, think 2024 so I flew into Pittsburgh and had a rental car from here, drove, to where we were staying at. Right away we started having electric issues with the- patty's name is being called, hopefully by a human.
Hopefully it's a real person. This is a live haunting. I'm gonna lo- I, I- I'm gonna lose it ... it's actually going- I am running out of here. Yeah. If, if there- If Patty doesn't come back, I'm... Oh, okay, you've returned. All right. You returned. Please tell me that was a person. Yes. It was one of my staff checking on [00:11:00] us.
That's a level of concern down here. So yeah. So had a rental car. We were driving the rental car, you know, to this center for training and then, you know, back to the hotel. And right away the first day after we were leaving, the sensors in the back seat that show if your, you know, seatbelt is on the sensors in the back seat started showing two people in the back seat.
And there were not two people in the back. We were in the front seats. There was no people in the back seats. It was showing that there were people. So we had to buckle the seatbelt in or else the car wouldn't go. Like, it pings if the seatbelt isn't on. Well, I mean, safety first. Obviously, we want the ghost to be safe.
But we had to buckle the seatbelt. And it, so then we could drive, but then the back sensor started going off. So the there was like a... it was an SUV, so it had a door with a hatch, and it kept showing that it was open, and it wasn't open. And at one point we pretty much, pulled off to the side of the road to, re-close it.
And that [00:12:00] continued, I mean, truly until I crossed back over into the State of Pennsylvania. Then everything was fine. But I was genuinely worried I was going to have to explain to Avis why the electric on this car was completely haywire. And then also at the hotel. Like most hotels, has a key card operated door.
And we had gone out for the night. I believe it was a open mic night. And so by the time we got back to the hotel it was pretty late, like 11:30, 11:45. And my key was not working on the door. And, I went down to mainten- or the front desk, and they're like, "Oh, we'll use the... We'll just have to reprogram your keys."
They brought the master key up. That was not working either. Like, the electric box on my hotel room door was completely fried. They had to call in maintenance to replace the entire door, and this is all at, like, midnight. So yeah, I had lots of electronic interference things that were happening that entire year.
So I had some similar issues same timeframe. So immediately after this timeframe, [00:13:00] different city. So I left here in Harris Haven. If you remember that year the Parkersburg conference was right after. So drove over to the Parkersburg conference. Was staying at the hotel. Not the historic Blennerhassett Hotel, which is also haunted.
I'm staying there, and I'll dramatize it. At the stroke of midnight there's just rattling the door, like someone was just hammering on the door.
So I get up. What the heck's going on? Conference didn't even start until the next day, so presumably it wasn't a drunken law enforcement officer. Which on the second day of a conference, absolutely, that's for sure what was happening. But this is before then. And so I go up, you know, to the door.
Nobody there. Nobody there. I look both ways in the hallway. I lay back down, and the same thing, just pounding. I can see the door, and the door is shaking and from something pounding on the door. And so I get up again. I go out in the hall. Nothing. Not a thing.
And so I go back. I lay back down, and this happens at least three or four times in Parkersburg. So at a certain point, I'm like, "I'm putting on my [00:14:00] headphones, and whatever happens, happens." That's how I... You know, I gotta sleep. I got a presentation tomorrow, so I'm gonna litigate the theology of this ghost or angel or drunken law enforcement officer later.
So if you're responsible for haunting me in Parkersburg in 2024, if you could come forward, I'd feel a lot better about the metaphysics of it all. But in any event... But that was right after, you know, your experiences, Kathleen, with Stan and Dan, and right after we spent some time in this quality basement.
Now I'm concerned about what happens tonight, but, alas. I'm nervous too. Well, and I know, like, more hauntings are more things are happening in the town or city of Clarksburg. In fact, on the 30th they're doing a haunted tour of our next door building, where they've reported several abnormal things happening throughout the years there.
Very similar to what we have here. So I don't know if Stan and Dan is going back and forth between the neighboring buildings or. Well, hopefully they're friendly over there as well. I like what Patty said in that, [00:15:00] you know, it doesn't necessarily feel, like, malevolent.
It, it's just a, a presence that is here. As long as it's letting the kids still be able to come in and do their thing, I, I think it's just a, a unique aspect and kinda like I said at the beginning, where, you know, we have so much trauma that comes into these doors because of what the work is with a child advocacy center.
And it can be really difficult to process a lot of that. And that is part of, you know, why we have the multidisciplinary team and everyone working together. In a way maybe this presence is just another silent member of the team that adds something interesting to the space. But I think in a way recognizes that this is a place where there is a lot of energy and a lot of emotion.
But that it is supportive. And, you know, even there is... Even though there is so many, you know, heartbreaking stories that come through these doors, there's always that support with the multidisciplinary team and with the ghosts that just happen to hang out. Yeah. This is by no means [00:16:00] limited to Heroes Haven, to your point.
I mean, there's other CACs that we've met just across the country that have mentioned similar things. Was it an Indiana CAC that we were talking with this would've been in Huntsville a few weeks ago. It, we were talking about this concept in Huntsville, Alabama, and there was a couple forensic interviewers from Indiana who were talking about, yes, their center has weird things.
And somehow it was communicated back to one of their coworkers who happened to be at the CAC, and the time that we were talking about their activity, their coworker was at the center and said, " there was some weird stuff that happened pretty much right around that time when you guys were talking about it."
So yeah, I mean, Indiana, I've worked through a couple child advocacy centers in Illinois where there's been some weird things. So, yeah, I think there's definitely a lot of stories out there that have similar experiences, similar feelings and it'd be interesting to explore.
Maybe in a, a subsequent annual podcast or spinoff one. [00:17:00] Patty, have you heard of things at other CACs? Absolutely. So CYC, which is in Lewisburg, is actually in the oldest child advocacy center in the state- Oh, wow ... and they remain in the same building, and it's in historic Lewisburg.
Yeah. So I've heard things from them. I've heard things from Reach, which is in Hinton and a couple other CACs throughout the state that are in historic areas and historical buildings. So interesting. Very cool. Well, if you'd like to host us at your haunted CAC give us a ring. So the reason that we come together, in addition to the first, you know, maybe inaugural Halloween podcast episode is obviously training.
And this, the training this week has been wild. I'm holding in my hand a book by the, uh, Reverend Obadiah Bloodsworth called The Dead Shall Walk. This is a fictitious one graced by an AI-generated Gary Weaver, one of our coursing justice trainers, holding a serpent. But it's an in-depth unique training.
Once again, we started off with modesty ambitions and as per usual, things got out of hand. And so it turned [00:18:00] into what was initially, oh, let's do some, some faith-based pieces 'cause there's some nuances, some sensitivities to those cases, some specific impacts on victims in those cases. There's sort of spins on what we see with offender distortions when offenders weaponize or distort the teachings of different faith traditions in order to perpetrate abuse or avoid accountability for it.
So we were focusing on that, and then we're thinking, oh, well, we should have like a non-verbal victim aspect of that. I'm like, oh, well, we should do a residential facility where there's a whole host of, of non-verbal victims. And then we decided, well, let's build a whole platform thanks to the beauty of AI, let's build a whole platform where our investigative teams can request legal process, subpoenas, search warrants, records requests, et cetera.
And so things got completely out of hand. But I will say this is our test run on the platform. Patty was kind enough to allow us to have her teams be guinea pigs for it. And pretty good feedback so far. The internet was disrupted. We don't know whether that's ghosts or something else.
But generally speaking, it worked well, and we were able [00:19:00] to scale from sort of, you know, five or six search warrant requests to, I have to check the running tally, but well over 200- Yeah ... when I saw it. So able to get, you know, engagement at... I'm excited for what this could do for experiential learning, one, 'cause I haven't heard of anyone else doing this, but two, it enables more people to be engaged and enables more people to be hands-on while there's still those in-person instructors.
Though I think this could scale to a virtual environment too, I just hate virtual environment and don't wanna discuss it. Patty, in a time when many are scaling down training or just not doing training, you know, because of the financial ramifications, the challenges of the field, why have you doubled down and permitted such ludicrousness on our part?
What drives you to literally put your money where your mouth is and invest in these types of training things for your CACs and MDTs? So our ultimate goal is to help our children become survivor. And it takes, I always say it takes a village. I know that's a cliché, but it does.
Our team is that village. And if we don't provide training for our team members, then [00:20:00] we're not providing the best services to our children. And so I feel that these trainings are essential for all our team members, so we can make sure these children become survivors. And every year, whatever our theme is, it's really weird, something comes out of our theme that really happens each year.
In fact, two years ago, during the training, one of the topics in our training, we had an emergency interview, and that same topic came out in that interview. So it really when people are like, "Oh, this is this would never happen. This isn't real," we're seeing it happen year after year after year. So I feel like giving our team the best skills here, and they can use in the real life is, not to wait till the real life and not give them the skills Absolutely.
And picking up on the eeriness of it we won't get into graphic detail on the podcast, but one of the years you're referring to, a toothbrush played a prominen- a prominent role within the investigation, and literally same day, you know, there's, there's these related disclosures.
The [00:21:00] point is we try to make these things realistic, and so your investment in realistic training is really important. But also, sometimes truth is very much stranger than fiction, whether it's a child perceiving, you know, a ghost walking through a wall in a forensic interview room, or just some of the bizarre allegations that happen to be true and happen to be corroborated, you know, by our MDTs.
Kathleen, you are now a prosecutor, an active prosecutor, which brings with it a massive caseload. I'll ask you a question you've no doubt been asking yourself. Why have you spent your time this week with such tomfoolery, you know, despite your active caseload and other obligations?
I think the, the reason can absolutely be summed up in the evaluations we just finished reviewing that all of the attendees that come to these experiential trainings walk away with something that they didn't have when they first came in, whether it's a new perspective on how to address cases, a new skill on how to better investigate, some ideas of how to more effectively prosecute.
All of those are things [00:22:00] that the attendees that come to these trainings take away. The other huge aspect of having this collaborative multidisciplinary team training is that you get to see what the other members of the team do. You get to see the investigation. You get to see what prosecutors go through requesting search warrants and prepping witnesses for trial.
You get to see the struggles of a forensic interviewer with a non-verbal victim. You know, all of these things that we don't in our own roles don't necessarily get to see day to day. So I can say after years of working with the Heroes Haven and the folks here, that the impact that this type of training has is almost immediately seen in how the team then can better do their jobs, but then also better support the other multidisciplinary team members.
So that I think we always say that if they take one thing away, if there's one thing that each attendee takes away and uses to do their job better next time, we've done our job, and all that makes it worth it. Yeah, this is a common theme of the [00:23:00] podcast, but good training certainly matters in a huge way, and it influences the lives and wellbeing of actual children.
I always think when you talk about the progression of skills the officer who years ago, this might have been in 2023 where a new at the time officer comes into an interrogation and fumbles the Miranda rights and literally just has that recall issue and freezes, right?
And he did a great job recovering from that. It turned out to actually be a pretty, pretty decent interrogation, especially for his experience level. But then to see that confidence grow year after year as those repetitions happen, the confidence, right? And also, you're throwing some pretty bizarre things, so that, that helps as well.
We've talked about the ghosts of Heroes Haven. We've talked about the importance of training. Patty, you know, at a time where the funding landscape is difficult, how can people support the work of local CACs, whether that's at Heroes Haven here in Clarksburg, West Virginia, or elsewhere?
How can people step alongside [00:24:00] you and further this important mission? I think absolutely donating to your local child advocacy centers or the United Ways that normally support child advocacy centers. This cannot be done without those donations. And the donations, A, stay local, and you're helping local children in your communities.
And You see the return from that. You see the return when these children become survivors, they become part of society they're healthy, they bring healthy families in. We see that return. And if it's just to save one child, it's to save one child. Our center, we had 622 children come through our doors in one year.
Wow. So that money goes to all 622 of those children. And this is work that just doesn't happen without support. It's impossible, and increasingly that support has become harder and harder to come by, whether that's state funding challenges or federal funding challenges. If you have connections at the state level or the federal level, obviously there are oftentimes [00:25:00] state chapter networks doing funding campaigns. There are national campaigns. You can follow the National Children's Alliance for things like that. But the work of CACs is essential. It's not it's not going to generate profit, right? That's the mythology. They do, you do not get paid per child removal or anything like that.
This doesn't have a funding stream, and it desperately needs support. And ultimately, as scary as Stan and Dan may be a world without CACs is genuinely terrifying. So support your CACs There we go. We landed on something that's actually concrete and important in our foray into the supernatural realm.
Kathleen, any closing thoughts on all things eerie, supernatural, or CAC-related? Happy Halloween. Happy Halloween. Thank you for listening. Please join us at Coursing Justice and sign up for our newsletter at coursingjustice.com. Join us as we continue charting a way forward for cases that matter most.
