Is the Lincoln Cultural Center haunted?

Co-founded by Nelson Nauss who had his first exposure to the paranormal at a very young age in his childhood home. This experience forever changed how he viewed the world around him. It wasn't until 2007 that he joined two other paranormal groups to seek answers. In 2016, Nauss met Kelly McConkey and together they founded The Ghost Guild. 

“We all met through other paranormal teams and decided to start our own,” Nauss said. “We’re all very different people, but we share a love for history, science and the unexplained. We wanted to find a balance between those. What we feel is different with our team is that we’re very serious about what we do. There’s a lot of different types of paranormal teams. We focus on paranormal research and historical preservations. We prefer to work with historical organizations. We help them engage the public by mixing the mystery of those particular locations that have had unexplained activity.”

Cathy Davis, the director of the Lincoln Cultural Center reached out to the Ghost Guild last year to ask if they’d be interested in doing an investigation at the center.

“After having has a few paranormal teams out I thought it would be interesting to get their perspective,” Davis said.

Prior to coming out to a location, members of the Ghost Guild get an assessment of the claims that have been made relative to the property and they focus on those.

“We like to identify patterns,” he said. “We look at what’s happened and try to see if there’s another possible explanation for this. It’s very easy to assume that every sound you hear, and everything that goes bump is paranormal when most of the time it’s not. There’s a perfectly good explanation for it. We don’t rely on a lot of the gadgets that are typically seen on television or used by other teams. We’re more focused on the scientific side.”

Recreating what may have happened in the past can be difficult to recreate, Nauss added.

“It’s not like other scientific fields where you can recreate things and test them in exactly the same way each time,” he said. “A lot of times you have background noise. You’re looking at locations that have background noise that could show up on your recordings later on that people might say, ‘hey, is that a voice?’ Your brain is a wonderful thing – it will make sense out of what it hears even if it has nothing to do with what was actually heard. It fills in the gaps.”

Nauss won’t come out and say that he’s been to a location that was haunted, but he’s been to places where he and his team have been unable to explain what has happened, such as the USS North Carolina battleship in Wilmington. Nor will he say whether he believes in ghosts or not – that he “doesn’t know.”

“Every time we go back to Wilmington, we try different things and have been unsuccessful,” he said. “That one’s definitely been strange. We’ve investigated 40 different locations since we formed and I’d venture to say, maybe out of those 40, 15% or so have things that made us wonder.”

If you’ve experienced occurrences in the Cultural Center, the Ghost Guild would like you to fill out an online survey which is located at http://theghostguild.com – under 2022 schedule. Unlike other times when a paranormal team has visited the Cultural Center, this is not open to the public.