For years, Jeffersonville residents claimed to see apparitions of Union and Confederate soldiers at Colston Memorial Park.

The barren lot, now a makeshift baseball field, silently sits between I-65 and historic downtown Jeffersonville.

As the City of Jeffersonville began digging in the park for their new pedestrian ramp onto the Big Four Bridge, they ran into a problem—human remains. And not just one; hundreds of bodies dating back to the Civil War rested six feet below Colston Memorial Park.

This is just one of the many stories told on the Kentuckiana Historical Haunted Tour, which take place every Thursday, Friday and Saturday night in October. Sponsored by the Association for the Study of Anomalous Field Phenomena, the tours are meant to share local, historically-focused paranormal stories. Tour guides lead groups around several allegedly haunted buildings and places in downtown Jeffersonville.

Katie Jo Glesing, communications senior and member of ASAFP, said the Kentuckiana area is especially known for supernatural activity in part due to its dark history.

“The falls of the Ohio was a war-ridden area,” Glesing said. “We had everything from Native American tribes against settlers to Union soldiers against Confederates.”

Glesing said some people even attribute Kentuckiana’s high level of hauntings to geography, citing energy from the Ohio River or the large amount of limestone.

While the tours include mostly eyewitness accounts, the Kentuckiana Historical Haunted Tours are primarily designed to provide funding for a future non-profit research institute, where ASAFP can conduct scientific research into paranormal events.

Brian Laythe, who teaches at Ivy Tech Sellersburg and IU Southeast and who is director of the ASAFP, said his organization is different than most paranormal research groups.

“We are a scientific data-collection organization,” Laythe said. “We set up laboratory conditions in locations, use the scientific method, and the data that we collect from these places are actually published in the Journal of Parapsychology.”

Glesing also stressed the importance of the scientific side of paranormal research.

“We’re not ghost hunters,” Glesing said. “We look for things that should not be there. And when something is there that shouldn’t be there, that’s when we step in and record it.”

Chris Goodman, one of the tour guides, said hauntings are always examined with a skeptical, scientific eye. After interviewing the eyewitness of an abnormal event, the group records data and classifies the type of activity into different categories.

“There are two types of apparitions that you see,” Goodman said. “There’s a residual haunting…it’s like playing a record over and over again. Then there’s the interactive hauntings. And that’s what we try to find.”

Laythe said the amount of haunted places to research in the Kentuckiana area sets it apart from anywhere else in the country.

“I’ve been doing this stuff for 15 or 20 years, but it’s amazing how many people will report hauntings here,” Laythe said. “There’s an uncommon amount of activity around here. So it’s a good place to set up an institution.”

The last haunted tours of the season will take place on Halloween weekend. Two tours meet each night, 7 p.m. and 10 p.m., at 723 Spring Street in Jeffersonville. Tickets are $20 per person. For more information, go to www.khht.org. If you wish to donate to ASAFP, visit www.gofundme.com/