Key City Paranormal

 "We found that  a gentleman had killed himself in this house, "Lee said, "His wife had an affair with a train engineer who had passed through Dubuque in 1942. She left with the engineer."
     The house sets near 16th street in downtown Dubuque, Iowa. Lee Montgomery wants to keep its location a secret. His protocol and manners dictate the rule in this case. Lee and his brother Jeff have been working the paranormal field for many years and they have just founded Key City Paranormal, dedicated, "...to researching, to investigating  and to catching proof of it."
     The Matthias Hamm house, the Canfield Hotel, old Union Park, "There's lots of paranormal sites that are very well known, in fact."
     Lee and ten others do this part time. They're willing to come to any local space where suspected paranormal is going on. Lee is very serious about the work.
      "I grew up at 17th and Jackson. We had a ghost in the house when I was a kid. I've been interested ever since."
     If you've seen the show Ghosthunters then you understand. Lee has spoken with them and they're all headed in that same otherworldly direction.
     "Seeing a full bodied apparition is a life changing event," Lee says and he smiles and wraps his hands, one across the next, rolling and weaving them as if he can wring them dry. He's forty two, sober and clear eyed.
     "Three kinds...residual is when a spirit is attached to an item. Inhuman: demonic. Intelligent type can interact...I don't say there's angels out there..." Then he refers to the bible and refers to other evidenciary stories.
     "We've caught some stuff on video.
      It's not necessarily bad," Lee says, about hauntings.
     The Hamm house haunting concerns Hamm's daughter and a pirate. Legend has it that daughter shot the pirate trying to get into the house. The old swashbuckler never left. Up the hill there's reported sightings of Civil War veterans, marching upon the bluff edge, visiting and revisiting the acorn strewn hillsides, scabbards and guns at hand, endlessly roaming Eagle Point Park. The legend addresses  the lore that hangings were performed along  edges at one end of the park.
      After twenty five years he's decided that that his experiences can help others. He won't charge, but donations are accepted.
     "One individual in the family was being assaulted," Lee says about the house near sixteenth, "...a physical altercation with the spirit..."
     He says the spirits can become violent and he tells of a Clinton, Iowa experience in which he was on a staircase.
     "I felt hands at my chest. I was being pulled backward...when it was over I had the bruises to prove it..."
     About that Sixteenth Street ghost, the suicide and the confrontation:
     "After we rid the house of it, we found a silver dollar, a 1942 silver dollar, in the middle of the bedroom floor."
     
     Lee Montgomery hopes that word of mouth builds a clientele. That, and, well, maybe...you know...

Visits are welcome at www.keycityparanormal.yolasite.com

Timothy Trenkle