KEPW, ‘Spoopy Squad’ visit Time Travelers Antique Mall

(Underground Echo theme music)

Echo (Underground Echo, Wednesdays, 6 p.m.): You are listening to KEPW 97.3 FM broadcasting from Eugene, Oregon, and simulcasting online at KEPW.org.

I’m your host, Echo, and we’re taking you somewhere a little different: Springfield, Oregon on location, a little antique shop called the Time Travelers Antique Mall.

Think about it. Every object in that building belonged to somebody. Every photograph, every piece of furniture, every forgotten treatment and trinket it. And dusty little curiosity represents a fragment of someone’s life.

Let’s establish something: I’m a journalist. I ask questions—sometimes uncomfortable ones. And I’ve certainly had experiences in my own life that I struggle to explain.

And that’s where our friends at ESPI come in. ESPI, or ‘The Spoopy Squad’ (that’s S-P-O-O-P-Y)—their work brings them into places where people have reported strange sounds, unusual sensations, unexplained movements, and encounters that don’t fit neatly into their understanding of the world.

Paranormal investigators use everything from recording equipment and environmental observations to interviews and personal experiences in an attempt to understand what’s happening.

So for this investigation, we joined the Spoopy Squad at Time Travelers Antique Mall, owned by husband and wife team Reed and Julie Lucas. And I am here with Julie. (Hi.) Hi, Julie. (Hello.) Time Travelers Antique Mall. Where’s that address for our listeners?

Julie Lucas (Time Travelers Antique Mall): 2020 Main St. in Springfield. We’re right on the corner of 21st and Main—13,000 square feet of vintage collectibles, mid-century retro, whatever you like.

Echo: And tell me a little bit about how you came into this business.

Julie: Well, it was my husband’s idea. He wanted me to go in with him on this adventure. At the time, we weren’t into antiques—it wasn’t in our horizon to own an antique mall, but we became customers first, here, when we first moved here about eight years ago, looking for furniture. We found the furniture here.

And then, one day, there was just an announcement across the window that they were closing down. And so my husband came home and asked me if I wanted to be in business with him. Took me a couple of days to think about it. But sure enough, I said, ‘All right, well, let’s do it.’

And we did. There is so much history here. I mean, I think one of our oldest items was possibly 1880-1890. It was a piece of furniture—a hutch, beautiful oak piece, hutch.

We definitely did experience one time where our video camera captured an armoire mirror do a flip and knock over a vase, which my mother in-law found the next morning. So, yeah, there’s definitely a lot of activity here.

But like I was telling a lot of people,  I just tell ’em that I don’t feel threatened or anything, you know, they’re just here. There’s so much energy. There’s nothing malicious that I sense around here at all.

Echo: How did you come up with a cool design of your store? ‘Cause I noticed it’s not just a store you walk into, it’s an immersive store. It feels like several stores in one.

Julie: Yes. So we have over 40 vendors in our store. They rent spaces out and bring in the items that people collect.

Some of them are specifically just one item. Like, barware is only bar stuff—cups, glasses, you name it. Some people dedicate themselves to midcentury furniture.

Some people dedicate themselves to, maybe salt and pepper shakers, or kitchenware. So everybody has their own unique collection in their booth that they know about.

Echo: And from what we understand, during our Spooktacular Special, we’re going to be exploring this building all night because it’s apparently haunted. And I’m here with—Reed Lucas.

Reed Lucas: Yeah, it’s pretty haunted. We’ve had well over 50 stories volunteered to us from past workers in this building, people who’ve been walking around, our employees and our owners who have experienced things in the store both during the day and after hours.

And due to our extensive security system, we have just multiple images and videos of things that have occurred in here that are really kind of odd.

And whether you believe or you don’t believe, some of them might be natural causes, but certainly not all of them.

So (Absolutely) hopefully the paranormal team will be able to pick up on some of that and be able to share it with the world.

Echo: That’s really neat. What made you attracted to being an antique store in the first place?

Reed: Well, it’s kind of a funny story. I was working at another place here in Eugene and I heard that time Travelers Antique Mall, the business, (which became Time Travelers in about 2013) was going out of business.

And my wife and I had already purchased furniture here and I went over thinking I was going to, you know, swoop in and get a lot of good deals on my lunch break from work. Mm-hmm. And I ended up buying the mall.

And, you know, I brought my mother in and my, my wife in and it’s great. People really enjoy it and so do we.

Every item in here has spent time with a family and has been collected, cherished, and passed on. And I think a lot of people that buy items from our store are finding something that is nostalgic, that brings back a memory or that they themselves want to collect and pass on as well.

That just speaks volumes about the type of people that come in here that’s not just people buying gifts and people coming in to to just hang out. I mean, people come in really looking for something unique.

One of the things my mother said, who’s one of our partners when we first got here, is that you could take a trip down memory lane and you could bring back a cherished treasure from the past.

So a lot of people will say, ‘Man, my grandma had these when I was a kid.’ And I always joke with them, I say, ‘Those are the exact ones. I know your grandma.’

Echo: What is the spookiest thing that has happened to you in this store?

Reed: There’s a lot. Well, one of ’em happened starting right where you’re sitting.

Echo: I’m a sensitive myself, and I came over here,

Reed So I was working on redoing this booth after hours about 7 p.m. I have a video of this as well. You can’t make this stuff up. I think that there’s a ghost playbook that they all follow.

So I’m just sitting here. At this point, I already have experienced enough in the store to know to keep my phone handy, just in case. ’cause I’m just, you know, ‘Something’s going to happen.’

And all of a sudden I hear this ‘Bling-blong, bling-blong,’ and it sounds like a music box. And I’m thinking, ‘This cannot be happening.’ And so I pull out my phone and I end up walking down this aisle straight over to that big circus tent there. That’s called ‘The Sideshow.’

At the time, it was a tea room. It looked like, under the big top, like a manager’s office or something. And in it was a stack of music boxes.

So I panned the camera down and I can still hear it: ‘Bling-blong, bling-blong, bling-blong, bling-blong, bling-blong.’ It’s getting louder. ‘Bling-blong, bling—’

And I get down to the bottom. I move all of the music boxes off of the bottom one and it’s still bling-blonging. And then I touch the box and it stops and I open it up.

And it was the same music box that I put on the bottom because it didn’t work. (What—?)

So somehow by sitting there for six months under a bunch of other boxes, it got wound and started playing in the middle of the night.

Echo: That is creepy.

Reed: So that was partly the, like, the creepiest thing I had gone through. But there are other things that are like more jump-scary. (Oh.) But that one was just like a slow build, you know?

Echo: That’s, that’s terrifying. (Yeah.) Yeah. That’s the beginning of a horror movie.

Reed: Yeah. Well, that’s what I’m saying.

Echo: And this is where our story takes another turn, because while Reed and Julie have spent their time living and working amongst the mysteries of the Time Travelers, there’s another group of people who’ve made investigating the unexplained something of a calling.

Enter ESPI, better known around here as ‘The Spoopy Squad.’ The group began with Anya (Pawelec), a psychic whose interest in the paranormal has helped bring the team together.

Later, Walter contributed the investigation structure and methods that shape how the group approaches its work today.

And Anya is— Would you call yourself a sensitive, a psychic, a medium? What would you call yourself?

Anya Pawelec (ESPI): Probably all three. I mean, a sensitive is more like somebody who can sense things, I would say, and kind of pick up on some things. But then when you get into the medium/psychic territory, you can do multiple things.

Echo: So you came into this, the Time Travelers Antiques store. Tell me a bit about your process.

Anya: My process is a lot of the times I don’t know where I’m going.

It’s something new that ESPI (Eugene Springfield Paranormal Investigators) have put together with our protocol. But basically we’ve been trying something new and fresh where we go into a spot and only one person will know where it’s located, and then we’ll meet up with that person. And then they’ll take us to the location.

So we know nothing about it, we don’t know where we’re going. and we just get in the car and go. And basically my process with that is I’ll start picking up on things.

Anya: I can pick up on a lot before I go to a spot. I work really well with the claireaudient, so I’ll pick up on words, I’ll pick up on names, I’ll pick up on feelings. I’ll get really nervous. A lot of times I will hear a spirit communicate.

In my mind, and a lot of times, you know, I’ll go back and when we reach the place that we’re going to be checking out for the night, it’ll kind of come to me. It’s like a puzzle piece, you know, where everything just kind of fits together once you actually arrive at that place.

But once I’m there, I instantly am starting, starting to pick up on anything and everything.

Echo: Yeah. It’s overwhelming, huh?

Anya: It is. And the energies are probably, I would say, the strongest sense that I have.

Echo: Where’s the store on your energy scale? Like, give it 1 to 10, 10 strongest, 1 is the weakest.

Anya: Oof. Probably an 8.

Echo: Wow. This is an 8 location, folks.

Anya: So I detected one boy, one little boy, one little girl. So two children I picked up on, two men. A really tall gentleman, very slender build, kind of looking over the whole place.

And then I picked up on like a younger kid from maybe like the ‘50s or ‘60s who’s just really young and into doing, like, naughty things and getting into stuff and he’s having fun. He’s being like a teenager or like early ‘20s.

And then I picked up on women in the bathroom. Multiple women.

And then just one woman in the back over here. She was showing me her things like, ‘These are my things, my cups or my plates.’ You know, ‘I feel homey here because these were my things.’

You can actually pick up on how they’re feeling, what they’re thinking. a lot of the times, if someone’s sad about maybe how they passed or how their life was, and then they passed. It’s like you can feel their emotions. So a lot of times I’ll start almost like crying.

And I felt that way here in certain spots where I just wanted to cry. Yeah. And I couldn’t explain why.

I was in another paranormal group back in 2018-2017.  I was with that small group at the time. It was my friend (T) and my friend (B), and we would go to multiple places and we would record.

We had a completely different way of going about everything. Okay. So I did that for a couple years. We didn’t really do any research. We just kind of went in and like picked up on things and did recordings.

We helped people too. Yeah. That’s another thing that we did was a lot of people needed our help or like crossing things over and we did that for a lot of people.

With that group, we kind of just did it for fun, you know? We didn’t really do it professionally. And with this group, there’s the protocol, there’s steps that we have to take. We have, you know, paperwork that people need to sign.

I got everyone together, just random people from Facebook. Okay. Hey, I’m putting on this event. Okay, let’s talk paranormal. I love this. And we formed a group out of that.

Echo: If somebody’s out there and they wanted to get ahold of you guys to bring you into their place, how would they do that?

Anya: Right now we have a couple Facebook pages and a group page and anybody can really put into the search bar, ‘Paranormal near me,’ you know, anything, ‘Psychics near me’ or something, and we should pop up.

Echo: Here in the Eugene-Springfield area, ESPI, Eugene Springfield Paranormal Investigations, has brought together a rather extraordinary collection of people who share one thing in common: They want to know what’s happening when the ordinary explanations don’t seem to fit.

And at the heart of this story today is Anya, a psychic, an investigator, and one of the people who helped bring this remarkable little community of paranormal enthusiasts together.

Now I want to give Anya her flowers for a moment. ’cause there’s a difference between having an interest in the unexplained and having a determination to turn that interest into something that other people can participate in.

It takes a lot of courage to put yourself out there, particularly when your beliefs and experiences exist outside what society considers conventional. And it takes something else entirely to bring people together who may not always agree on what those experiences mean. And that’s what I appreciate about Anya’s contribution to ESPI.

She’s helped create a space where curiosity can become collaboration, where people can bring their own perspectives to the table. And Anya isn’t working alone. And this is where the story gets even more interesting, because every good investigation needs more than one perspective.

Enter Walter King. Now Walter brings an entirely different set of tools to the proverbial haunted table, an Emmy-winning filmmaker and the creator of ESPI haunted case file. Walter helped develop what the team calls the ESPI protocol. It’s an investigative framework, exploring the possible relationship between human consciousness and paranormal experiences.

And then there are the other members of The Spoopy Squad, the people behind the cameras, the investigators monitoring equipment, the individuals listening carefully to recordings, and the personalities who bring their own experience, humor, and curiosity into the darkness.

They’ve also been sharing their adventures through their own productions, giving audience an opportunity to follow along as they explore some of the Pacific Northwest’s more mysterious locations, and that, folks, is worth celebrating because independent investigators, much like independent radio artists and independent filmmakers, and artists and storytellers, are a part of what makes our local creative community so interesting.

We’re out there making things happen. Asking questions, documenting experiences, and inviting the rest of us along for the ride.

So to Anya, Walter, Bob, and the entire Spoopy Squad, thank you for opening your investigation to Underground Echo and allowing us to explore the strange little corner of the world alongside you.

Go check out The Spoopy Squad on YouTube, that’s S-P-O-O-P-Y. Support their work, follow their investigations, and see what they’re exploring next, because independent projects like theirs started happen without people willing to show up and make them happen.

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You can listen to Echo and Underground Echo on KEPW 97.3 FM every Wednesday at 6 p.m.