Inside the Haunted Phelps Mansion: What We Found During Our Paranormal Investigation in Binghamton, NY

Some buildings hold onto their history differently than others. The Phelps Mansion in Binghamton, New York — built in the 1870s for Sherman D. Phelps — has watched more than 150 years of the world change around it, outlasting nearly everything that once surrounded it. When claims started surfacing that some of its former occupants may never have truly left, we knew we had to get inside and find out for ourselves.

Before we ever set up a single piece of equipment, we spent real time in this mansion. That's something I've always believed in — you cannot investigate a location you don't understand. We walked every room, learned the history of the Phelps family, and got a feel for how the building breathes. Old structures like this one have their own rhythms: the way heat moves through the walls, the way floorboards respond to temperature shifts, the sounds a 150-year-old foundation makes when the night gets quiet. I need to know all of that before I can fairly evaluate anything that happens once the investigation begins. My job isn't to prove a haunting. It never has been. My job is to rule out everything I can and document what I can't.

Once the building settled and we began our formal investigation, we moved through the mansion methodically — starting on the upper floors and working our way down. This isn't arbitrary. In older multi-story homes, a lot of what people interpret as paranormal activity has a straightforward explanation: sound travel, structural settling, drafts from aged windows and compromised door seals. I want to identify those natural culprits first. We documented the baseline environmental conditions in each room, mapped out where the temperature fluctuations were most significant, and noted any areas where EMF readings were elevated due to older wiring — because elevated EMF has a well-documented effect on how people feel in a space, and that matters when you're evaluating witness claims.

During the EVP sessions, we asked questions, went silent, and listened. We do this with digital recorders running in multiple locations simultaneously, and I'll be honest — there were moments in this mansion that gave us pause. Certain responses on playback don't have an easy answer. That doesn't mean I'm ready to call them paranormal, but it does mean they warrant a closer look during evidence review. We also had some unexplained activity during a session in one of the main rooms — a response that seemed to correspond directly with a question, captured on more than one device. Coincidence is always possible. But when something shows up consistently across independent recordings, it becomes harder to dismiss outright.

What struck me most about the Phelps Mansion isn't any single piece of potential evidence — it's the weight of the place. More than a century and a half of lives lived inside those walls. Families, decisions, losses, milestones. Locations like this one carry that history in a way that's almost tangible, and it makes you think seriously about the claims people bring to us. I don't walk into any investigation looking to be scared or to confirm what a client wants to hear. I walk in looking for the truth. Sometimes that truth is a leaky pipe and a drafty hallway. And sometimes — sometimes — the evidence leads somewhere I can't fully explain. The Phelps Mansion left us with more questions than answers, and in this work, that's not nothing.

After a thorough investigation and careful evidence review, the Phelps Mansion remains one of the more compelling locations we've visited — not because of dramatic moments, but because of what we couldn't account for. I'm not prepared to call it definitively haunted, but I'm equally not prepared to say there's nothing here. The evidence is inconclusive, and I'll take inconclusive over fabricated any day. Watch the full investigation, listen closely with headphones, and reach your own conclusion.