ELMWOOD, Neb. - Stay too long and your brain will convince itself: There's something strange happening here.
This place, with the eerie background track and stale air, is the Museum of Shadows, a newly opened business in Elmwood filled with supposedly haunted items in a supposedly haunted building.
Enter through a doorway between blackened windows into a dimly lit room. Pass through a gift shop - with crystals, sage, ghost-hunting equipment and holy water - and sign a waiver saying you won't take photos or video and waive the right to sue for bodily or psychological harm. Then you can start perusing the museum.
Odd, weathered items are affixed to the walls, each with its own creepy backstory.
There are weapons, bolted into place, from murders a century passed. There's an old-timey bassinet, armor from fallen soldiers and a burnt crucifix. In the second room of the museum, dolls hang from the ceiling in the most attention-grabbing showcase: the Island of Dolls.
"All the dolls are just creepy; they're stuck in my head," said 36-year-old Randy Morton, who visited the museum in October, shortly after it first opened.
Of course, this place could just be a hoax. The laminated signs, with backstories and home cities for every keepsake, could all be made up.
But when you pay the $15 admission and sign the waiver to come in, there's a part of you that wants to believe. Certain items have a presence about them, whether that's in your head or in a spiritual realm.
The creepiest of the bunch: Ayda, the doll with the scratched-out eyes.
Ayda is said to have come from an anonymous donor in Saunders County. All the items in the Museum of Shadows came from donors, most of whom wanted the items off their property and out of their lives.
Ayda's owners said they tried to throw her in the dump. She crawled back, legend has it, dirty and with clawed-out eyes. The family threw her in the trash again, mortified. The next time they came outside, she was sitting on the ground, outside the trash can.
They called the museum's co-owner, Nate Raterman, who owns Tri-City Research and Investigation of the Paranormal (TRIP). He says he's developing a TV series co-starring his wife, Kaleigh, a clairvoyant, but can't reveal any more details without the network's consent. If it's greenlighted, Raterman's would join a host of other paranormal shows in an ever-expanding genre, including "Ghost Adventures," "Ghost Hunters," "Paranormal Witness," "A Haunting," "Celebrity Ghost Stories" and "Paranormal Lockdown."
Raterman, 32, took Ayda to a building in Gretna where he takes all these donated items.
There, he put her in quarantine to make sure the spirit attached to her wasn't malicious. He filmed the item alone in a soundproof room in quarantine, then ran the footage through 36 pieces of software to rule out lens flares and other technological phenomena.
When an item proves to be active and isn't malicious, it goes into the museum or into storage while Raterman and his wife find a home for the item. They add several items to the museum each week.
When an item proves too malicious, it goes into a storage locker with others like it. The worst Raterman ever saw was a dark apparition in quarantine. "You can see, like, a horn," he said. "One horn."
As Raterman drove Ayda past mowed-down cornfields and weather-worn water towers on the highway back to the museum, he noticed the bag moving. He left Ayda - whose name means "the one who returns" or "comes back" - on the museum's floor to go fetch some rope to tie her down, as the donor requested. He said that when he returned, Ayda had moved halfway across the museum's floor.
"Honestly," Raterman said, "she creeps me out."
She's not alone. Several times, alarms have gone off at the museum in the middle of the night, with Raterman finding no burglars, no damage and nothing - or at least nothing alive - on surveillance tapes. Sometimes the activity is on the main floor, where the museum and gift shop are located. Other times it's in the basement, which housed an embalming business for more than 60 years.
When the Ratermans, who live in Gretna, scouted for a place to create a museum, they wanted somewhere haunted, and they wanted it in a community they could support and that would support them. They found that in Elmwood.
"The museum will bring other people to our community who may also visit other community businesses and tour the (Bess Streeter Aldrich) home and our veterans museum as well," said Pat Wray, Elmwood Village Board chair.
"Elmwood hosts many activities throughout the year, and if we become a designated stop for others, that will certainly be a boost for not only the Ratermans but the community as well," Wray said.
The museum drives in about half of its traffic for evening ghost hunts in three- or seven-hour blocks on-site. The Ratermans explain their ghost-hunting equipment and use it to try to communicate with spirits without provoking or taunting them.
Morton went on one of those first hunts.
The Ratermans killed the lights. They used a device that they say allows spirits to try to make words.
"All the sudden it starts making crazy beeping noises, then stops working for the rest of the night," Morton said. "I've been back twice since, and that hasn't happened."
On subsequent haunts, his girlfriend, Trisha Hart, felt a tap on her head. Then Morton felt a tap on the back of his, with noticeable force.
Stories like this are spreading. Already, the museum is drawing visitors from across the U.S., and in a few cases, other countries, who want to see if this place and its items really are haunted.
A few of the town's pastors had the same curiosity.
As the Ratermans prepared to open the museum in October, a pair of pastors swung by to "shake our hand and make sure we're normal people," Kaleigh Raterman said. "They realized we're just like any married couple."
Museum of Shadows
What: A museum of haunted items in a supposedly haunted building that used to house an embalming business in the basement
Where: 116 N. Fourth St., Elmwood, Nebraska
Hours: Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Sunday, noon to 5 p.m.
Admission: $15
Ages: Mature audiences only; use discretion
Ghost hunts: 3-hour sessions from 7 to 10 p.m., $25 per person; 7-hour sessions from 7 p.m. to 2 a.m., $60 per person including refreshments
More info: museumofshadows.com