AMBROSE
Location: Ambrose is a rather forgotten and desolate little community on Rural Route 10 north of the towns of Jones Creek and Smallwood, 28 miles north of Baton Rouge in West Felicia Parish. The former Sinclair Wax Museum, now gutted by fire, is north of town from the church with the Sinclair House at the end of this road before turning into town. The old sugar mill is south of the garage. An old cemetery rests behind the church along with a mausoleum.
Description of Place: Ambrose is a tiny isolated farming community of less than thirty structures in the most desolate part of West Felicia Parish surrounded by miles of empty highway, forests and deserted farmland bordered by a small tributary to the Thompson River. There is one main road in and two side roads out, but the area is nearly inaccessible. The last of the existing structures include the church, a variety of shops, a bowling alley, the move theatre (last reported movie shown "What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?" from 1962), the gas station, town hall, an abandoned sugar mill and a few private residences in addition to the gutted remains of the former House of Wax museum.
Ghostly Manifestations: According to the FBI, there are possibly somewhere between 200 to 250 possible serial killers at large at any moment in the USA. There are whole books devoted to the grisly deeds and histories of men like Ted Bundy, Norman Bates, Richard Ramirez, Jason Voorhees, Andre Chikatilo, Angela Johnson and Joseph Mumfre and each of their exploits always appear much more gruesome and more inhumane than the last character. In November 2005, the world again shuddered to hear about the deeds of Bo and Vincent Sinclair, the so-called "wax-killers" who concealed their foul deeds behind the facade of a forgotten tourist attraction.
Many paranormal researchers believe that ghosts exist at locations where there has been a massive amount of psychic energy imbedded into the physical environment, and they point with proof to the amazing number of haunted battlefields and murder sites. Ambrose is no exception. Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred people breathed their last moments of air here pleading for their lives. In the months after the murders, both police officials and the morbidly curious have testified to a volume of activity here ranging from sights, smells, sounds and poltergeist activity. Here, the spirits of the dead are reaching out to tell what happened in order to gain justice and piece of mind to pass on to the next world. Forensic photographs taken at Ambrose are reported to show orbs, distorted photos, extra figures, ethereal luminescent mist and shadowy figures, but a majority of the pictures are not open to the public. One photo allegedly shows a figure in black missing his head.
Lee Christiansen of the Louisiana State Police stood guard repeatedly at the isolated Ambrose site several times during the investigations as bodies by the dozens were carried out, but eventually, he refused to be out there alone. He told supervisors that he heard voices around him, noticed figures vanishing out of eye shot, felt himself being watched and the sound of screams from under the road where tunnels linked the utilities in town. One night, he stormed the theatre chasing shadows and emerged finding no one from among the living. He later learned that twenty-three bodies coated in wax had been recovered from the theatre alone.
One newspaper article about the investigation describes a fingerprint expert dusting for prints at the former theatre. She felt as if she was being watched because every so often a curtain would part in the window facing her from the empty house across the street.
Reporters from the local NBC out of Baton Rouge came up with a bit of footage where an anomalous figure in black stood loitering and watching the police investigation as they taped an interview. No one knows who the figure might have been because ass the officers and forensic experts were accounted for at the time. One officer thought the likeness of the unidentified person resembled that of Bo Sinclair.
As officials were carrying bodies out that had been posed in the bowling alley, several officers overheard voices whispering from the church and charged en masse to storm and trap any persons inside. By this point, the bodies in the Ambrose church had been cleared, the building swept of evidence and the doors taped shut against intruders. All the tape on the entry ways was intact and uncut, but as officers once again invaded the desecrated church, they found it empty and devoid of life.
As body-collecting started from the church at the end of town and progressed to the entry of town, body-collecting and forensics swept over both sides of the street and the structures two blocks in from the center of town. Evidence taking was meticulous, slow and thorough as groups of three to five covered two to three structures a day. Forensic experts were on loan from across the country to cover the work load, and they all returned home with stories of their experiences. Afterward, Teddy Prince on loan from CSI New Orleans commented that he felt the life-forces of the dead people around him as he scrutinized the Sinclair house on the hill. Heidi Barrows and Michael Hyneman of CSI Nashville felt a chill go through them in the Ambrose gas station even though they were working in plus ninety degree heat. Greg Sanders from the Las Vegas CSI reportedly told his colleagues that he saw unidentified figures out of eye shot around him all the time the month he took processing the former Ambrose town hall. Manuel Vasquez from CSI Detroit thought he heard puppies whimpering and cats purring as he cleared the pet store. Alanna Sprouse from CSI Seattle described a headless woman walking down the street from the theatre not once but five times!
In seventeen out of twenty-five occasions, Kerri Savage from CSI San Francisco and Grant Belucci from CSI Boston thought they overheard trespassers in sealed off parts of the former sugar factory. They reported hearing footsteps, whispers and noises as well as experiencing sensations of being watched; many of these incidents were documented in their report as well as the fact that one was available for these sounds.
As much as a year after the investigations, trespassers ranging from the morbidly curious and the morally questionable were invading distant and nearly inaccessible Ambrose for macabre trophies, personal experiences and idle fascination. The winter after the authorities departed, a pack of juvenile delinquents camping out in the church heard and reportedly saw a phantom funeral procession in the cemetery. After the road to Ambrose was closed down to vandals, a gas station attendant in nearby Jones Creek started getting reports from lost motorists who saw the lights of distant Ambrose from deep in the valley.
There are no longer power lines into the city.
Despite the closed off road and regular patrols by the state police, teenage vandals and amateur ghost hunters still trek the back roads to Ambrose and even raft upstream to sneak into town. As of 2010, weeds, budding trees and brush are claiming the tiny hamlet. Where residences once waited to attend the movies, hordes of feral cats run in and out of the openings in the boarded up theater. The gas station is nearly intact except for weeds clogging the pavement, and the church at the end of the street is boarded up tightly, except trespassers report they still hear choruses of voices singing inside the old chapel. The lights inside also reportedly come on at night.
On May 16, 2011, six years after the bloody deeds, a team of "Blair Witch"-inspired teenage movie makers from the University of New Orleans headed to Ambrose to shoot a short film, although when they were escorted out of a town a week later, they claimed they had gotten lost and were stuck in town because their van had broken down. Afterward, they reported that they had spent a terrifying week of voices, shadows, screams and apparitions which terrified them the time they had been camping out in the mill. Starting out simple at first, their experiences started out casual at first and became more terrifying the longer they remained. When they were finally arrested and fined, all five of them were founded huddled in terror and living in their recreational vehicle terrified that something had spent the night before trying to break into their RV.
History: Ambrose was a tiny farming community founded in 1933 around a local sugar mill founded by later town mayor Charles Ambrose, but the town actually gained notoriety around 1950 through the success of local artist Trudy Sinclair. Her wax creations were once very prosperous for the town, bringing tourists north from Baton Rouge, but her death brought dire results on several levels. After a degenerative disease took her life, her husband, Joshua Sinclair, a physician, took his life after losing hope on keeping her alive. Their three sons were taken in by local neighbors, but from the start, the boys proved to be a problem. The older boys, Bo and Vincent, had been born adjoined twins medically separated by their father, and had grown up anti-social, while Lucas, the youngest brother, fared well away from his brothers. Bo became violent and destructive while Vincent did what he could to keep his mother's wax museum going while indulging his brother's homicidal tendencies.
It is unknown when the older boys murder spree begin, but it was sometime in their teenage years when the town's population was at its lowest. The new highway in 1953 cut off direct travel through town, and the sugar mill where Bo worked closed down. Isolated from the outside world, Bo started picking off the last few remaining people in town and his brother covered up the crimes by turning the bodies into figures, including that of anyone Bo pulled off the highway. At least twenty-eight vehicles from missing persons were found concealed in the sugar plant by time the boys were stopped. In November 2005, the Sinclair brothers were out-matched by football fans from New York City and subjected to their own waxworks. Investigations lasted for seven months, the longest criminal investigation in US history, recovering 175 corpses preserved in wax and staged in life-like poses all over town. No one is quite sure if Lucas had anything to do with the murders, but the state police have designated the area private property. An Orlando, Florida judge is trying to get legal permission to convert the town remains into a private retreat with the help of investors.
Identity of Ghosts: In the final tally, it is believed that the Sinclair brothers killed at least 175 people, maybe at high as 250 ("eleven more than Voorhees, six hundred less than Jim Jones....") in the space of twelve years. Victims consisted of locals at first and later graduated to tourists, commuters, misplaced travelers and unfortunate motorists. Nothing linked the victims except for being unlucky to end up near Ambrose.
Source/Comments: House of Wax (2005). Phenomenon based on Dudleytown near Cornwall, Connecticut, Bannack Ghost Town near Dillon, Montana and Cerro Gordo near Owens Lake, California.
Greg Sanders from CSI: Crime Scene Investigations (2000-Recent)