PARK CITY — Sue and Gary Pruitt had their camera phones at the ready while walking through the Mentz Hotel building, snapping away in hopes that one of their pictures captured something not of this world.

The Glasgow couple had heard stories about the empty building being haunted, and when they learned that a paranormal investigator was giving guided tours this weekend, they jumped at the opportunity to visit Friday evening.

“If I hear a place might be haunted, I’m there,” Gary Pruitt said.

Jeff Yeckering, lead investigator of OpenDoorz Paranormal Research of Bowling Green, has spent several nights with his wife, Shelly, at the former hotel, using infrared cameras and sensitive voice-recording technology to pick up activity that he believes suggests a supernatural presence throughout the building.

Yeckering has been giving tours of the city-owned hotel building every other weekend, and with Park City holding its annual community festival, he is expanding the tour itinerary this weekend, adding walking lantern tours of the Bell’s Tavern ruins and a nearby cemetery after tonight’s fireworks display.

The Mentz Hotel building was erected in the early 1900s and has also served as a boarding school for boys, a nursing home and a private residence before falling into disrepair.

For Yeckering, whose prior investigation of activity at Octagon Hall in Simpson County was featured on the A&E Biography Channel program “My Ghost Story Caught on Camera,” the empty hotel has been where he has picked up some of his best readings of paranormal activity.

“This building has a lot of history coming out of its pores and, at night, it ain’t bashful about letting you know,” Yeckering said.

During a series of tours Friday, Yeckering led groups through many of the rooms of the hotel, telling stories about the building’s past as a stopover for tourists here to see Mammoth Cave.

Yeckering also spoke about the building’s associations with death. 

The lobby held about 80 funerals, Yeckering said. Most of the dead were elderly nursing home patients, but Yeckering said his research turned up three killings, including a criminal who was shot on the second floor after being chased by police and a woman who was smothered in bed by her son.

Sue Pruitt grew up hearing stories about the old hotel being haunted, though she did not know how much stock to take in them.

Nevertheless, curiosity led her to the building Friday.

“I’ve always wanted to go through here,” Pruitt said after the tour. “It’s a grand looking building, and I hope it gets restored to its original grandeur.”

Renovations are underway in preparation for the potential relocation of the Barren River Imaginative Museum of Science.

Park City Mayor David Lyons touts the Mentz Hotel for its historical value and calls the building a “heck of an asset” with a lot of potential for continued use.

He has allowed Yeckering and other paranormal investigators to spend nights in the building. One group, Louisville Paranormal Investigations, posted its findings from a 2010 visit on its website.

“There is a lot of history there,” Lyons said. “As far as the spirits are concerned, I guess I’ll leave that to someone else’s investigation.”

The Pruitts said they would be interested in doing an overnight visit, which Yeckering conducts every other weekend with groups, in which he teaches about the science and history behind paranormal investigations and leads participants through investigations.

Gary Pruitt said he and his wife visited Rose Hall Plantation in Jamaica, an 18th century mansion with an infamous story attached to it about the White Witch, a long-dead resident who reputedly haunts the grounds.

When the Pruitts returned home, one of the pictures they took of themselves in the mirror contained an unexplained presence, Gary Pruitt said, and their fascination with the paranormal developed from there.

During Friday’s tour, Gary Pruitt attempted to conjure some spirits, asking them to show themselves by moving a chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

“I kept thinking if I kept asking them to come out one of them would slap me in the back of the head,” Gary Pruitt said with a laugh.

The tours of the Mentz Hotel continue at 1:30 p.m. today, with lantern tours starting after the fireworks tonight.