Rob Conover was a skeptic, and still is at heart. His attitude was shaped in part by his early years in Missouri, the Show Me State, his three years in the United States Marine Corps, and his career after that as a private investigator. If he could not see it, hear it, smell it, or touch it then it just didn't exist. It was this attitude that also started him down the path he follows today. In 1992, Rob spent the night in the Tazewell County Healthcare Center with a small group of people that included his best friend Dana Herold, a reporter, a photographer, and Gordon Poquet, the director of the Tazewell County Health Department. It was his goal that night to prove that the building was not haunted. Stories had circulated for years among county employees, including police officers, judges, lawyers, and other respectable citizens of Pekin, that the old building was haunted by a spirit named Hazel. As a private investigator, Rob had heard many of these stories while visiting the courthouse on business. Rob found the stories interesting, but he was not a believer. However, he was amazed that such logical, level-headed people could believe in something so outlandish and more than once he thought about spending a night alone in the old building to prove to them that there was nothing there that couldn't be explained with logic. After hearing that the building was slated for demolition before the end of the year, Rob decided he had to get in there before the building was gone. It was that decision, which seemed so small at the time, that changed his life forever. On the night of Friday March 13, 1991, Rob and a small group of people he assembled spent the night in the Healthcare Center. The building itself was nearly a hundred years old, having been originally built as a poor farm for Tazewell County's less than fortunate. That night, the team experienced many unexplainable events; from muffled voices and cold spots to slamming doors and even a door that refused to open. Reviewing the video tapes the next day, Rob also found that they had captured unexplainable phenomena on tape. Rob became a believer in ghosts that night. Over the next few years, Rob's life changed dramatically. He became friends with local and nationally known psychic Greta Alexander, whom he had previously thought to be a quack, and spent a lot of his free time investigating haunted houses in Pekin. The biggest change, however, came while he was working at a machine shop in Peoria. While working on a computer lathe, Rob lost a finger in a horrendous, and slow, accident. The trauma of the accident left Rob with abilities which at first scared him but that he ultimately embraced as his true calling. Rob gives all credit for his psychic and medium abilities to God, who for some reason chose him to do His work on earth. - www.robconover.net