OLEAN — It’s likely a normal conversation for most couples. “Honey, I found a house I think we should buy.”

For Dan Klaes, of North Tonawanda, we imagine that discussion with his wife Colleen went a bit differently. “It’s dilapidated, all the ductwork and electricity are torn out, it has black mold, he wants cash up front and then a mortgage — oh, and it’s rumored to be one of the most haunted houses in New York state.”

For the past decade, Klaes has been the owner of the Hinsdale House, known the world over for its alleged haunts after being on television at least seven times. And on YouTube, featured by all kinds of “celebrity ghost hunters.”

At Olean Public Library Monday evening, Klaes said, “When I first saw the house, it was like … you know that commercial where they have the chainsaws hanging from the garage and they say ‘let’s go hide in there?'”

He presented his story, “Whispers of Hinsdale: Unraveling My Paranormal Journey” at the Olean library this week. He’s been sharing the story throughout Western New York all month.

Dan Klaes

A co-founder of the Greater Western New York Paranormal Society, Klaes is a longtime believer in the paranormal, telling the crowd in attendance that he grew up in a haunted house.

“My parents always sloughed things off,” he said. “They never told me what was going on there. They would say someone is pulling a prank on us.”

He described returning home from church one Sunday to find crayon drawings on the ceilings. “A lot of the stuff I was getting blamed for, but I knew I wasn’t doing it,” he said. Klaes has two sisters, but they weren’t home when it happened either.

He described a time his family was away on vacation and he was staying with a friend. They stopped by his house to get his GI Joe action figures and heard someone upstairs in the empty house singing “Ring Around the Rosie.” His friend ran upstairs to look; he grudgingly followed. No one was there.

Klaes went to college, moving out of his childhood home. He was engaged and expecting a child when his parents sold the house to him and moved away.

“A few months after we moved in, my wife thought she saw a little girl standing at the top of the steps,” he said. “My son said he saw a boy standing by the bed who disappeared.”

A friend told him to go to Lily Dale Assembly, where he met the Rev. Ellen Bourn. “She told me two children’s spirits were living in my house even before I paid her,” Klaes said with a laugh.

With research, he ended up finding out two children who had lived in the house had cystic fibrosis. Eventually, he found a painting of them in the home’s attic and, with advice from Bourn, was able to bring peace to the home.

“This was like the first ‘Scooby Doo’ episode of my life,” he said with a laugh. “It’s kind of what got me into ghost hunting.”

His focus has been researching the places they investigate. “We were diving into history. I thought it was so important to know as much as we could.”

EXPLAINING HOW HE learned about the Hinsdale House, Klaes said the co-founder of his paranormal group gave him the address and sent him there in the winter time.

“There was no electricity in there except in the living room. Five flies were buzzing around in the kitchen in the winter.”

In the living room, his friend turned on an episode of the show “A Haunting” called “A Dark Force,” which was based on the Hinsdale House and its residents, the Dandy family.

“I remember saying ‘Isn’t this the same house?'” Klaes said. He explained a priest from St. Bonaventure University did a structural exorcism on the house in the 1970s to try to help the Dandy family, but it didn’t work. The family ended up moving to California.

Klaes said they did a ghost hunt that night, and he was intrigued by the house. He kept going back. The owner at the time had defaulted on the mortgage and was preparing to tear the house down.

“It was a hellhole,” he said, “really bad.”

He felt that he had connected with the spirits of some former residents of the house, and wanted to preserve its history. He struck a deal with the owner, but wiped out his savings to do it.

There were 500,000 honeybees in the floors and walls. Everything in the place needed to be redone.

“I don’t know who in their right mind would want to save the place … except for me,” Klaes said.

He faced a lot of hardship getting going.

“Every time we tried to do something, people would just break in and ruin it,” he said.

“I put on Facebook that I’m going to have a Day of Caring at Hinsdale,” he said. “About 60 to 70 people showed up.”

Some bee farmers in Franklinville came to pull the bees out. The workers got the roof replaced. There was a tremendous amount to be done, but progress was being made.

The septic system and water well needed work — neither of which Klaes knew anything about.

AS WORK PROGRESSED, he sent off some boards from the house to a man in Ohio who made spirit boxes out of wood from haunted locations. “There’s bullet shards in the wood,” Klaes said.

They sent the shards to the University of Buffalo for dating and found they came from the pre-Revolutionary War era. They thought it might have meant that someone way back then had shot into a tree, and that tree was eventually used in building the house.

With ownership of the house came a responsibility to the people of Hinsdale, who were tired of the carnival-like atmosphere the former owner had made around the property.

“I wanted to turn it into a research center, peacefully,” Klaes said.

Once he had it, and work was underway to save it, he heard from someone who wanted to film a show there.

“He wanted a whole week. They were paying me $2,000,” he said, adding that money would really help with the roof project at the time. It was Nick Groff, who was well known from formerly starring on a paranormal show on Discovery Channel called “Ghost Adventures.” He was then starting a new show called “Paranormal Lockdown” with Katrina Weidman from the show “Paranormal State.”

“I ended up becoming really good friends with him,” Klaes said of Groff, who now lives in Niagara Falls. “He’s taken a vested interest in this location. We also filmed his new show ‘Death Walker’ here.”

For that show, ground-penetrating radar was brought into the Hinsdale property and four graves were found, two adults and two children. “They’re in caskets,” Klaes said. “People buried themselves on their properties back in the day.”

Now that section is fenced off and marked as a small cemetery.

Much of the investigating is aimed at finding out what really happened at the property in the past, and putting an end to the plethora of myths and folklore that serve to create urban legends.

“Part of my goal was to give Clara Dandy some answers as to what was happening,” Klaes said.

One of the former residents of the property said he had seen apparitions floating above the pond on the property. A local legend said a car was in the pond.

“We had forensic divers come in and dive the pond,” Klaes said. They found a broken off piece of headstone from the small cemetery plot, but not really anything else.

KLAES IS IN TOUCH with Clara Miller, formerly Dandy, and has heard from her things that have happened at the house “in her own words. Just going there and listening to her,” he said, shaking his head. “She’s a storyteller,” he said, explaining the power her words hold as she tells about the terror her family faced.

The family moved in in 1970 and poltergeist activity started soon after. An ash tray was levitating, the children were seeing shadow figures. One daughter said she had seen a girl with red hair dancing by the pond. One night, the family saw a girl outside the window. They went outside to check it out only to see the girl was now inside the house.

“The kids did play with the Ouija board inside the house,” Klaes said. “A doll came flying off the shelf at them.”

After the priest came, the house was cleared for some time, but then the disturbance came back at full force. The Dandys left.

When Klaes bought it, there was no wi-fi — the house is pretty far back in the woods. He was able to get satellite-based service, which has allowed him to run a web camera showing the house’s interior at various times. His first night, an outline of a person was seemingly visible in the empty house.

In the perhaps thousands of investigations since, pictures, videos and audio recordings have captured all kinds of things — like a creature from Native American folklore called a pukwudgie, shadows walking through the home and voices speaking when no one is present.

Many examples are online where one can view what others have recorded and decide for oneself what to believe.

As for Klaes, “I’ve been documenting this for nine years now. My ultimate goal is to put out a book of data. We’re compiling all that data now.”

He showed several examples of what others have recorded. In a few instances, a quiet, female voice could be heard saying “hello.” In others, an outline that looked like a person was visible.

One video he referred to showed a static camera recording a ghost hunter from “Warriors of the Paranormal” sleeping on a couch in the house’s living room. “She said it was the deadest night they ever had,” Klaes said. But then the static camera recorded something they couldn’t explain — “something under the blanket with her.”

Referring to the Hinsdale project overall, Klaes said, “It’s been 10 years of fun and love. The house is always open to investigate.”