Chasing Ghosts, page 24
The exchange continued, and though the ghost couldn’t count the fingers, it certainly seemed to understand the challenge at hand.
“The numbers one was the best session we’ve had because, before that, we’d get two or three direct responses towards what we were asking about,” Pfeiffer says, “but to hear a stream of numbers like that—I asked Connor about it later and he said, ‘I was hoping you guys asked for the winning lottery numbers.’”
Randall recommends finding a comfortable place to relax while listening to the box, and he noticed that holding the antenna helps create better activity. “It adds into this nice symbology of the human being becoming the antenna themselves,” he says. “If you hear something, say something. You don’t want to sit and think about the answers. You don’t add editorial opinions. You just spout out what is coming across that feed as quickly as possible.”
So are ghosts actually coming through the radio waves? That’s one theory the team offers. Alternatively, they believe it might be a way for the spirits to communicate through our minds. Perhaps listening to the bits of sound through the radio placates the conscious mind and, as Pfeiffer suggests, “allows the unconscious brain to recognize sounds that aren’t there, or manifest them or produce or hear them in a psychical sense.”
“None of the gadgets being fielded is specifically designed to detect ghosts—despite the claims—because we do not know what ghosts are or what causes them…. Even though it might look and sound impressive, having something that beeps does not make a scientific investigation.”
—Dr. Leo Ruickbie, a member of the Society for Psychical Research’s governing council, discussing the “gadget trap” in his 1988 book A Brief Guide to Ghost Hunting
Over in West Virginia, Valarie Myers of the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum has gotten “freaky” results using the method over the past couple of years. One of her spookier sessions occurred while she and her assistant manager were in what she called “the notorious bedpost murder room.” Of all the places in an old insane asylum to seek out a creepy experience, this would seem to be an ideal candidate. Myers had her blindfold on and was hearing nothing but radio static until a ghost seemed to come through the box.
“All of a sudden I hear a woman’s voice say ‘evil.’ So I spoke up and I said ‘evil.’ Next thing I know Brandi’s flashlight is getting my attention: ‘Did you just say evil?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ She says, ‘Time to go! Time to go!’ She put her flashlight on in front of her, and she’s hauling ass through the violent men’s ward and through the violent women’s ward, and we got to the nurses’ quarters before she’d tell me what happened. While I was hearing nothing but radio static, she was hearing someone walking out in the hallway. She spoke up and said, ‘Is that person out in the hallway nice?’ And that’s when I spoke up and said ‘evil.’”
Other ghost hunters use regular recording devices hoping to pick up an EVP. With any luck, after recording an investigation they’ll hear something upon playback. Nothing would be heard during the actual recording since ghosts probably can’t talk. Without a tongue or voice box it’s basically impossible to create a sound wave that can wiggle its way through our ears. Just as Loyd Auerbach spoke of an apparition occurring in our mind’s eye in the previous chapter, with an EVP the ghost’s voice would be imprinted on the media. Dan Sturges describes it as a psychokinesis process. He’s had luck capturing EVPs over the course of twenty years of investigations. Of note were voices captured at the Merchant House Museum in New York City’s Greenwich Village. The museum’s long history of ghosts has earned it the title of Manhattan’s most haunted place.
The four-story brick row house was built in 1832 and purchased by a merchant named Seabury Tredwell. One of his eight children, Gertrude, was born in an upstairs bedroom in 1840 and lived in the elegant Greek Revival home as the neighborhood grew and changed around her for the next ninety-three years. She left this world in 1933 in the same canopied bed where she entered it. No one would ever occupy the Merchant House again. Several years later, in 1936, it became a museum, which ensured all of the original furnishings would be preserved as a Tredwell time capsule. The sheets on the bed are the sheets they slept on. The dishes on the table are the dishes they ate from. They played the pianoforte in the front parlor, where guests were entertained and family funerals were held. The family’s DNA is ingrained in every room and stairway. This presents ghost hunters with a unique opportunity to study a house that has a full history of just one family, whom many believe never left. Gertrude in particular has been seen by many visitors over the decades, often in a brown dress drinking a cup of tea. Some have claimed to see her outside the front steps, shouting at kids to be quiet.
A museum volunteer in the mid-1960s recalled a time when her hand was overtaken by Gertrude’s spirit: “Suddenly the pencil I was holding started moving. It seemed to be guided by a very powerful force—not me—and it wrote ‘Miss Tredwell is here.’ The handwriting was not my own. It was very large and flowery, with a lot of loops—like old-fashioned penmanship.”
Before Sturges begins any EVP session he records everyone on his team talking and saying their name in order to have a voice print of all present. If something is captured, a digital forensics analyst can use that information to rule out their voices. Sturges acknowledges fakery is still possible—the Spiricom case has proven that—but he’s not one to coordinate such antics. The EVPs his team caught at the Merchant House Museum were especially interesting because they proved to be direct answers to their questions. In one instance, a girl asked Ms. Tredwell if she was pretty. The answer they discovered later was “Pleasant enough.” Another question asked Mr. Tredwell if he liked to play the piano. “I like to strike the keys in succession,” came through on the recording.
“It’s crazy!” Sturges exclaims. “And we’ve had such luck at the Merchant House, sometimes I take it for granted. I’ll be talking to someone about it and I’ll see their eyes popping open when they listen to it. And I go, oh yeah, this is crazy!”
Crazy is an understatement, based on his experiences at the house. “I think we have lots of things happening there and it’s not only Gertrude Tredwell, it’s (according to the many mediums I’ve brought there) various members of the family as well as the servants,” Sturges added in an email. “We’ve also had family members and friends of the people on the investigation pop in for a visit. So, not only is it an imprint or ‘place memory’ haunting happening but also an apparitional or ‘intelligent’ haunting as well.”
Niki Saunders of the Farnsworth House Inn hunts ghosts with a high-tech tool kit that includes audio recorders for EVPs, spirit boxes, lasers, antennas, and more. She’ll use lasers, for example, to set up a grid, as if helping a museum protect an exhibit of rare jewels. If something crosses the line, it’ll be clearly visible by a break in the laser’s beam.
“We can tell if one of us goes through it, but when something else makes it go off it’s pretty interesting,” she says. “In video you just see something crossed the force field. We’ve had it go off [at the Farnsworth].”
Another go-to device is the REM Pod. It features an antenna that radiates its own electromagnetic field. The base has lights and noises that go off if anything should come close or make contact with it. Ghost hunters can leave it in a room and, in theory, invite a ghost to interact with it in an attempt to communicate.
“If we’re sitting here and it’s over there and it starts going off, we’re not touching it, we’re not close to it, so something is making that happen,” Saunders said.
Working at the Farnsworth led her to develop her own version of the device called the Seeker. It gives investigators the ability to turn the sound off yet still have the lights alert observers.
“If you’re here in the bed-and-breakfast where the walls aren’t so thick, you can turn the volume down but still have the lit-up validation, so it won’t wake up the guests,” she explains. “Those tones from the REM Pods are deafening.”
Despite the explosion of ghost-hunting tech, paranormal investigators like Sturges and Auerbach prefer a simpler approach, not unlike earlier ghost hunters Harry Price and Hans Holzer. Their main tool: humans.
Witnesses are key to an investigation. Auerbach stresses the importance of conducting extensive interviews with them to find out where, when, and what paranormal events happened.
“We really go over the testimony a number of times,” he says. “Sometimes asking the same questions in different ways, in different spots of the house, with different combinations of witnesses just to get a fuller picture.”
Auerbach will employ psychics and mediums as well, but only after fully vetting them and feeling confident they might be able to provide useful information. Alexandra Holzer works in a similar manner by following her father’s techniques—the Holzer Method—which she describes as “the scientific method for collecting data minced with a medium in tow as another tool to get as much information as to what’s going on.” That includes digging up the history on any residence under investigation, finding out when it was built, and learning about who lived there before and what happened on the land prior to the construction of the house.
As for technology, audio and video recorders are useful for their intended purposes of preserving interviews—not for capturing EVPs and apparitions. EMF detectors can be useful in attempting to debunk reported phenomena.
“We’re always looking for ways to separate the things in an environment that could cause us to conclude something is paranormal or psychic from the things that might genuinely be paranormal or psychic,” Auerbach explains. “I had a case early on where people were talking about footsteps in their attic and it turned out the attic acoustics were such that the squirrel that got into the attic and pushed a nut across the floor sounded like footsteps. I caught the squirrel. Then I tested it out. I scared the hell out of the people, I grabbed a bunch of the nuts that I’d found and rolled them across the floor and they were screaming because they thought that I was taken by the army of darkness or something.”
“I know a couple magicians who work with ghost hunting shows to create subtle special effects to wig out ghost hunters. They have an hour with nothing to go on. They have a beep on a device…. I do talk to one executive producer who said, ‘You know, I really thought there was something out there, but by the end of the first season, no.’”
—Todd Robbins, performer and historian, discussing in 2020 the proliferation of ghost hunting shows and their validity
It doesn’t take much more than a level head to debunk ghostly visitors by seeking out rodent offenders in the attic or walls, or even creaky floors or old pipes that like to make noises whenever they feel like it. Once you get past the normal, you can start to explore the possibility of the paranormal.
But until technology provides some form of indisputable proof of the afterlife, belief in ghosts comes down to the basics: reason, personal experiences, and faith. Thousands of years after humankind’s earliest recorded ghost sightings, these are the very same things that have always formed our opinions. Sometimes reason perfectly explains a personal experience, and sometimes faith wrestles reason to the ground and wins us over. At our core, it’s human nature to wonder what’s next for us—and to hope for something more. Yet for all our desire to solve the mystery of ghosts, perhaps we’re better off living with the unknown. Not having all the answers makes life far more interesting.
Of course, the unknown is also what conjures fear. We humans tend not to like the things we don’t know and don’t understand. Things like unexplainable noises, strange people, and different ideas. So to most people, ghosts are scary. Yet witnessing such a thing should provide a sense of relief and awe instead. If you believe in what you’ve seen, a ghost is your ultimate answer about life after death. A ghost means there’s something more. Maybe that something more includes various states of being, whether it’s ignorance about being dead, a struggle to right a wrong, or existence on an entirely different plane. Maybe it means our best attempts to connect with the living come through electricity, mental imprints, blinking lights, tossed objects, or even a good old-fashioned knock on wood.
All we know is that no one knows. If any theories or paranormal experiences presented in this book have even an ounce of truth, it means we don’t just die and turn to dust. We don’t just live on in memories. We become something new in the afterlife. Whatever form that takes, it sounds a lot like heaven. Dead in a box is hell. Which do you want to believe in?
Skip Notes
11Barnum referred to Abraham Bogardus, a daguerreotypist and photographer who had a gallery on Broadway, not far from where the showman’s American Museum had stood until it burned to the ground in 1865.
12Infrasound also happens to be used by elephants to communicate over long distances. Spending time with chatty elephants would lead to extraordinary memories for anyone. And maybe some paranormal ones too.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ghosts may be elusive, but lore, legends, written accounts, scientific studies, and other reports about them are not. In addition to interviews with many knowledgeable sources, the following books, websites, podcasts, and articles—including many with colorful descriptions of events from Victorian-era newspapers—were valuable resources in my research.
Ghosts of Humans Past
“Angels and Demons.” https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/explore/angels-and-demons (accessed October 23, 2020).
Aridjis, Eva, and Joanna Ebenstein, eds. “Death in Ancient and Present-Day Mexico.” Death, a Graveside Companion. London: Thames & Hudson, 2017.
Attar, Rob. “Guidebook to the Ancient Egyptian afterlife.” History Extra, December 2010. https://www.historyextra.com/period/ancient-egypt/ancient-egyptian-guide-afterlife-death-book-dead-journey-facts (accessed October 5, 2020).
Ayton, William Alexander. The Life of John Dee: Translated from the Latin of Dr. Thomas Smith. London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1908.
Bouyer, Louis. Dictionary of Theology. New York: Desclee Co., Inc., 1965.
Brennan, J. H. Whisperers: The Secret History of the Spirit World. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2013.
Bruce, Scott G., ed. The Penguin Book of the Undead. New York, Penguin, 2016.
Casaubon, Meric. A True & Faithful Relation of What Passed for many Years Between Dr. John Dee and Some Spirits. London: D. Maxwell, 1659.
Crooke, William. The Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India. London: A. Constable & Company, 1896.
“Dee, John.” Occult World. https://occult-world.com/dee-john (accessed October 25, 2020).
Dee, John, and James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, eds. The Private Diary of Dr. John Dee. London: Camden Society, 1842.
Defoe, Daniel. The Secrets of the Invisible World Disclosed. New York: Svantovit Press, 1999.
Easting, Robert. “Peter of Bramham’s account of a chaplain’s vision of purgatory (c.1343?)” Medium Aevum 65, issue 2, 1996.
Heaphy, Linda. “Hungry Ghosts: Their History and Origin.” Kashgar - Life for the Modern Nomad (website). https://kashgar.com.au/blogs/tribal-culture/hungry-ghosts-their-history-and-origin (accessed November 2, 2020).
Hearn, Lafcadio. Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911.
“Inside Information.” Lore podcast, episode 143, May 25, 2020.
James, M. R. “Twelve Medieval Ghost-Stories.” English Historical Review XXXVII, issue CXLVII, July 1922.
Kowalewski, David, PhD. Death Walkers: Shamanic Psychopomps, Earthbound Ghosts, and Helping Spirits in the Afterlife Realm. Bloomington, IN: iUniverse, 2015.
Lavater, Ludwig. Of ghostes and spirites, walking by night: and of straunge noyses, crackes, and sundrie forewarnings: which commonly happen before the death of men: great slaughters, and alterations of kingdoms. London: Thomas Creede, 1596.
Lewis, Nell Battle. “Incidentally.” News and Observer, August 28, 1938.
Lindley, Charles, Viscount Halifax. Lord Halifax’s Ghost Book. New York: Didier Publishing Company, 1944.
Mark, Joshua J. “Ghosts in the Ancient World.” World History Encyclopedia, October 30, 2014. http://www.ancient.eu/ghost (accessed November 7, 2020).
“Miscellany: A Propos de Bhoots.” Manchester Guardian, December 24, 1926.
Onion, Amanda. “Scientists Explain Red Sea Parting and Other Miracles” ABC News,February 12, 2004. https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=99580&page=1 (accessed November 1, 2020).
Owens, Susan. The Ghost: A Cultural History. London: Tate Publishing, 2017.
Rivenburg, Roy. “Purgatory.” Los Angeles Times, October 20, 1995.
Ruickbie, Dr. Leo. A Brief Guide to Ghost Hunting: How to Identify and Investigate Spirits, Poltergeists, Hauntings and Other Paranormal Activity. London: Robinson, 2013.
Swedenborg, Emanuel. Heaven and Its Wonders, the World of Spirits, and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen. New York: American Swedenborg Printing and Publishing Society, 1885.
Thorpe, T. E. “John Dee.” Nature, December 2, 1909.
Whitby, Christopher Lionel. John Dee’s Actions with Spirits. New York: Garland Publishing, 1988.
Conversations with the Dead
Abbott, Karen. “The Fox Sisters and the Rap on Spiritualism.” Smithsonianmag.com, October 30, 2012. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-fox-sisters-and-the-rap-on-spiritualism-99663697 (accessed August 23, 2020).
