originally published in the Hartford Advocate, October 25, 2007
According to the movies, a ghost that's haunting you can be easily detected: just look for blood oozing out of the walls, objects moving of their own volition or giant marshmallows terrorizing the streets of Manhattan.
But those who believe in ghosts say their real-life (so to speak) manifestations are more subtle than that.
Take for example the Insight Paranormal Investigations people in Stafford Springs, who believe in ghosts but say they're debunkers as well, looking for natural explanations before considering ghosts as a possibility. (They don't charge for their services, either.)
"Why would you charge to alleviate fear?" asked investigator Tony Diana. "When people are at home, and they think that something's haunting them, they feel real fear, and they want that fear to be quelled, and I think it'd be great, at least for one person, if we can go in there and say 'it's a banging pipe' or 'it's your next-door neighbors, you have thin walls.'"
But finding a ghost would be great, too, and in hopes of doing so the group planned an excursion to the old Hillside Cemetery (next to a municipal dump).
In addition to Tony, there's his wife Allyson Diana, mother Barbara Passmore, friend Stephen Bednar, daughter Christina Sirhal, and daughter's boyfriend Jaime Ziemba.
I followed them to Hillside.
As the name suggests, it covers a sloping hill. A harsh yellow streetlight nearby cast creepily long shadows from the gravestones.
Tony carried a camera and voice recorder, and Steve a doohickey which he said measured electromagnetic fields. I followed them through one part of the cemetery while Jaime and Christina, with digital thermometer and voice recorder, struck out on their own.
But before we climbed the stone wall into the graveyard, Tony announced our presence to any spirits within: "We're only here to help. We mean no harm. We don't wish to attract negative energy here."
Hillside has many grave markers tilted at precarious angles or fallen down entirely. "See that pyramid-shaped tombstone?" Tony asked, pointing to one from the 1870s. On the group's last trip, a mysterious red mist appeared on the pictures they'd taken of it.
This time, after Tony snapped a few photos and inspected them, he said, "I think we found our red mist." The distant streetlight reflected off the polished granite in a way that turned dull red in the camera lens. "Debunked!" Tony said. "Now that we've debunked that, we'll go to a regular sweep."
He lifted his head and spoke to the cemetery as a whole: "Would anyone like to talk to us? Give us a message, tell us your name?"
Tony paused a few seconds after every question. "We have to give them a chance to speak."
"Do you expect to hear anything now, or only when you play the tape back later?" I asked.
"Later," he said. "They use their energy to morph white noise into messages ... for digital voice recorders, you get better results with the cheap models. There's more static [for ghosts to work with]."
He took a few steps more and said "If you're here and don't know you're dead, you don't have to stay here. You can move on. Unless you have unfinished business here?"
Back at Tony's house, Steve downloaded the voice recording onto a computer. Tony and I listened over the speakers while Steve wore headphones, and checked to see how the recording matched the electro-magnetic readouts he'd taken.
There were a couple of moments where, between the sounds of our own words, you could see a teensy blip on the readout, and hear something that might be a human voice. Tony and Steve thought these significant but I wasn't too impressed by, for example, a sound resembling a man saying "ou" for a fraction of a second.
"Was there an EMF reading?" Tony asked.
"One-point-five," Steve said. "That's why it was so weak."
The recording got to the part where I'd talked about having multiple pens to take notes. Just after, we heard a very faint female voice, not Christina's and definitely not mine, saying "You'll never [something] me." (I thought the indistinct word sounded like "cross" or "crush." Tony and Steve, mentioning past impressions that a ghost was hiding something from them, said "find." Interpreting ghost voices is a bit like reading Rorschach blots.)
There were other moments in the 20-minute recording that the two thought might be ghostly voices: perhaps a man whispering something that might be "Help me, please," if you had to match it to an English phrase.
"I hate that, hearing nothing but 'help me,' because I can't do anything," Tony said. Later we heard something even more indistinct, maybe a voice fragment from a child, or a trick of the wind blowing into the microphone. Tony and Steve suspected a ghost kid asking, "Was that you?"
The recording ended soon after, and I drove home through pitch-black streets looking for the Interstate and thinking, "You'll never find me." I still don't believe in ghosts, but skepticism didn't prevent a shiver running up my spine.
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