Ghost hunters stay busy during Halloween season
Bartlett is president of the Alabama Foundation for Paranormal Research, which travels the Southeast looking for orbs, EVPs, and vortexes — all supposed signs of ghosts lurking in the misty shadows somewhere between this world and a spookier one.
The hunt itself can be a hoot — for several years the group has been featured around Halloween time on a popular radio and TV program shown on Turner South from Birmingham, the Rick & Bubba Show. On the show, ghosts are played for gags.
But the foundation’s eight volunteer investigators aren’t kidding about their work. They make several trips a month trying to both debunk ghost stories and verify possible apparitions when there’s no other explanation for things that go bump in the night.
Things really get busy this time of year, when the foundation, a nonprofit group that accepts donations, receives lots of calls and e-mails from people who want help figuring out that odd feeling they keep getting in their house or a random creak in the floor.
“We’re really serious, but it’s fun,” said Bartlett, 41, who works as a secretary and has had a lifelong interest in the supernatural. She believes her home might be haunted by the ghost of her husband’s father.
Foundation members have made dozens of ghost-hunting trips in Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee and Georgia since the group was founded in 2001. Most often they check out homes where residents have heard weird sounds or seen unusual things, like floating objects.
“A lot of times it’s just nothing more than people wanting to make sure they’re not crazy,” said member Jamie Cutler, 27.
But sometimes they investigate better-known places, like the abandoned Tennessee State Prison in Nashville or Sturdivant Hall, an antebellum home and tourist attraction in Selma. There, they set up a motion detector that went off in an unoccupied room that’s supposed to be haunted by the ghost of a little girl.
“In my opinion, (Selma) is one of the most haunted cities in Alabama,” said Cutler.
Charles Wood, 32, is the skeptic in the group. He said investigations show nothing unusual about 70 percent of the time. But then there’s that other 30 percent.
In those cases, members say they often see or photograph orbs — floating circles of light — or record electronic voice phenomenon, EVPs, the murmurings of spirits. Members have even reported feeling vortexes, a developing spirit that resembles a tornado of light.
The ghost hunters aren’t under any illusions: They know their work sounds odd to most people. But their methods have impressed even skeptics.
The foundation has conducted several searches for ghosts in Birmingham at the Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark, according to Bob Rathburne, executive director of the site. Several workers were killed at the old steel mill when it was operating, he said, and the group seems intent on finding their ghosts.
“Those of us who don’t really believe in this sort of having a hard time taking them seriously, but they are,” said Rathburne. “They’ve been out here a few times.”
The ghost hunters use common items like cameras, video recorders and audio recorders in their work. But they also have some high-tech tools like night-vision scopes, a laser thermometer to find “cold spots” where ghosts may be lurking, and meters to detect energy fluxes.
If it all sounds a little bit like the movie “Ghostbusters,” it should. The characters in the film and the Alabama ghost hunters use some common methods, like trying to talk to spirits on occasion.
And while members talk about sometimes seeing “ectoplasm,” a term straight out of the 1984 movie, it’s not the green goo from the flick.
“It’s not like slime. It’s like a fog,” said Wood, who is looking for a job in the biotechnology industry.
The Alabama Foundation for Paranormal Research isn’t alone in its work — similar groups chase ghosts in Louisiana, New Jersey, Maryland, Michigan, Florida and elsewhere. There’s even another paranormal organization in south Alabama, the Alabama Ghost Research Society.
Someday, Wood figures, science will prove all the ghost hunters right. Until then, the hunt for ghosts will go on somewhere around the fringes of a skeptical society.
“It’s only abnormal now because we don’t understand it,” he said.
On the Net:
http://www.alabamaparanormal.org