When the spirits move you: Paranormal group haunts a home in search of ghosts.
BY CRISTAL CODY
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

“They’re here,” Carole Anne says while pressed against a TV in the 1982 film Poltergeist. Her family found that spirits don’t leave if they don’t want to.

October is when ghosts arise in the mainstream consciousness, but in some households, it’s a daily thought-provoking event.

Take mine for instance.

Sometimes when I go to bed, in the minutes between awake and sleep, I feel it. The mattress moves down as if the cat jumped onto the bed. But the cat’s outside.

You’ve got a vivid imagination, I tell myself.

That’s not all. Over the past six years of living in an 1880s-era house, there also have been quick flashes of light that bounce off the living room walls, cabinet doors opening, items that disappear and reappear in plain sight (not at the same time, though, that would be too easy), smells of candy cooking, shadows that disappear when I turn to face them and the overwhelming feeling of “something there.”

The skeptic in me shoos away any thoughts of “ghosts,” though the writer in me is intrigued by the possibility of an unseen world. I mean, that’s what we all want, isn’t it — something to prove this life isn’t all we get?
Maybe others want proof, too. That might account for Americans’ renewed interest in ghostly television shows such as Medium, Ghost Whisperer and Supernatural. More than 12 million viewers tune in to watch Medium, which won Patricia Arquette an Emmy for best actress this year.

So with an invitation to do a ghost hunt at my house, I couldn’t resist.

Karen Shillings, director of the Hot Springs-based Central Arkansas Society for Paranormal Research, brought her video and digital cameras and trusty flashlight to my house on the last night of September.
The next night, Shillings and other group members brought even more equipment to investigate whether ghostly encounters at the Arkansas Air Museum in Fayetteville were imagined or real.

Nothing much happened at the museum. But it turns out, Shillings doesn’t think I’m imagining what’s happening at my house.

THE HUNT BEGINS

Arriving in the dark on a Friday night, Shillings brought just a fraction of the group’s ghost hunting equipment to my house. Some of the fancier gear, such as the electromagnetic field detector, is owned by other members.
Shillings, who has undertaken about 50 investigations since starting the paranormal group five years ago, doesn’t charge for these ghostly hunts. The group has performed paranormal investigations across Arkansas and in Missouri.

“It’s not really a business. I don’t make any money from this strange recreational hobby I’m in,” she says.
Shillings spends her own money on equipment and gas as she drives across the state to perform weekend hunts for the supernatural. But for the people who call for her services, it’s anything but a Saturday night adventure.

“If you hear noises, your cabinets open and close by themselves, your children can’t sleep, toys go on and off, that type of activity indicates there is a haunting taking place,” Shillings says. “You really have no sure way of getting rid of them other than just moving, and then hope they don’t follow you.”

As soon as she arrives, Shillings announces she’s not a “ghostbuster.”

“I’m looking for visual and audible proof of their existence. I don’t necessarily want to come in and get rid of them,” she says.

I wasn’t sure I even wanted her to give me confirmation, but I knew I didn’t want her to try to get rid of any purported lingering spirits. Who needs that kind of karma?

Most “strange” anomalies that paranormal investigators find can be explained logically, says Benjamin Radford, investigator with Skeptical Inquirer magazine, which is published by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

Photos and video footage often show white balls of light, called orbs, that are purported to be spirits.
“It could be a number of things, dust on the lens, lens flare, a flash photograph of a bug in the air,” Radford says. “Why is it that ghosts only appear when the lights are off? Invariably what you have is ambiguous stimuli, a blob or a shape or a feeling. There are any number of explanations that could account for something strange without it being a ghost.”

For that matter, humans aren’t even united in their definition of what a ghost is, Radford notes.
“Some people claim that ghosts are spirits of dead people. Some claim ghosts are telepathic projections. Other people claim ghosts are spirits that are stuck here because of unresolved issues. There is no agreed-upon explanation of what a ghost is.”

Larry Pleimann, associate professor of structural engineering at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, says it’s possible for older homes to make noises such as creaking sounds. Or “you might have squirrels in the walls,” he says. But Pleimann, who also holds a degree in theology from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and became an Episcopalian in the 1980s, believes those noises and apparitions could be the real thing. Pleimann mentions a theory relating to quantum physics that suggests reality has 11 dimensions, more than the four in which humans participate. “Science doesn’t answer whether those seven other dimensions are occupied, but I frankly think they are,” he says.

Shillings’ digital and video cameras capture the orbs in my living room and bedroom. My mini tape player also records the event.

“This is your opportunity to be seen and heard,” Shillings says, to what appears to be empty space.
My stomach tightened into a growing knot as she continued with the paranormal investigation, set up inside my now much darkened house.

“A lot of times spirits are wanting attention. We invite them to be part of the investigation, that’s what a hunter does,” Shillings explains. “So if anyone’s here, I don’t want you to leave. I just want you to hang out and show yourself on camera. The camera uses infrared technology and can record your image.”
When I played the tapes a couple of weeks later it spooked me a bit as I realized I may have confirmation of something indeed. A sound like a pan hitting the wall in the kitchen forces me to pause the tape. But nothing’s there, the pan is on the counter and the cat’s outside.

“Use as much of your energy as possible, and we can pick up your voice on the tape recorder,” Shillings says on the audiotape. “Tell us who you are ….”

Strange squeaks emerge when the tape is played back. Hmmm. I wonder if my tape player has seen its last days.

“We can bring it up to the frequency we can hear it, and you’ll find a lot of voices that will be there that shouldn’t be there,” Shillings says.

She’s not kidding. One portion of the audiotapes also includes a few women’s voices in the background during a pause in the interview, but the words are too faint to make out. Where did that come from? We were the only women in the house that night.

I’m not the most religious person in the world, but maybe now’s the time to start praying for protection, I think.

GHOSTLY TOURS

The Arkansas Air Museum’s haunting might be more of the commercial variety. Ghosts drum up business for museum tours Friday through Monday.

Derald Linn, director of the Arkansas Air Museum in Fayetteville, says of the “spook hunt” that he’s “skeptical about the whole thing. But there are a lot of strange occurrences.”

Doors open and close when they’re not supposed to, lights flicker on and off, furniture is sometimes moved, and once, a whole box of Teletype paper was dumped across the floor in an area off-limits to visitors.
Linn believes Ray Ellis, a longtime aviator instructor and museum president who died at the age of 94 in October 1999, might still be coming to work. Ellis first worked in the hangar at Drake Field in 1943, and later lived inside the building while he managed the University of Arkansas Civilian Pilot Training program.
The scent of aftershave also sometimes wafts across the museum, Linn says.
Linn says he thought a ghost hunt might help the museum’s tours, before he learned that employees really do think the hangar is haunted.

The research team of eight investigators spent nearly a whole night inside the dark museum with video cameras and other equipment.

“Ghost hunts are not that exciting,” Shillings says. “There’s a lot of sitting around, and you look in your camera. You never know what you’re going to get.”

After about eight hours of standing around inside the museum, which felt ghostly with the hulks of World War II planes, the team didn’t get much.

There were a “few orbs, but nothing spectacular,” Shillings later says. “Not like your bedroom, that’s where the activity is. There is definitely something going on in your bedroom, no doubt about it.”

And I thought it was me who drove the men away! Thank God — now I know it’s possessive ghosts behind my dating disasters.

HOME TODAY, JAIL YESTERDAY

The buildings people live in today weren’t always homes.
“It may be an apartment building now, but previously it could have been a jail, a hospital,” Shillings says. “A lot of times, people aren’t even aware of what their house was before they got there. A friend’s house was a jail in the 1800s, and she didn’t know that until she started having experiences and delved into the background of her home.”
Anyone can find out the background of a building by studying courthouse real estate records or publications by historical societies. Or ask your neighbors, since they may know if former tenants had bad experiences.
My house was the first residence built in the area in the 1880s. Once out in the country, the site is fast becoming the middle of a suburb as more people build on the lakefront property.
Since none of my experiences have been “bad” — slightly unpleasant but nothing that has made me run screaming from the house — Shillings thinks they are good or benign spirits, or maybe even guardian angels.
“About all you can do is ask them to leave,” she tells residents who prefer to live by themselves. “Short of an out-and-out exorcism, I haven’t found anything that anyone really does works. If the ghosts are persistent and they want to be there, it doesn’t matter if you command it to leave in the name of Jesus Christ, if you command it in the name of Buddha, if you smudge it, if you sage it, it doesn’t really matter. If they want to be there, they will be there.”
Whatever “they” are, let them stay, I say. I might need help one of these days getting rid of a bad date."

On the Web: Central Arkansas Society for Paranormal Research