Real-life ghost story

There's always a van. The Scooby gang, ghost hunters by trade if not specifically by design, rolled around in the Mystery Machine. The Ghost Hunters from SyFy flit from haunt to haunt in their souped-up van — black, of course, with "TAPS" stenciled in yellow "COPS" lettering on the side. Even the land boat the Ghostbusters tore through New York City with bears far more resemblance to a modern-day van than a car.

Though you may question whether the contemporary investigators are aping the ghost hunters of their youth, the Whispering Spirits Paranormal Research Society pulled up to Farmington Daily Times building in the quiet northwest New Mexico hamlet in their very own van. It was (appropriately enough) Friday the 13th, with a nice big moon hanging in the sky to perfectly illuminate the aging but still functioning newspaper. It's spooky business, poking around decaying buildings in the dark.

The motley crew that piled out for a night's work wasn't what you'd expect a group of ghost chasers to look like. They come in all shapes and sizes, all manner of hair colors and lack thereof, and range in age from 18 to well into Boomer territory.

Then again, if you really think about what real-life ghost hunting entails — a steadfast belief in the supernatural with an accompanying willingness to sacrifice your nights and weekends in pursuit of proving said logical improbability — they're exactly what you should expect them to look like.

They began unloading their hard plastic cases filled with all sorts of electrical gizmos, some recognizable and some not, around 11 p.m. To a person, the only thing they had in common other than the uniform black T-shirts was a determination, a sense of purpose. They exuded a clear sense of order and efficiency as they transferred the boxes first to the ground, then inside. It almost bordered on urgency — though, since the investigation wasn't set to begin until after midnight, it wasn't quite clear why.

They all wore matching black T-shirts with the name of the society and a very pixelated vortex plastered on the back, but it was rare you'd confuse any of them for another.

Mel, the undisputed leader of the group — who never was referred to as such by the rest except in their complete obedience to his every order — stood distinguishable by his stocky, muscular stature, his reddish-blond beard and accompanying (though thinning) hair. He got started right away.

"We expect to find whatever we can," he said, unpacking one of the six night-vision video cameras from where they lay in their custom-cut foam holes. He hands one of them to his wife, Krystal, one of the group's co-founders, and has her run it from the flat-screen monitor they brought with to a prearranged point in the other room. "We're doing a small investigation here, it'll be about an hour, an hour and a half."

The sheer amount of electronics the group carries along is somewhat staggering, especially considering the rather small area they're investigating on this trip. A lunchroom and a small bullpen seem like fairly easy ground to cover, but Mel says the total cost of the equipment they have is pushing $4,000. It's not hard to believe how expensive the equipment is. It's just a little hard to believe that the people who run this nonprofit (they're adamant about their IRS status) have nothing better to do with that kind of money.

Of course, it's a little hard to understand what drives a person to do this sort of work in the first place. As people who believe in ghosts, they're actually somewhat less equipped to deal with coming face-to-face with a spirit than a nonbeliever. A nonbeliever would be just as scared at a startling noise or a freaky coincidence, but logically they'd attribute it to just that — a coincidence. True believers, though, are prone to seeing specters around every corner. To them, that hard, bristly thing that brushes lightly against their left arm in the darkened room is out to get them — there's no chance it's just an upturned broom.

It all started with a cellphone. A smartphone, actually, the marvel of modern technology that carries a staggering amount of computing power in your hand. More than enough to solve the most intractable mathematical mysteries that stymied humans for generations. And it finds ghosts, apparently. Sometimes?

"We were messing around with an app on my phone, and it turned out to be fake, and we started wondering kind of a little bit more about the paranormal," says the other co-founder, Natasha. By day Natasha works at a deli, but nighttime is when she can bring out her spiritual, supernatural side.

"We found another app on the Droid called the Ghost Radar, and I was curious as to how it worked because I couldn't find anything on the Internet that said it was either fake or real," chimed in Krystal, interrupting slightly. The two went to a local cemetery to test out the app, which instructed them to look for "Paul."

It's worth noting that, on the website for Ghost Radar, the company's only comment on the app's veracity is that it's "as effective as an EMF detector or a KII." Which is to say they either believe in it wholeheartedly, or think it's a great way to transfer money from the gullible to their bank account.

Krystal, however, seemed to be convincing herself she believed.

"It was like leading us to it, I want to say, because we were looking for this person’s name and we couldn't find a Paul, and it said, 'Beyond,' so we're like, OK, so it's on the other side. It wasn't actually on the wall itself, it was on the ground, so we just kind of went from there and invested ..."

"They were playing, basically," interrupts Judy.

Judy is Mel's mother, something of a skeptic and an utterly devout Christian. She got into the ghost-chasing game after Mel and Krystal kept out all hours of the night and asked her to babysit the kids. Judy doesn't actually believe in ghosts, per se. She mostly tags along to help protect Mel and Krystal from the spirits they face, which Judy believes are all demons. She started asking to help them analyze the recorded evidence, and eventually worked her way up to a starting spot on the squad.

The investigation itself is actually the easiest part of the whole thing, if you can get over the whole "actively seeking out haunted places" thing. The part that Judy broke in through, the analyzing, is actually the most difficult piece — mostly because of the tedium. Hour upon hour of straining to look at grainy, black-and-white footage of something you just witnessed firsthand, all to find some — any — evidence of the supernatural. Since just about anything unusual can be ascribed to the supernatural, just about everything that happens has to be double-checked to rule out the presence of other beings.

Mel couldn't give me a definite estimate as to the man-hours involved, but what he did come up with sounded exhaustively time-consuming.

"Probably two hours for every hour, reviewing just video," he said. "It takes probably a couple of weeks to go over four hours worth of audio and video."

The cameras, recorders and what can only be described as gadgets they carry with them could stun a small herd of high school AV nerds. Each investigative "team" of two people carries at least one personal digital audio recorder. There are also various electromagnetic field readers, something called a "ghost box" (an AM/FM radio that continually scans through frequencies, so as to create "white noise" that spirits can use to make themselves heard more easily) and of course the Ghost TiVo, the digital video recorder that captures of every frame of freaky footage they shoot on their stationary night-vision cameras.

Between the expense, the late hours, the hours (and days and weeks) annihilated by analyzing and the cringe factor that accompanies an adult describing his or herself unironically as a "ghost hunter," it's somewhat bewildering to comprehend why this dedicated — and any group of people that willfully sacrifices this kind of time and money deserves the designation "dedicated," among others — group of people would do this kind of thing. From the variety of their answers, it's clear there's no category they can be slotted into, no on explanation that covers all of them.

Except, maybe — simply — that they like to do it.

"This is probably the best hobby we could ever come up with," says one.

It's time for the investigation to begin. First the entire group clears out to the back door, most to smoke, but ostensibly for the purpose of getting a neutral reading, of sorts. The sensors and video cameras can get a control reading — and maybe pick up some stray ghost bloopers before the spirits see the "ON AIR" light switch on.

The group also needs to let off some steam (slash smoke). This is the part of the play before the play, when the cast gathers backstage to let out the giggles, stretch and warm up their vocal chords. And, of course, pray for a good show.

Religion and ghost hunting don't mix together well when you first throw them in the blender. Though you can (and Mel does) point to the Bible for evidence of evil entities on Earth, the prescribed method for dealing with them involves commanding them into the bodies of pigs and running them off the cliff.

Not only are there no big drop-offs present, we're fresh out of pigs as well. This, however, does not deter the group.

"Basically, we stay in God's word. If I have to take a Bible with me, I'll take a bible with me. I preach God's word," says Mel. "There's no guarantee that we can get rid of what's there, but we do our best."

Mel, Krystal, Judy and Shane (he's the oil worker in his mid-20s with the tattoos and the leather vest that plunk him square in a moderate-to-rough motorcycle gang) are adamant about religion playing a huge role. Shane takes the same demonological hard line about spirits that Judy does, while both Krystal and Mel believe God protects them and their children against the spirits they counter. It might be the couple's biggest worry, actually — unknowingly bringing a ghost home for a spooky reenactment of "Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?"

Mel's even had a sit-down with his pastor. Or two.

"He does not agree. He has an issue with me doing what I'm doing and my wife doing what she's doing," Mel recalls.

"He's just real concerned with the Bible and what it says," offers Krystal. "In there it says not to seek the spirits."

After the invocation, the group heads back in and picks up their gear. Each two-person team has the aforementioned voice recorder as well as a walkie-talkie to facilitate to communication and rule out false positives. If one of the teams hears a weird noise, they'll try to ascertain whether another group's nearby before maintaining radio silence in the hopes of hearing it again. Similarly, if the group leader back at base sees something on the camera, he can instruct a team in the field to take a closer look.

The audio devices seem to be the easiest way to catch a ghost, though the reason is never fully explained. Mel tells me he can just sit in his backyard with the recorder and hear plenty of voices. This for some reason makes him think the method is more, as opposed to less, reliable.

In addition to the audio devices, Judy's carrying around a garden-variety digital camera with the flash set to "accidentally staring directly at the porch light when your parents flip it on after the sun goes down." The hope is that you can catch a spirit by surprise? Or something. That was never really spelled out to me, though Mel assured me 35mm film cameras do a much better job than the new-fangled digital ones.

Even ghosts can be Instamatic hipster snobs.

Natasha and Shane are exploring the lunchroom, where unspecified paranormal activity is rumored to have taken place. They carry both an EMF reader and the ghost box. Shane takes the EMF reader and basically runs it over every square inch of the cabinets, walls and as much of the ceiling he can reach, interrupting every so often with a desultory, "Are you there?"

Natasha, on the other hand, immediately takes a seat at the table, lays her cellphone and the ghost box down on the table, and turns on the squawk.

"Are you there?" she asks, though it's more of a demand than a question. "Show yourself. Prove to me that you exist."

This goes on for longer than you'd think tolerable. In the corner of the room sits one of the tethered night-vision cameras, its presence notable for the circle of small red LED lights that ring the lens, staring directly at us. It's watching Natasha decry whatever spirits may be there as "cowards," challenging them to prove her wrong.

One obliges.

As the ghost box flips through the frequencies, every so often you'll be able to make out a word or a partial sentence that slips through a broadcaster's lips.

"Did it say 'press room'?" I ask at one point, pointing at the device even though we can't really see each other.

Natasha confirms she heard it too. Her aggressive patter picks up in volume and intensity, but we don't get much more in terms of aural confirmation.

But there is something strange going on. For some reason, every time the ghost box rolls through the 1300 AM range, you can hear a whine cycle up through different pitches. And when it gets to 1380 AM, it just ... stops.

It stops scanning and hunkers down on some random Latin music station. Natasha says it's never done that before. Shane agrees. When we set it to start scanning again, everything continues as normal. At least, until we hear the whine in the 1300s. And it stops. Again.

The group line is that they're debunkers. Sometimes it's the house settling, other times it's simply in your imagination. They say their job is to go in, gather all the information possible and announce that the ghost was actually just Mr. Jenkins, the creepy real estate developer, all along.

"The main purpose of the group is to go in and debunk, to make sure that people aren't seeing or hearing things that are naturally occurring," says Judy.

That's the spin on natural occurrences. When it comes to the supernatural — that no one spoke out against during the powwow we had before the investigation began — there are no human spirits wandering in search of a loved one or a great burger or a long-lost childhood sled.

Everything is demons. If you hear a voice that sounds like Grandma Lil or knows something only Uncle Jerry could know, that's just a particularly crafty demon trying to trick you. Judy also believes in demonic possession — but they're spirits of Hell, not spirits of people. Tricksy demons.

There's a lot to debunk in this creaky old newspaper office, though one can't really rule out the notion that one or more demons has passed through its halls posing as an editor or a sales rep. But there are plenty of clunks and groans when the air conditioner kicks on, at least twice an hour at random. And since the gigantic printing press used to be just on the other side of the wall, there's a drop-basement that holds the leads and connections to enough juice to power at least one good-size Vegas hotel.

This is where some of the science comes in, the debunking. They're a research society, see. It's right in the name. And their studying is not limited to extraterrestrials and ghost stories; they also read up on common phenomena, and I'm sure the electrician-in-his-other-life has gotten through a technical manual or two. That, the technology and the scientific method the group applies to their investigations (two people to a team, so they have verification; constant communication to rule out false positives; and making sure everyone knows where everyone else is for the same reason) are the values the group holds highest.

But the power plant only explains the crazy readings we're getting on one section of the wall with the EMF reader. We've still got this ghost box that's spooking us all just a little bit with its whine and random-but-not-at-all-random stoppages. We run it through some tests.

"Try stopping it manually once we start hearing the whine," I suggest. Natasha does so, and we both hear the whine skip up through the scale on each of the 1310, 1320 and 1330 AM stations.

"So the octave's not tied to the frequency," I offer, which sounds scientific-ish, at least to my ears.

Natasha nods. She then turns the scan back on, only to have it stop a few seconds later on the same station as before.

"OK, this is pretty weird."

Natasha nods again.

We sit in silence as we let the box run through the same cycle two or three more times. Then we decide to experiment again, so Natasha picks up her phone and hits a button so we can get a better view at the ghost box.

Which proceeds to skip right on by 1380. No whine, either. The ghost is gone.

We're both a little disappointed. She sets her phone back down so we can continue the hunt in darkness, which is apparently the group's guess at spirits' preferred mood lighting. When the whine comes back and the box stops abruptly at 1380, Natasha gasps.

"Dammit. It's my phone."

She moves it away from the box, and we resume the investigation in silence.

Some level of skepticism should be present. As debunking performs a fairly vital part of paranormal investigating, at least for Whispering Spirits, you'd expect the group to be somewhat wary of what it finds. You'd expect each of them (or at least some of them) to examine things with a critical eye, always naysaying each other and operating on a basis of "normal until proven not."

You'd also be wrong. Most of the debunking, it seems, falls to one man — Bobby.

"Bobby is very skeptical," Natasha had told me earlier. "He is the one who does not believe."

The concept was boggling. Why would a paranormal group carry around a skeptic on its roster? More to the point, who joins a group for the expressed purpose of not believing a word it says?

"I think it's curiosity," Bobby says. "I just like to prove 'em wrong. Until they can prove me wrong."

Bobby's proved 'em wrong on more than one occasion. Despite being very hard of hearing, the first thing he does when the group shows up on site is to check for any mitigating evidence — do the lights hum, is there a power plant behind that wall, what noises do you hear?

"Bobby's very observant," says Mel. "He'll note everything in his head, and when it comes time to go over evidence, he remembers. He tries to debunk everything that we come up with, because we get excited. He tries to explain everything."

Once, the group set up in an old graveyard. (Despite the ready abundance of dead bodies, nobody ever seems to haunt a new graveyard. Wrong atmosphere, maybe. Not the right aesthetics.) They had been wandering among the tombstones for a while, in the oldest section, running the ghost box.

"We were walking through there, and the radio come off with, 'Scared,'" Mel recalls. "And we stopped and we said, 'Don't be scared of us, we're here to help you' ... The girls come off with, 'What do you have to be scared of?' And it came through, 'Reaper.'"

The electromagnetic spook set the scene perfectly. Armed with their digital camera, the group took a steady succession of pictures of some spooky-looking trees.

"We were shooting pictures, and you see the dark images of trees, and there's the really dark image that looked really tall," says Mel. "It looked like the Reaper."

That one wound up being pretty easy for Bobby to debunk.

"It turned out to be me," he says.

Bobby's disbelief isn't really disbelief, though — more like the suspension of belief. He says he truly wants to believe in ghosts and spirits — he just hasn't had the opportunity yet.

At the very least, Bobby has to be a believer in belief, then, right? He's actually had a spooky experience he couldn't explain — a recorder he set down in a haunted basement recorded a disembodied voice growling, "Lucifer" about 10 seconds after he left a room. He has no explanation for it. But still he doesn't believe.

"Every investigation, though, I go in hoping to find something that I can't (explain) — that's not me. And so far, I've been let down," he says. "I wanna be a believer. And someday, I will be."

The dark is scary, regardless of whether ghosts are present. By far the spookiest occurrence took place in the press building, where the team finished up after scouring the main building. There are no windows in the building's deepest recesses, so the area where huge mountains of five-foot paper rolls are stored dims to the blackest of black with the lights off. So black you can't even discern the movement of your hand as you wave it in front of your face.

Stephen seems like the most normal guy in the bunch. His partner, 18-year-old Kim, isn't the opposite, but she's closer to the other side of the spectrum than to his.

Stephen and Kim set up in a paper-roll canyon that stretched back to the cinderblock wall, towering some 20 feet overhead. Stephen aimed a red laser pointer at the wall opposite, down the length of the chasm, explaining it would be much easier for a spirit to cause a small, weak light flicker than to manifest into a form visible by flashlight or camera flash.

So we waited. In absolute darkness, with only the tiniest, most anemic of red beams shimmering along our sides, barely even visible on the far wall. Your mind starts to play tricks at that point, combining the extraordinarily low light with the sleep deprivation that comes from ghost hunting until well into the 4 a.m. hour.

Then I heard shuffling.

Officially, I was along as an observer, not an investigator. And yet, much like when I asked if anyone heard "press room" on the ghost box, I felt compelled to speak up when no one else did.

For I knew the stories of the press building. Of the suicidal press operator who jumped into the baler (which compresses plastic barrels, cardboard or human flesh and bones, if you ask it, into much smaller and compacter versions of those things) in order to commit suicide. He failed to notice that the baler had been emptied and wound up just being stuck for the weekend, but it's still a bummer vibe to put out there.

I had heard of the full-bodied apparition of the '70s press operator, still dressed in the proper garb, standing watch at the control panel one late night. And the barking dogs and growls heard over by the ink tanks when no other soul, man or beast, was supposed to be in the building.

"I hear feet shuffling," I announced.

"You do?" asked Kim, surprised.

"Is anyone there?" I asked, directing my question toward the tiny point of light on the wall.

"Check the radio," I instructed Stephen.

He did. "No," came the response.

So we waited. Silence can seem oppressive in any situation, but in absolute darkness it's downright suffocating. I strained my eyes, trying to see anything.

Then I noticed the slightest waver in my peripheral vision, right along the left wall of the canyon. The laser beam streamed down almost directly along the right side, so the movement I noticed was so slight I almost missed it.

"I see something," I announced again, this time a little bit louder. I was, I admit, slightly scared. I scooted back away from the light, toward the cinderblocks. And I knew it wasn't Bobby this time, because I had heard him breathing heavily and walking away a few minutes earlier.

"You hear shuffling?" asked Kim.

"No, I definitely see something. Turn on the light, turn on the light!" I finished, my voice getting slightly louder, higher and faster on every word. Stephen fumbled for the laser pointer, which was attached to a flashlight, flipped the light on and shone it on whatever was coming for us. I gaped at what I saw lurching out of the darkness.

I don't know if Judy is right to be keeping an eye out for demons, or if Krystal's prayers do keep the evil away from her home and family. I don't know if Bobby's skepticism is well founded, or if Shane is correct in his adamant belief of evil spirits trying to fool us. I don't know what's on the other side, reaching out to make a connection to the land of the living.

But that time, it was Mel.

In the end, it turned out the newspaper wasn't terribly haunted. In the bullpen, where most of the spooky happenings had been reported, there were only two things to note before they went back to the tapes for analysis.

Judy managed to snap a photo of an "orb," a large globe of light that appears in one frame of a photograph and doesn't appear in any taken just before or just after. On the small screen of the digital camera, it definitely looks like an orb.

This was confirmed by one of the press workers, who exclaimed (multiple times) while looking at it, "Damn! You caught an orb!"

It's not as interesting as expected, given their recitations of other investigations. In fact, their very first time out they visited a location they refer to only as "The Basement," a literal hole-in-the-ground Mel had been told was haunted since he was a little kid.

"Growing up, all the kids used to talk about a lady that lived there that kidnapped kids back in the '40s," Mel recalled. After kidnapping them, locking them in cages and starving them for weeks, "she would take 'em down to the pond and drown 'em, if they were still alive. And she'd throw their bodies down a shaft."

Of course, after a full investigation the team found there was no truth to this story. The woman merely had several citations for cruelty to animals to her name before she was "taken away."

"She lit a horse on fire," according to a neighbor Mel spoke with.

Then the house was demolished and some homeless guy took up residence, kicking all the drunken teenagers out and scaring them by re-enacting "The Blair Witch Project" (back when people would have gotten the reference) before himself getting taken away by police.

Despite the attempted suicide-by-crushing in the press room story, this was no basement. Yes, one team did have a strange encounter with a table in the bullpen area. They sat the recorder and themselves down at one of the tables in a corner of the room where a lot of disturbances (both spectrally and in the flesh) took place. There, when Stephen (Kim's partner) knocked, a distinct rapping sound knocked right back.

"It's very interesting. It was almost like it answered me, so that's what makes me think it's not coincidental," Stephen recalls. "It knocked several times. I think it's something more. I'm hoping."

Kim, however, has no qualms about believing. Ghosts, spirits, demons, she'll root for the existence of everything. And she's even extra religious — though she grew up with her grandmother's Christianity, the deli-worker-by-day also got to hear about the traditional Navajo creation story and myths.

"Yeah, I believe there's a God, but I don't believe, 'Oh, you have to do this and be good,'" she says. "Traditional, they come from four worlds, and it's ... confusing, mainly. They talk about skin-walkers, bigfoots ..."

Of course, as much as religions differ, they also come together in surprising ways. In the same way that Mel and Krystal worry about ghost hitchhikers, Kim's dad employs his own religious cleansing for her ghostly doings.

"He believes that if I do something like this, then something's going to follow me home," she says. "He has to do a prayer with me, medicine man."

Kim's purpose for joining the group is the simplest, which is why it seems like the most honest.

"I just wanna find answers. To know if there really is another side," she says. "You have to find something to believe in, and I want to believe in something."

That may be why Kim appears to the most in tune with the supernatural. For the group's recent (and as of yet, only) UFO outing, Kim was the only one it communicated with, it "only lik[ed]" her. And this investigation — which was her "first big one," according to Krystal, as Kim is still technically training — she got a response in two different places, as opposed to most of the group's none.

Did Kim's search for answers influence her perceptions? Perhaps. Then again, it's possible she's just more attuned to the other side. Her grandmother told her the story of her grandfather, who was murdered before Kim was born. Every few years, her grandfather would visit her grandmother, telling her, "Good job."

"And he's telling her the next time he comes back, he's going to take my grandma with him," she says.

Kim also believes her grandfather is the voice in her head that restrains her from getting too angry or too upset, the voice that tells her, "Stop," or "Don't."

"My grandma says that's him protecting me. And that's what I want to know, I want the answer to it," she says. "I'm not all crazy about the idea of demons."

The intricate weave of belief in ghosts and religion seems to at once make both perfect sense and none at all. Kim's makes more sense than most, as she's already trying to tie together two beliefs that don't have any common threads — in fact, Christianity explicitly refutes much of traditional Navajo religion, If she can make those work, adding in ghosts just requires tweaking a few names.

The rest of the group, the devoutly religious, seems just as out of place on a paranormal investigative team as Bobby does. Are they just on the lookout for exorcism opportunities? Do they actually expect to see something? Do they really not see the parallelism of not believing in earthly spirits lingering after their physical life, but giving full credence to the notion that a heavenly spirit has total dominion over all?

"There's proof that there's a God. In history, and in the Bible itself," Judy says. "So we're guessing about spirits, we're not guessing about God. We believe in God."

In the end, if you ignore the somewhat muddled philosophies and jury-rigged beliefs, the group really does have one motivating idea. Kim is looking for answers. I don't know if she's finding any, but she's found a group of people that give her something to do after work — breaking her out of a rut that she says started when she finished school. Bobby is looking for evidence that will permit him to believe. He hasn't found it yet, but he still keeps coming along on investigations, sure that this one could actually provide the concrete solidity he needs. Mel, Krystal, Natasha, and who knows how many others are really just trying to find out what's out there — and they find something, every investigation, whether the origin of the phenomenon is supernatural or perfectly ordinary.

And when you think about it, that's pretty much what they've done so far. When they piled in and drove away that morning, they weren't trying desperately to convince anyone they'd encountered the supernatural. They had a few things they were going to check, sure, but that's just diligence — much like their other investigations. Despite the few "unexplained" occurrences such as the "Lucifer" recording, the group primarily spends its time finding weird stuff and then coming up with normal explanations for it.

Overall, their catalyzing agent is actually the same one that drives the original Scooby gang — getting to the truth. Demystifying the previously inexplicable.

Or, to use Judy's words, "To help people. So they're not afraid."