Published: October 25, 2007 05:17 pm            

VIDEO: Hunting Ghosts — Crawford County organization investigates paranormal activity

ROBINSON, Ill. — Sometimes that creepy, popping sound emanating from the walls of an old house is just bad electrical wiring. And those footsteps in the attic are really raccoons.

In fact, when the Crawford County Ghost Hunters Society special investigations team answers a call, “about 98 to 99 percent of the stuff will have a natural explanation,” said Jason Snider, who founded the group six years ago.

Watch the Ghost Hunters in action below



But it’s those rare cases that motivate him to continue looking for paranormal activity around southern Illinois and Indiana.

On one society outing, their digital recorders picked up “electronic voice phenomena” — or EVP in paranormal investigators’ lingo — in a cemetery west of Robinson. Afterward, a member of the group told the others that her co-worker’s mother was buried in that cemetery and asked to take the recorder to her job the next day. Her co-worker wound up recognizing the recorded voice as that of her late mother, Snider said.

“That’s one of the things that keeps me going,” said Snider, a 27-year-old firefighter and EMT from Oblong, where he also farms.

What got Snider, fellow investigator Bill Richardson and some other Crawford County Ghost Hunters Society members interested in paranormal activity was skepticism. As a teenager, Snider heard about haunted buildings and graveyards around the county, and decided to check them out for himself.

“I originally started out not believing in it myself,” Snider said. “I started out going to cemeteries and places with my friends, trying to disprove local legends.”

By 2001, Snider had started the Crawford County Ghost Hunters Society. A year later, he created the group’s Web site. That’s how Richardson — a 32-year-old bartender at Palestine — and his wife, Nina, discovered the group. The Richardsons saw photographs of strange objects on the society’s Web site.

“My wife and I joined about two years ago, trying to show how they were faking it,” Richardson said, “but they’re not faking it.”

Now, the local society includes nearly 100 members. A smaller segment of the group is part of Crawford County Ghost Hunters’ special investigations team, with each individual having completed a three-week, certified paranormal investigator course taught by Snider, a member of the International Ghost Hunters Society.

“Kind of the basics of ghost hunting,” Snider explained.

That investigation team includes, among others, Barb Legg, the 47-year-old manager of the Heath Museum in Robinson, and Becky Nidey, an employee at Crawford Memorial Hospital. It’s no coincidence that Nidey will turn 53 on Wednesday.

“I’ve always been interested in ghosts,” Nidey said, “and being born on Halloween, this is kind of a natural.”

But curiosity seekers hoping to see reincarnations of the 1984 movie “Ghost Busters” might be disappointed by an actual paranormal investigation. The wild chaos Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd encountered in that classic film is not the reality of ghost hunting, the society members said.

“You get, ‘Where’s your gun that shoots green slime?’ I actually got that one from my brother,” Legg said. “We don’t have guns that shoot green slime.”

Sometimes, the Ghost Hunters get calls from home or business owners who’ve heard strange noises in their buildings. The Crawford County group does not charge for such investigations, which they prefer to limit to their local region. Before packing up a plethora of paranormal detection equipment — everything from Geiger counters to electromagnetic field meters, thermal scanners, night-vision video cameras, motion-activated 35mm cameras and digital voice recorders — the special investigation team asks a lot of questions.

“We get a lot of crazy people calling,” Snider said, chuckling. “We’ll interview them to see if they’re somewhat in their right mind. We try to keep it as serious as possible.” Occasionally, “We find out we’re their form of entertainment for the evening,” he added.

Often, the property owners just need some answers.

“The first words they say are, ‘I don’t want to seem crazy, but …,” Snider said. Then the callers start describing unexplained sounds or events.

“People will say their home was haunted, and we’ll find a totally natural explanation, like bad wiring or finding raccoons in their attic,” Snider said.

Occasionally, though, the Ghost Hunters detect unnatural activity with their eyes, ears and equipment.

Their electromagnetic field meters register activity similar to the hairs on the back of a person’s neck standing on end. Thermal scanners detect sudden drops in temperature of 10 to 15 degrees. Night-vision infrared cameras pick up orbs, or circular anomalies, appearing in photographs.

Last weekend, the Ghost Hunters conducted their annual fund-raiser driving tours, in which nearly 70 guests rode along and watched the investigators check out an abandoned church near Casey, the vacant Kibbie General Store north of Oblong and two cemeteries near Belair. The guests’ $5 fee helps fund the society’s activities throughout the year, as does smaller, private tours, which are $10 per person. On those outings and any others by Ghost Hunters members, Snider said, “We stress to respect the locations. We get permission before we enter.”

The Kibbie empty store, according to Snider, was the site of a suicide nearly 70 years ago. Their monitors recorded a “pssst” sound, as well as those resembling footsteps. Unfortunately, the tour guests were outside when those noises occurred. That circumstance often happens, too, Snider and Richardson said. They take those instances in stride.

“We’re serious about it,” Richardson said, “but we still have fun with it.”

Of course, to the general public, the paranormal activity they most readily imagine are ghosts. The Crawford County Ghost Hunters have spotted such “full-body apparitions on a couple occasions,” Snider said, including a black, shadowy figure seen in a hallway at the Fife Opera House in Palestine. “It’s pretty rare, though.”

Mark Bennett can be reached at mark.bennett@tribstar.com or (812) 231-4377.

        

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