Working to explain the unexplainable
“From ghoulies and ghosties and
long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night
Good Lord, deliver us!”
— Traditional Scottish prayer
Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photography by Michael Callahan
A 4-year-old Moody boy sees a stranger in his house during the wee hours of the morning. A grown man hears footsteps from above when he’s in the basement of his Pell City business and noises from below when he’s upstairs alone.
Who do you call when you think you’ve encountered visitors from the spirit world? Priest? Psychiatrist? Ghost Hunters? How about the St. Clair County-based Central Alabama Society for Paranormal Investigation and Research (C.A.S.P.I.R.)?
“The Moody boy’s mother called me at 3 a.m. in a panic,” says Frank Lee, former Army National Guard military logistics technician and the founder and lead investigator for C.A.S.P.I.R. “The boy’s sighting wasn’t the only paranormal activity going on at their house. Cabinet doors were opening, they were hearing voices from empty rooms, and they saw a little girl.”
Lee didn’t rush over in the middle of the night. “They were Christians, so I worked with them through some prayers and scriptures, and things settled down.” When he did investigate, he found quite a lot of residual and intelligent activity. “A lot of paranormal activity that people encounter is residual energy,” Lee continues. “The popular explanation of this is the Stone Tape Theory, which says that certain materials like stone can hold energies, like an emotional or psychic imprint, whether happy, sad or whatever. A perfect example is churches, which tend to be one of the most reported haunted places we’ve encountered. Those are not evil hauntings, but emotional imprints.”
Intelligent activity, Lee says, is where the spirit answers the questions that people proffer. “In the case of the Moody home, they were sitting on the perfect storm, because they lived next door to a church, where emotions often run high.”
As for the Pell City businessman who hears footsteps, the investigation continues. On a warm Friday night in August, the C.A.S.P.I.R. team set up its instruments on the main floor of his business. The shop is in an old, one-story house, with a main level used as offices and a basement used for storage. With its piles of boxes, stud framing for rooms that no longer exist, and dark corners, the basement has the atmosphere of a Hammer Studios horror flick. The man has seen shadows and odd lights on the main level, and one day, a mist abruptly formed in an office, then just as abruptly disappeared. Most of these incidents have occurred during broad daylight.
A motley crew consisting of two blue-jeaned, 30-something men, two teenagers, a pink-haired and a punk-haired woman and a third with long blonde hair, the C.A.S.P.I.R. team looks like it would be more at home in a hard-rock band than at a paranormal investigation. Lee opened a cache of scientific and quasi-scientific instruments that included a motion-activated infrared camera, a camcorder, night-vision and infrared lights, a laser-grid projector, and something called an SB-7, or Spirit Box, that scans radio frequencies every quarter of a second. The SB-7 generates white noise, which investigators believe spirits can use to communicate with this world.
They also set out a thermobarometer to measure atmospheric conditions, because they believe that when ghosts are trying to manifest themselves, they draw energy that can create temperature fluctuations. Their EMF meter, normally used to find leaks in electrical wiring, measures any electro-magnetic field generated by spirits that might be present.
The Law of Conservation of Energy states: “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed from one form to another.” That would explain the presence of spirits in our world, says Lee. It also explains the theory behind the use of most of these instruments. The cameras sometimes pick up images that can’t be seen by the naked eye and simple voice recorders pick up electronic voice phenomena (EVP) from frequencies outside the range of the human ear.
Lee and his team came prepared with more than instruments, though. They had researched the building’s history and the geological properties of the land on which it sits. When they left, they would spend many hours poring over the data they had gathered, examining the photos closely and listening with practiced ears for any hint of other-worldly sounds.
“There are many aspects to properly handling a paranormal case, and the investigation is just the diagnostic part,” says Lee, an admitted science geek who sees himself as a serious researcher helping people rather than as a ghost hunter. “We follow up after the investigation, too, because the person involved may need counseling or to get back into church.”
This was Lee’s first trip to the Pell City business, but Donald Davis had been there several times. He says the house is inhabited by the spirit of an elderly woman named Anna, the former owner. He says her husband died in the basement, and that same man may have shot Anna’s brother to death in the back yard.
On previous trips, Donald had captured small moans, a voice saying, “Hey, I’m here,” and one complete sentence, “Do you want to go?” The latter, he says, was in response to his statement that if Anna didn’t want the team present, she should say so. He keeps going back, hoping to hear more.
Three other team members, Pink Floyd (real name), Dee Harper and Christine Grace, were present because they are mediums. Sometimes, Pink sees images or hears voices of entities inside her head, which caused her parents to send her to a psychiatrist when she was 5 years old. “I get memories of entities, like snapshots or watching a short film,” Pink says. “Some things trigger it, like certain smells that no one else can smell.”
Harper says she has always been able to see, hear and talk to spirits. “I saw a ‘real’ person in my mom’s closet as a child, but I was told it was my imagination. So I would block them (the spirit images) out. Last year, someone came into my life who helped me not to fear them, so now I tune in.”
Grace says names and numbers sometimes come to her, and she can see things others in the group can’t, like shadows, footprints or a face. “I can feel their touches, too,” she says.
While the team was setting up, their flashlight and camera batteries kept going dead, despite replenishing them with new ones. Lee had to run the instruments straight from the AC adapters, which can be common in haunted locations, he says.
Once the instruments were in place, the lights went off, and the chatter slowly faded as the team watched and listened. Donald turned on a digital recorder. The group eyed the green net light pattern on the wall, made by the laser grid projector. Street noises filtered in from outside and appliances hummed in the kitchen.
“Anna, are you still here?” Donald asked. He paused briefly, waiting for a response. “Is your husband here?” (pause) “Your brother?” (pause) “Can you tell us his name?” (pause) “Do you want us here?”
Suddenly, the laser lights flickered and dimmed. “Is that you tampering with our laser?” Lee asked. The grid stopped moving and came back to full brightness. “That was quite phenomenal, because we rarely see tampering with equipment to that level,” Lee says.
“Anna, do you know that you’ve passed away?” Donald continued. “Can you tell us how?” (pause) “Pink is here with us, do you have something to say to her?” (pause) “You said her name one time.”
Something touched Christine on the leg, causing her to jump. “I don’t know why they (spirits) like to touch me,” she says.
Later in the evening, after a curious reporter and skeptical photographer left, Brittany, Lee’s 13-year-old daughter, complained of a burning sensation on her back during an EVP session in the front office. When Lee checked her, he saw a large scratch mark that couldn’t be explained.
“She was sitting right in front of us when it happened, and there was nothing she could have leaned against in the chair to scratch her,” he says. Moments later, Brittany heard her name coming from the Echo Box, an instrument that takes random audio samples, then echoes and amplifies them, thus enabling the spirits to form words.
Other manifestations went on while the team was there, according to Lee. With everyone gathered in the same room, footsteps echoed from other parts of the house that were unoccupied. They felt knocking on the floor beneath them, as if someone were in the basement trying to make contact. Lee heard his name and Pink’s name from the Echo Box.
“When we asked, ‘How did you die?’ we heard a female voice come through the speaker that said, ‘Cancer,’” Lee claims. “We asked, ‘Who is in the basement?’ and the same female voice said, ‘My brother.’ We asked, ‘Is your brother angry?’ and received a ‘yes’ response over the system. When we asked, ‘How did your brother die?’ we received a response that said, ‘He was shot,’ which is historically accurate. We asked for names of the brother and others related to the case and the correct names came through as well. It was very compelling!”
This isn’t the scariest place Lee has encountered, however. That dubious distinction goes to a 17th-century Virginia home with a very dark past. “Me and three other investigators from a previous team were scratched and shoved there by something we couldn’t see,” he says. “We also had a case a few months ago here in Alabama where we saw a 25-pound end table thrown across the room. The people who live there had been clawed, pushed down the steps and held down and nearly suffocated. That type of activity is rare, but if you do encounter that degree of negativity and violence, you could be dealing with something demonic.”
Like the Pell City business, the end-table case remains open. “We’re working with a demonologist and the Catholic church to arrange a house blessing there,” Lee says. “If necessary, we’ll escalate the case to a full exorcism, which is also rare.”
Some investigations reveal normal causes to what people perceive as paranormal. While with a former team, Lee investigated a woman in Michigan who was having headaches, hallucinations and sleepless nights. The team found black mold and faulty electrical wiring in her rental house. When the landlord fixed those problems, the woman’s life returned to normal.
“There was no paranormal activity involved,” Lee says.
Contrary to popular opinion, paranormal activity doesn’t heighten around Halloween, according to Davis. “We see more activity in winter than summer, though, because the air is so dry and there is more static electricity,” he says. “Spirits use our energy and the energy that’s in the air to communicate with us.”
He believes that when people die tragically, they don’t always “depart” this world. “Some don’t know they’re dead and will deny it when asked,” he says.
So, where are these spirits, and why haven’t they passed on to heaven, hell or whatever Great Beyond awaits them?
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” he says.
