Jason Hawes - Ghost hunting: true stories of unexplained phenomena from the Atlantic Paranormal Society

Because paranormal activity is not supported by conventional scientists or by specialized equipment manufacturers, it cannot be re-created in a controlled setting. Therefore the field of paranormal investigation is populated by theory, speculation, and opinion. Due to these limitations, what is shared within these pages is what T.A.P.S. as an organization feels is closest to the truth. T.A.P.S. is not claiming these beliefs to be fact; rather, they are presented as educated theories and observations based on years of experience and research.

BY JASON HAWES

A t The Atlantic Paranormal Society (T.A.P.S. for short), we typically start our investigations with a question: Does this case merit our attention? The answer is usually dependent on a second question: Does the person who believes he or she has paranormal activity truly need our help? Thats our primary goalto help.

If people think theyve seen a ghost, heard an unexplained noise, or found things moved out of place and theyre concerned about it, well pack up our vehicles, bring in our equipment to document the activity, and, if necessary, even bless the place. We do believe there are supernatural entities, both benign and destructive, but before we accept that a house or building is haunted we check out every possible angle.

Im inclined to be especially sensitive to those clients who see paranormal phenomena and believe theyre losing their minds, as Ill explain in a moment. But the decision to go on a job is not mine alone. It involves my partner, Grant Wilson, as well. Grant and I developed T.A.P.S. together, so we rely on each others perspectives. Hes like a brother to me and has been almost from the day we met.

At the time, I was twenty-two, a couple of years removed from my first paranormal experience. At the age of twenty, I had gotten involved with a lady who practiced Reiki, a Japanese technique for stress reduction, relaxation, and healing that depends on the manipulation of a persons life-force energy.

At first, I was skeptical about the idea of life-force energy. Then, after six months or so of exposure to the technique, I started seeing things. Usually it started with a mist, out of which emanated a dim light, and then out of the light came other thingsincluding see-through animals and full-body human apparitions.

I would point them out to whoever was with me, but no one else seemed to see them. They looked at me like I was crazy, and frankly, that was how I looked at myself. I felt like I was honestly and truly losing my mind.

It was scary as all get-out. I didnt know where to turn. Then a friend introduced me to a guy named John Zaffis, who was known as a paranormal researcher in Connecticut. Zaffis ran some tests and determined that I was becoming sensitive to paranormal phenomena.

That was a whole lot better than going crazy, but it was far from comforting. I was still seeing things I didnt want to see. And Zaffis, who lived three hours away, couldnt work with me as often as I would have liked. At his suggestion, I started the Rhode Island Paranormal Society, which came to be known as RIPS.

It wasnt a ghost-hunting organization like T.A.P.S., at least not at first. It was more of a support group. I was trying to connect with people who had gone through experiences similar to mine, hoping they could help me deal with my sensitivity and shut it off. I ended up meeting people all right, many more than I would have imagined.

But none of them knew how to help me.

Then, one day in the aquarium at Mystic, Connecticut, a woman in her fifties came up to me out of nowhere and asked in a tender, almost intimate way, How are you doing?

It was a strange question to ask someone she had never met. Before I could answer her, she continued. Hon, she said, youre seeing things, I know. But you can make it stop. Try green olives. Ill see you again soon. Then she walked away. I was too dumbfounded to stop her and ask her how she knew about my problem.

Stranger still, the green olive approach worked. I ate those suckers all day long, a bottle a day, and the visions Id been having went away. I wasnt cured for life, because whenever I stopped eating olives the visions came back. But at least I had found a way to alleviate the symptoms.

In the meantime, my RIPS group had taken on a life of its own, blustering its way into graveyards and abandoned buildings with a couple of cameras, a tape recorder, and a whole lot of optimism. We caught a few EVPs now and then, but I cant say they were anything of merit.

EVPs, by the way, are electronic voice phenomena. When a ghost hunter enters a room, he always asks any paranormal entity for a sign of its presence. Even if an entity is there, listening, and inclined to answer, its response isnt always audible to the human ear. Sometimes it can only be picked up on a sound recording device and discovered later on, when youre going over your tapes or digital impressions.

EVPs have been part of the paranormal investigators repertoire since their inadvertent discovery in the 1950s by a man recording birdsongs. To his surprise, he got human voices instead.

The other thing RIPS seemed to capture a lot was orb activity. An orb is a round, translucent, mobile packet of energy thought to signal supernatural activity in some way. However, people often mistake naturally occurring phenomena like dust, bugs, light reflections, and condensation for orbs. It wasnt at all uncommon for someone in RIPS to prove a haunting because he had caught some orbs with his camera, when in fact theyd been floating particles of dust and there hadnt been a ghost within fifty miles of the place.

RIPS also visited some homes, responding to residents who wanted to know if they were living with supernatural entities. I remember one Connecticut case in particularnot because of any significant paranormal activity but because while I was there I ran into the woman I had met in the Mystic aquarium. Like us, she was checking out the house for signs of haunting.