Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (7 page)

Besides the physical debunking and elimination of all other variables in the equation, the one element that always makes me sure that an orb is paranormal is how it acts around the living and the effect it has on the people around it. The orbs always seem to behave like a person would and they appear at the same time we feel things happen to us or around us. Orbs frequently coincide with a physical reaction in me or someone in the investigation crew. Headaches, nausea, pain, and even the first stages of possession have happened in the presence of orbs. At Essex County Hospital we captured an orb as it flew into Nick’s face. Seconds later, his skin was red and hot to the touch as if he’d been slapped. It’s this behavior and correlation to other physical feelings that gives us telltale signs of a paranormal orb versus something else.

Anna Corbin’s room is a good example. The orb we captured there shot into my head at the same time that I felt an undeniable wave of peace come over me. Again, I can’t argue with the fact that this orb happened at the same time as a physiological change overtook me. It was some type of undeniable form of energy lacking the characteristics of natural entities like bugs or dust. I’m actually glad we captured this orb instead of a full apparition at this moment. It helps verify all the other orbs I’ve captured and validates the emotions I was feeling at that moment.

We captured a fantastic orb-like energy form on video on a decommissioned aircraft carrier, the USS
Hornet
, for which I may have been directly responsible. The
Hornet
is a legendary icon of World War II naval battles and saw more combat than just about any U.S. Navy ship during that war for the ages. Below decks of the carrier, just underneath the main flight deck, we set up a static night vision camera at one end of a corridor. I then used a bullhorn as a trigger object and announced “Battle Stations! Get to your battle stations!” over and over again in the hopes that any spirits on the ship would react, move, and be seen.

Minutes later, a very bright energy form, as clear as I’d ever seen, moved down the corridor toward the camera at the same pace and height as an adult human in a hurry. What was unique about this is that the more it traveled, the more it spiraled into a luminescent charged energy form. It had its own light and had a strange twisting motion like a miniature tornado. Was this the spirit of a sailor reacting to the call to arms? The orb moved with a sense of urgency, like a man in battle would, and when you combine that with the trigger object, it makes for a great piece of paranormal evidence.

But the best orb evidence I’ve ever captured was at one of the most profoundly evil places I’ve ever been: Poveglia Island in Italy. The island was witness to thousands of deaths over the course of its very dark history, which I will get into later. For now, I just want to focus on the orb that passed in front of my EMF detector and registered a reading higher than I ever thought possible.

We had just gotten started on the investigation and were in the main hospital where hundreds of people had perished. I was doing a regular sweep, asking the normal baseline questions when my EMF detector suddenly spiked. But this wasn’t just an ordinary spike from 0 to 2 milliGauss, which would be impressive by itself. This time it went from 0 all the way up to 26 milliGauss! That’s a huge difference and a jump in electromagnetic energy like I had never seen before and have not seen since. I was shocked because the moment something like that happens, it’s mind blowing. Even a seasoned investigator like me takes a moment to absorb what’s happening.

But what made this fascinating was something we caught later while reviewing the video footage. An orb, moving very quickly, passed in front of my EMF detector at the exact moment that the spike occurred. It was a round ball of light, just like all the others I’ve seen over the years, and just as it passed in front of my EMF detector, the detector spiked up to 26. Trying to debunk this orb as something natural falls apart when you add the incredible spike in EMF at the same time it happened. It’s a clear causal relationship between orbs and EMF and is probably the most definitive piece of evidence linking the two together that we will take credit for capturing.

Orbs always appear just before or during other paranormal activity, so I believe they are spirits gathering energy from our equipment or us as they try to manifest. Most of us think of apparitions as being fully clothed people, and many times they are. But really we have to think of orbs as partial apparitions in themselves.

Here’s a message to you skeptics—linking orbs to higher amounts of EMF is an important step forward in paranormal science and we need to further dissect these phenomena. I get frustrated with skeptics because no matter how good the evidence is, all they want to do is point the finger at the believers and ridicule us for our beliefs. They want an apparition to sit down on a chair and make a turkey sandwich, and even if such a thing were to happen, they still wouldn’t believe that it’s real. They don’t understand the range of evidence outside the full-bodied apparition or the crystal clear EVP. We need to stop pointing fingers at each other and have a dialogue, because we all seek answers to the same questions. I’ve encountered enough orbs now that I have no other choice but to accept that they are in fact paranormal. But does that mean orbs are the intelligent remnants of a deceased person? The presence of intelligence adds a whole new layer to the paranormal.

Intelligent Hauntings

I believe orbs can be either residual energy or intelligent spirits. If orbs and light anomalies reacted directly to human prodding (i.e., answering a question or moving an object on demand) then we could classify them as intelligent hauntings, but truly intelligent hauntings provide an interaction on a higher level than an orb. An intelligent haunting is just as it sounds—a spirit who is aware of its surroundings and (usually) its situation. Sometimes a spirit knows that it’s dead and its spirit has remained in the physical plane, but other times it doesn’t know. An intelligent haunting is a spirit that maintains its identity, memories, and personality after death. They can be good, bad, virtuous, benevolent, mischievous, evil, or just lonely.

Intelligent hauntings range from the wandering, confused spirit who can’t figure out why someone is sleeping in its bed to a completely aware spirit who purposefully avoids moving on to the afterlife for personal reasons. I assume that every spirit I encounter is intelligent and deserves the recognition and respect of dealing with someone who is alive and healthy. I ask leading questions in the hopes of getting intelligent responses on my digital recorder, though I’ve actually heard them with my own ears at times. Getting clear responses to questions, especially when we get two or three in a row, is great evidence of an intelligent haunting. At Hillview Manor in New Castle, Pennsylvania, I got just that.

Hillview Manor is yet another forgotten relic of progress and a mainstay of paranormal investigation—an architectural masterpiece that was once stunning, but now waits to be reclaimed by Mother Earth after its human creators abandoned it. For eighty years it housed the poor, the destitute, and in its final days those awaiting the cold fingers of death, much like the building does now. As a retirement home, suicide was rampant at Hillview until it was shut down in 2004. Today the Manor is a hive of ghostly activity and home to a few spirits of an intelligent nature.

Before an investigation, it’s imperative for us to walk through a building to get a feel for it and to make sure we know where all the paranormal hot spots are. This doesn’t just help make the investigation a success, but it’s also a safety measure so we can identify the hazards of the location while there’s still light. Abandoned buildings don’t have to adhere to any safety codes and they always have dangerous debris, crumbling structures, and weak floors that can injure or even kill a human.

Hillview had intelligent hauntings written all over it. During a daylight recon of the Manor, a guide named Gary took us into room 101 of the hospital’s east wing where he’d had a recurring encounter with a spirit. I decided to do a quick EVP session to see if it was with us.

“If there’s a spirit in here, tell us what your first name is,” I asked with my digital recorder rolling.

The answer was clear. “I’m Jim,” a whispered voice said. You might think this was coincidence, but clearly written on the door was the name of the patient who died there—Jim Casciato. That’s not just an intelligent spirit, but also one who knows its name and can be consistently found in the same place day after day.

That evening I went back to Jim’s room. For some reason I got a little emotional about having established a connection with him earlier in the day, probably because he seems to me to be a guy trapped in his circumstance. I asked Jim a simple question to verify that he was still there.

“What color are your pants, Jim?”

“Blue,” he responded. Jim was indeed known to wear blue pants when he was alive. Jim’s spirit showed a high level of intelligence; a ghost that still retains its identity and knows who it is after death, even if it doesn’t know it has actually died.

Jim’s situation underscores a basic question in paranormal science—does a person have to know he or she is dead to move on? If a person dies so suddenly that he never saw it coming and therefore doesn’t know he’s dead, does his spirit wander the Earth in limbo until he comes to the realization that he’s no longer among the living? This is a prevailing belief among paranormal investigators. If that is true, then Jim is unaware that he’s taken his last breath. He may be an innocent spirit still residing in the room where the attendants of Hillview Manor cared for him.

When terminally ill people die, they experience the process of breaking down over time. They are sick and know their time on Earth is limited so they have the time to prepare for their fate. In my opinion, they are aware they’re dead, so trying to make contact with them or thinking I’ll see them in their old house isn’t feasible because they’ve moved on. Sudden, traumatic death is different. Many believe that spirits ripped from life continue to go about their daily activities as they knew them, which results in what we call “hauntings.” These spirits need help.

I believe this was the case in another part of Hillview Manor. I was walking through the hospital trying to make contact with the spirits using the spirit box. The spirit box hops across frequencies at a very high rate of speed to provide white noise for ghosts to make contact on. Nick and I were having some success in the hallways when a spirit suddenly asked me for a favor.

“I got a question,” a female voice said.

“Go ahead, ask,” I responded.

“Let us . . . hear,” she said. The voice sounded pained, like she was asking me to listen to her. I was happy to oblige.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Alicia,” she responded. I was shocked, but just as quickly as she appeared, she suddenly went quiet again. It was a great moment. I had a conversation with a female ghost who was in pain, possibly because she did not know she was dead, and wanted to be heard. I think it’s also possible that we gave her enough closure to cross over because she disappeared so fast. I felt like we connected and helped her through the spirit box device. This is when the spirit box became more valuable to me. It allowed me to make contact with Alicia and possibly ease her suffering.

One of my biggest goals as a paranormal investigator is to find out what your surroundings look like after you cross over. When you’re trapped inside the Hillview Manor, which was built in the early twentieth century, is all the décor the same as it was when you died? Are there record players? Are there other ghosts of your era? Or are the spirits seeing the same things we see in the physical world? What does the world look like from the other side? When we come walking through their domains with cameras, flashlights, and backpacks of strange equipment they’ve never seen or used, what are they thinking? Are they frightened of us or are they used to it in places like this where paranormal investigators frequently poke around? Do they see flashes of us like we do of them? Why does it seem that they can always see us but we can’t see them? Do they exist in two different time eras at once?

Out of all the fictional paranormal movies I’ve seen, the one that I respect the most is
The Others
with Nicole Kidman. I think it accurately depicts a situation where spirits still residing in their own home do not know that they’re dead. They become confused by the living, which keep passing through them, and it takes an intervention by older spirits to make them realize what has happened. It’s an intriguing situation.

Let’s say someone dies in a house and the spirit remains inside. Then, fifty years later, another person dies in the same house and also haunts it (such is the case of the Ancient Ram Inn). Do the spirits from both time frames all reside in the same plane or do they exist in different planes where they can’t see each other? Does a separation of time of death mean a separation on the other side or are they all wandering about the house like old friends?

I believe these spirits interact with each other and have some evidence to support it. At Loretta Lynn’s plantation in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, we captured a spirit of a Civil War soldier threatening what we believe to be the spirit of someone who passed away many years later. At Ashmore Estate in Illinois, we caught an EVP of a spirit arguing with another one. Something tugged on my leg and at the same time a voice said, “don’t you dare touch him.” It’s these moments that make me believe that the souls of the dead not only see each other, but interact socially just as we do.

I think they exist in the same plane instead of being layered over a bunch of interdimensional time zones. It’s fascinating to think that a ghost from the Wild West can be sitting next to a ghost from World War II and another from just a few years ago.

Residual Hauntings

Residual hauntings are not the same as intelligent hauntings and are one of the phenomena that have mystified paranormal investigators (and quantum physicists) for decades. Residual hauntings are a moment in time that seems to play itself out repeatedly, like a broken record that skips over and over again. Residual hauntings are usually more nondescript than intelligent hauntings. A residual haunting can be anything—a car crashing into a tree, a woman walking across a balcony, a party that happened one hundred years ago, but the music still plays in the parlor of an old mansion.