Lilburn Manor; Another Chapter in a Haunted Past

By Robin M. Strom-Mackey

Author of Anatomy of a Ghost: A Guide to Analyzing the Dead

"But it was five years later that I just started having this gnawing feeling that I just had to get there.”

Overlooking historic Ellicott City, Maryland is the stately Lilburn Mansion.  Already notorious for its haunts, the aging mansion built in the likeness of a castle has a tragic past of loss and sadness.  Enter a young, impressionable woman with a love of history and you have a recipe for a ghostly obsession that lasted years.  

In my collection of interviews I came across a case where a person became an unwitting mouth piece for an entity.   This case doesn’t appear to be a case of the more sinister form of possession, but a case of spiritual obsession.  Obsession by a spirit is somewhat different from possession. In this case a living person can become obsessed, or fixated on an idea or behavior that is obviously out of character and sometimes self-destructive. They can be urged to do compulsive acts, but they don’t lose sight of themselves. In other words they may feel the need to do something, but they don’t black out or lose control. They realize what they’re doing, and understand that the compulsion comes from without and not within themselves.  In Judy’s case she remained aware of what she was doing, and understood that the compulsions she was experiencing were not of her own choosing. 

Now retired and living near the beach in Maryland, Judy had been a hardworking career woman all her life. She ran a restaurant and a catering service for many years before giving up the long days and nights in the kitchen for semi-retirement as a book keeper. She recounted for me an episode in her life in which she seemed to be obsessed by the tragic spirit of a woman and the stately remains of an edifice of tragedy.

In an interview I conducted with her, Judy recounted how it began. “I was between eighteen and twenty-five at the time when this happened, and it was really what started my interest in the paranormal. But you know you grow up, you raise kids, you have a job and you just don’t have the time to pursue it. I know this is going to sound weird, maybe not to you because you deal with this, but it certainly sounded weird to all my friends at the time. I used to live in Clarksville at my brother’s. I used to love to walk in Ellicott City. There used to be a place called the Phoenix which was right on the corner of Cranberry Avenue and Market Street. My girlfriends and I used to go down there and have lunch all the time. One day we just decided to go riding around and seeing what the houses were like. So we drove up there and that’s when it started. This house looked like a Castle, it was up on Cranberry Avenue, up where the railroad used to be. You’d have to go up a hill to get there.”

“We were up there and I thought, wow, what a cool house. At the time it wasn’t inhabited but there were no trespassing signs everywhere. And we thought, we can’t go in here. So we took a couple of pictures of the outside of the house which is really cool. Around six months later we saw an ad in the paper that the house was for sale. They were asking a million –three at that time and that was 1980 to 1982 maybe. I certainly didn’t have that. Not too long after that it sold to a person, I don’t remember who but I have it on my timeline. Then after that it sold to the doctor who owned it for a long time. So we took a couple pictures of it, as I said, and then we drove back down to Ellicott City, and I said I want to go back to the Phoenix and ask about that house.”

And I did, and they said, 'Ooh. That’s the haunted house in Ellicott City. So I asked, ‘well what happened up there?’ They said, ‘oh, well there’s someone up in the tower. There was a fire there and children had died, and it’s had many owners. But everyone stays away from that house because it’s supposedly haunted.’”

So captivated by the house did Judy become, that over the course of the next couple of years she would research the property extensively. The following are from the notes that she made and kept all these years later.

The building is not a house in actuality, but a mansion of some 7000 square feet. Built in the 9^th century Gothic and Romanesque Revival style with stone and granite, it boasts twenty rooms, a four story medieval style tower, twelve foot ceilings and seven fireplaces with marble mantels and surrounds. The property also boasts a three-story carriage house and the only three-story smoke house ever built in Howard County.

It was built in 1857 by Henry Richard Hazelhurst. Originally from Abington, Berkshire England, who moved to Ellicott City after making a fortune in iron works. Henry had lost his first wife in 1848, but remarried a second time to Elizabeth Virginia McKim. The family moved to the area around 1857 with their two children, Maria and George. Soon after the mansion was finished a third child, Catherine, was born. Soon after Catherine’s birth, however, tragedy struck the family. Maria, aged three years, died of a childhood illness. Throughout the course of the next five years Elizabeth delivered three more daughters, Margaret, Julia and Elizabeth.

During the Civil War the Hazelhurst’s allowed the mansion to be used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. Following the war, the family’s financial interests may have taken a down-turn, as Henry apparently was forced to sell off several acres of land surrounding the mansion, which was distressing to the family. The original plot of land was 2500 acres, eventually it was whittled down to eight.

Elizabeth reportedly suffered bouts of depression for twenty some years. Judy’s notes suggested that the depression was brought on by the loss of daughter Maria. The loss of a child is a tragedy beyond words, even in an era when such losses were common. The birth of later children apparently did nothing to assuage the loss. Elizabeth passed away in 1887. She was fifty-nine years old when she died of an unspecified illness.

Her daughters would be even less fortunate. Indeed, none of Elizabeth’s daughters would live to reach the age of forty.

Catherine the third child, and the first to be born in the mansion, was reportedly very close to her mother. She died only four years after her mother’s death. She was thirty-three when she passed in 1891.

Only two years into her marriage, Julia died in childbirth in 1893, at the age of thirty-one. She was laboring in the tower of the mansion trying to deliver her first and only child when she died.

Not much is known about Margaret, only that she died in 1895 at the age of thirty-six. Henry, who was losing his family one by one is quoted as saying that the mansion was “A place of tragic memories.” Still Henry lived to old age. Accounts vary, but he either died in 1890 or 1900, either at the age of seventy-five or eighty five. He was laid to rest at St John’s Cemetery of Howard County next to wife Elizabeth. The last and final daughter, Elizabeth, followed her father to the grave five years later in 1905.

The first born, and only surviving child, George sold the mansion in 1906. He moved to Catonsville, Maryland and died in 1919.

A waspish man by the name of Wells bought the mansion next, and inhabited the mansion with his family into the early 1920’s. Apparently a bit of a character, Wells earned a reputation with the town’s folk for his petulant demeanor. He was known to snap at anyone that attempted to speak with him. One who valued his privacy, Wells had a seven foot hedge planted around the front of the property. The Wells family stayed mainly in the house, emerging only on Sunday mornings to attend church. Wells was found dead one day in the mansion’s library.

John McGinnis and family were in residence in the mansion by 1923, when a devastating fire destroyed much of the interior. The family managed to escape the blaze, but were forced to rebuild. During the renovation they added the medieval style battlements to the roof of the tower, replacing the steeple gothic roof that had been the original design.

Apparently the mansion earned its haunted reputation with the town around that time. According to Judy’s research, activity in the mansion included the sounds of a small child crying in an upstairs bedroom, and an apparition of a young girl wearing a chiffon dress who was reported as playing in several rooms of the mansion. There were also reports of an apparition of a man and a small child walking hand-in-hand down the hallway. A male apparition was also reported standing in a doorway. The aroma of cigar smoke, a habit not uncommon in Hazelhurst’s era, was smelled and sometimes witnessed in the library, a curling cloud of smoke wafting toward the ceiling in an otherwise empty room. The chandelier in the dining room was said to swing with vigor at times, once during a family gathering. Footsteps, sometimes heavy footsteps, were at times heard around the building, and on the tower stairs. And once, a vase full of flowers was said to elevate off its stand, pouring water and flowers out onto the floor.

Windows in the manse appeared to be uncooperative, refusing to stay closed. This was especially true in the tower. One owner attempted to tie the errant windows down with rope. By the time he got outside to inspect his handiwork, however, the windows of the tower were open again, the ropes lying on the floor beneath.

Judy commenced her story, upon learning that the mansion was up for sale. “Right then I thought I want to buy that house. But I couldn’t.”  The one-million dollar asking price was inconceivable to a woman who waited tables.  Her dream mansion was such that, she had to concede, just a dream.

“And then years later, I think it was five years later when I lived with my brother, that’s when that started happening to me. I had taken other friends around and we would look at it and just ride around the streets. But it was five years later that I just started having this gnawing feeling that I just had to get there.”

“I thought at the time, this is weird, but I’ve got to go [to the house]. And I would go, and I would sit and I would bawl my eyes out.” She admitted that she had no idea why she was crying, but that she was simply overwhelmed with, “complete sadness.”

In her research she had found accounts of tragedies, any one of which she might be tapping into. The house had burned down. A lady that had lived in the house had lost three children. Owners of the property had come and gone with great regularity. For all its grandeur it hadn’t been a house of joy for its inhabitants.

“I’ve got loads of stuff, I went to Ellicott City, the historical society and I gathered so much information. I always wanted to explore this home. Years ago in the early 2000’s a couple were trying to make the house into a bed and breakfast, but Ellicott City wouldn’t allow them to do that. But it’s still, it’s lived in, but there are many, many stories about it.”

“For some reason I connected with a woman in the house, who was very, very sad. I could be at my brother’s and it could be any time. Every two or three months, it could be three o’clock in the morning or it could be noon. If I was asleep I would wake up and I’d have this insatiable desire, I had to get to the house. I’m surprised no one ever called the cops on me. Because I’d go and I’d sit outside the house in my little car and I’d bawl my eyes out for  an hour. And then it was done, and I went home. But it was reoccurring and it would happen every two or three months with regularity for three years, and then it absolutely stopped.” Judy admitted that she probably repeated the ritual a dozen times over the three year period while she shared a grief so terrible with an unknown woman that it communicated beyond the veil.

“I did, I thought I was cracking up, but the feeling was just so strong in me, and I went, and I would have this experience and I would go home, and then I was so relieved. And then it wouldn’t happen again until a couple of months later. It was weird, but it was cool. So I decided that I needed to find out more about this house, and the owners, and the timeline. The stack of papers [she accumulated] is probably this thick [around two inches] and I wrote down a timeline of when the fire was, who owned it, who built it, how many acres it was. That was so interesting for me to go and do that kind of research.”

“So that was why I did so much research on the home. I don’t even recall now the name of the woman that lost the three children, but I always felt a connection that maybe she was the one that did that. I don’t know.”

“I knocked on the door one day, there was a doctor living there, a lady, and I kind of introduced myself and I told her my story and I asked her if I could come in. But she didn’t know me, and I don’t blame her for saying no. It was just so fascinating.”

“My brother thought I was crazy, my friends thought I was crazy. So I really didn’t [share it with anyone] because it was personal to me. It felt very personal that someone was reaching out to do that. I just went with it. When it stopped, I was kind of sad that it stopped. I realized it had been six months or so and I realized, wow, I haven’t been to that house in a long time. And it never happened again.”

What is fascinating to me about this account is the fact that Judy never actually entered the dwelling, and had no knowledge of its history at the onset. She apparently made an immediate connection to the property, though, obvious by the fact that she took pictures of it on the first encounter and went downtown to inquire about it immediately.

Final Analysis

Why was she the one of the whole band of friends that was affected in this way? Can we assume that she was the only one with the empathic ability to tap into the tragic energy? I wonder also if the energy, the sadness she apparently was in tune with, was actually a consciousness or just a type of residual sadness that lingered about the property.

The episodes Judy underwent certainly didn’t seem to have had any purpose beyond the sheer expression of pain. This energy appeared to require nothing but expression. The expression of sadness, expiation, all those years after. The death of a child, three children, a woman in childbirth…Judy would go on to become a mother herself.  Did the spirit sense a bond? Was it Elizabeth still mourning the loss of Maria? Was it one of the later residents who also experienced tragedy in the mansion? We will never know, beyond the fact that death and loss left an imprint on a place that transcended the passage of time.

Part II - How to Run a Ghost Hunting Group: Interview with P.R.G. Founder & Director Jennifer Lauer

By Robin M. Strom-Mackey

“The only two people that should know what is going on are the people that were on that pre-investigation; any of the weird things. The investigators that are going in are going in blind. Yes. We feel that’s the best way to go, because then there are no pre-conceived notions…”

 Jennifer Lauer is the Founder  and Director of the Paranormal Research Group, (P.R.G.) [formerly the Southern Wisconsin Paranormal Research Group.] The organization recently expanded to include Pennsylvania as well as Wisconsin. In this interview Lauer shares some very thoughtful information about how she founded and continues to run this very successful paranormal investigation group. If you’re thinking about starting a paranormal group or revising group protocols, this is a must read article. Lauer has also co-written two books and is a frequent public speaker on the topic of paranormal investigation.

Robin: Can you tell me about how your group does an investigation from the screening of possible clients to the actual investigation?

Jennifer:  When someone is interested in having us come out and check out their place they’ll either call or send an email and they’ll say I’ve got some stuff going on and I’m really interested in talking about it or having someone come out and do something.

The first thing we do is send out a question set.  It’s an extremely long questionnaire.  It’s something like 150 to 200 questions and it has a variety of different questions that will help us to get a better understanding of what they are experiencing. It also has a couple of different areas in it that allows for some psychological testing, just so we know that we’re not sending our people into an unstable environment.  They’re actual tests that are taken out of psychological texts. And we can score them. It’s really more for our protection than anything else. I don’t want to send anyone into a dangerous environment. So this allows us to screen an applicant and make sure that it is a safe environment in which to send our investigators.

After they send us back the questionnaire, we look at it to kind of get a feel for what they might have going on, what they might be experiencing. And then we set up a pre-investigation which is just two of our investigators going out to the location, sitting down with the people, talking to them and getting a feel for the area where things are happening. We’ll have them take us on a tour of the location, show us where things were happening, tell us who was experiencing them and who was involved.

We also videotape the whole session.  That way we can take it back to the group when we have a meeting, and we can say, “This was happening here, and they can see it.” We also do background readings with either our D.E.A.D. system or with just hand-held equipment just to see if there is a natural reason for that experience in that location at that time.

We also look at, which a lot of groups don’t, if the homeowner says that when they lie in bed they see something across the hall walking down the stairway. What most groups will do is  go to that stairway and they’ll investigate that. What we do is we go to the bed and try to find out if anything is happening in that area that has a natural explanation as to why that person might have hallucinated something. A lot of times a clock radio sitting next to the headboard can really scramble your brain waves because there’s are a lot of electro-magnetic fields coming out of those things. If you’ve ever checked them, you can get 50 milligaus coming off those things and your brainwaves can actually get scrambled. And if your brain neurons aren’t firing properly you can start to see shadows; a variety of different things can affect the human brain.  Those are the types of things that we want to look at.

What we do after the pre-investigation is we go back to the team. We explain what happened and give an overall concept of what is going on. If we have EVP we will listen to it or we give it to Cindy. If we think there is a good chance that something is going on here we’ll go ahead and set up a full investigation which, depending upon the size of the house will determine how many investigators we will take. We don’t want to take too many because then our equipment will pick up their natural electro-magnetic fields. We want to stay as small a team as possible; I think that’s really key.

Then we’ll talk to the homeowners again. We have them take the entire team on a tour of the house so that everyone knows where the areas are, except we won’t have them explain anything about what is going on. The only two people that should know what is going on are the people that were on that pre-investigation; any of the weird things. The investigators that are going in are going in blind. Yes. We feel that’s the best way to go because then there are no pre-conceived notions or anything like that.

Then we’ll do the investigation. We do them in a variety of ways. We may take a couple of investigators and set them off with a couple of hand-held sweeps of the environment. They’ll sweep for ions, radiation and EMF in different rooms. And then they’ll record them. Then we’ll have somebody else setting up the video equipment. And we’ll have somebody else setting up the D.E.A.D. equipment. Another person will get everything together – whatever else needs to be done at that time. Once everything is set up we’ll all get together and do an EVP session in one of the areas where something is going on. Then we’ll also do controlled sessions  in rooms where there aren’t reported happenings. That way we have a control.

We pretty much do investigations in layers. First we do sweeps, then an EVP session and then throughout the night we’ll maybe do a lights-out quiet time, an observation time depending on what’s been going on.  We’ll do another set of sweeps later on. We’ll run the D.E.A.D. system in different areas to see what we can pick up.  We may have several EVP sessions throughout the night.

And then, when we’re done, I have every one of the investigators fill out a little report sheet that they have.  Actually they’re supposed to be filling that out throughout the night, any experiences, anything they noticed that was odd or strange. And they turn in that with any readings they have for the ions. For example if they’re doing an ion sweep in the bathroom they have to record that, and they have to turn that in at the end of the night with the investigation notes. That way the Lead Investigator can write the report. 

Then we take all of the equipment back and the data is analyzed through the D.E.A.D. system to look for any correlations with any EVP that might be caught. So Dave will do the analysis of the D.E.A.D. system, Cindy will do the analysis of the EVP, someone else may watch the video.

Actually I just stopped that because I’ve had people watch hundreds of hours of video and seeing nothing. So what we’ve decided to do now, is  if we notice anything on any of the recorders or the data, we will go back to that time, because everything is date-time stamped. We can go back to the video at that time, just to make sure that anything natural happened that might be caught on video – like a child ran by at the time. We could understand that, because everything is date-time stamped.  Dave or Cindy may say, “Well, I noticed something at this date and at this time.” Then they can compare notes and we’ll look at the equipment readings at that time, the hand-held sweep information, we can see if everything jives or looks strange. Then we can create the report from that.

And we’ve got all the sheets from all the investigators so that we can look at that and correlate that time with everything.  And everything is put into a full report. If EVP is collected we put that on a CD. We go to the owner and we do the reveal. We’ll sit down at the table and we’ll go over the whole report with them. We’ll explain what we found, what we experienced.   If we caught any EVP we will play the disk and have them listen to it. They’ll keep that as well as the report. And there’s always a conclusion at the end of the report of what we believe may be happening.

We always tell them that client care is one of our biggest concerns. If things continue and you’re worried about it, please get back in touch with us – especially if we didn’t find anything. Because they spend 24 hours a day there, seven days a week, 365 days a year. And we’re there for one brief four to six hour session.  A lot of times we don’t collect everything. You can’t be at the right place at the right time all the time. So we make sure they know that, “Unfortunately we didn’t catch anything at this time. But we don’t think you’re crazy.”

The people who have had these experiences, there has to be something that’s creating these experiences, whether that be a ghost or whether that be something natural in the field that you are seeing. Client care is really important, and we want them to know that we’re here for them…So often they say, “Oh, I’m not crazy. That’s all I wanted to know! I knew I wasn’t crazy and now I have proof.” A lot of times that alone makes everything better for them.

We don’t have a lot of clients that say, “I have to leave my house.” More often we have people that just want to be assured that they’re not crazy. They say, “You’ve collected that evidence. You’ve shown me that I’m not crazy. That makes them happy.”

Robin: So you’re saying that the majority of people you deal with just want assurance that they now know what is going on and they’re not insane?

I would say that 80% of the people that call us just want to make sure that they’re not seeing something and that they’re not crazy.

Robin:  There is a contingent out there, however, that’s scared to death. You’ve met the client group out there that’s scared to death? How do you deal with the scared ones?

Jennifer: Sure. There was one [client] in particular that had called us. They called us at night time and we had to drop everything and get a team and go out there. It was a case of RSPK which is Recurrent, Spontaneous Psycho-kinesis (the current term for poltergeist activity). The popular theory behind poltergeist activity being that there is a human agent that is affecting the environment with their minds.

It had to do with a young female. And after we did an investigation and told her that’s what we felt that the case was,  we explained that the activity was probably coming from her. We explained how the brain works and how the brain functions and how that can happen, and that it’s a natural cause. We explained that it’s been studied under lab conditions and how it has been reproduced and that it’s not a “crazy-person” thing but that it happens more frequently than people understand or recognize. She didn’t want to believe it; she wanted to believe something else. However, after we brought that from her sub-conscious into her conscious by making her aware of it, it stopped.

So a lot of times making someone aware of the fact that it could be them, if it’s P.K. [psycho-kinesis] it will definitely stop it. That happens a lot. A lot of times we’ll hear, “well, I don’t know what you did but it’s gone now.”  Well, we didn’t do anything, we didn’t do anything. Just the fact that we were there and you thought that we were doing something, brought the issue that you were facing in your subconscious to your conscious…It’s the, “O.K., someone is here now and they’re going to take care of me. I’m going to be safe and everything is going to be O.K.” And then in fact, everything is O.K., because the issue is resolved in their  mind. Especially if it’s P.K.; because P.K. is done in their mind. So just by making them aware of it, it solves a lot of them.

Robin: Well, we always wonder if we’re going to come across the truly dangerous investigation. Has your group ever experienced anything…I hate to use the word demonic, but have you ever experienced anything of a questionable nature? Or that was a little frightening for you, perhaps?

Jennifer: Not really. I think there was one time in Milwaukee that I got scratched and that Heather got scratched too. But, to be perfectly honest, I don’t think it had to do with anything. There was a huge pulse in the electro-magnetic field of the home. I was sitting on the floor and where I got scratched was very level to an outlet.  And I think it could have been ball lightning coming out of that outlet, and it burned my arm coming down. I think that’s pretty much what it was.

I couldn’t tell you for sure, but the area and the circumstance that I was in, watching it on the D.E.A.D. system; we could tell that it was really erratic. So, I’m going to go with the natural explanation because there was no other possible rational explanation for that. But, other than that, when we go into an investigation, it’s a job and we don’t let our emotions get the better of us. And when something happens we’re more likely to say, “All right! Come on let’s do this [laughs].”

I think we use our minds a little more for…patterns. We’re always looking for patterns. Our mindset is a little bit different, we don’t go based off of emotions, or based off our perception, because we have so much equipment.  We can ask, “Oh, hey, did something happen? I felt something.” And you can see in the environment [using our sensors] whether something did change. So if something did change, and I felt something, then I can say wow [laughs] I’m pretty good! I’m able to detect the changes in the electromagnetic field. So that’s the way we look at things. We’re more fascinated than scared. Fear comes from the unknown. Because of what we know about the field we’re less involved and less scared. We bring more research and science into it.

Robin: Are there any specialized pieces of equipment that your group uses that maybe others don’t?

Jennifer: Yeah, we have a Fluxgate  Magnetometer. It is about $15,000 if you’re going to buy it.  It’s very expensive, but it’s very detailed. It’s an electromagnetic field detector, but it collects 400 samples a second. So it gives us a great range of what is going on. I mean you can walk around with those Dr. Gauss and if you happen to get a really big signal you might pick it up.  This thing can detect changes within the whole house. It’s just so sensitive that if anything happens it’s going to detect it.  You can vary the bit rate if you desire. You can set it for one sample per second if you want or up to 400, which is just amazing.

It takes a lot of space on your computer to do it [laughs] but it gives you a really great look at the environment, especially the electromagnetic in the room, because that can just cause havoc.  It can create mood swings in people. What it does is it interrupts your natural brain flow or pattern, the electricity in your brain.  And when that happens you experience things.

Robin: I imagine a lot of groups would love to have a $15,000 detector but...

Jennifer: Well, we’ve been doing this for so long that we just collect as we go.

Robin: So do you charge dues from your members?

Jennifer: We do.

Robin: Do you charge fees for your services?

Jennifer: No. We charge membership one time, and one time only. We’ve got people who have been here for six or seven years that have never paid but once. The website does say we charge a yearly membership. But I tell people if you stay active in the group I’ll never charge you again.  However, if you don’t stay active for over half a year, even if you’re an Associate member, we will drop you out.

 If you stay active in the group you can stay a member for life. However, if you don’t stay active then step aside and let someone else take your spot and be active. I don’t want 600 members who aren’t active.  It just doesn’t make sense.  So they lose their membership. If they want to rejoin again they can. But if you just remain active you would never have to pay again.  It’s an incentive for the people to just stay active.

Robin: How do you screen potential members?

Jennifer: I really don’t. I think everyone has great in them…bad in them. But that’s one of the reasons I charge people to join; because people put more into something that they’re putting their money into.  If they’re a complete nutcase [laughs] we’ll eventually find out. But we’ve got a lot of nutcases in the group that are really good people.  We’ve had a couple of issues where people are just out of their mind, weird, strange, kind of scary…I refund money. I just say, “I don’t think this is the right place for you.”  But I don’t deny anybody. I don’t want it to be like they feel they have to perform in order to be in this group.  I don’t want that. If you want to be in active in this group then we want you.

Robin: So for you it’s more about willingness than credentials.

Jennifer: Yes, but right now we don’t have open membership for onsite members. We’re at our limit for investigators. But it’s still a great opportunity to get involved as an Associate member.  And it’s a great opportunity for us too, to get to know them before we put them in a situation that could be dangerous – for us too.  Before we take someone into an investigation we want to know how they’ll act. So it gives us an opportunity to get to know them before they become an investigator, before we move them up to that place.

We also do full training sessions. We have a manual, not the actual book that you saw, but an actual manual. It’s a members’ manual that is about this thick. And we sit down for a whole day and we train them on every piece of equipment, every theory, everything that we have. So that they’re well informed before we go out on any investigation.

Robin: So we all have our favorite stories, our favorite paranormal experience. So what is yours? What really set your heart racing?

Jennifer: I did have one. It was before I got into the paranormal field. I was 21. I was living with my mom. I was trying to save my money because I was getting married.  My fiancé lived in the house with us.  We lived in the house where my grandparents had lived their entire married life. My grandfather had died in the front room of a heart attack as my brother watched.  It was back in 1977.

My fiancé and I were staying in the room where my grandparents had [lived].  It was in the front of the house. It was the most beautiful room, all the light from outside would come in at night. It was just a very warm and inviting room.

At the time I was working a second-shift job and I wouldn’t get home until around 11 o’clock at night. When I got home my fiancé was already sleeping in bed and my mom in bed too. She was in a bedroom that was way down the hall. 

When you get home late you can’t always go to bed right away.  So I sat up and watched TV for maybe an hour or two.  It was maybe around 1 o’clock when I decided to go to bed. So, I went in and got ready for bed, my fiancé at the other side of the bed. I laid down, and within 2 seconds I felt this breath on my ear. I could hear it. It was whispering so quick and so wispy that I could hear it, but I couldn’t understand what it was saying. \ I could feel it, its hot breath on my ear. And, of course I froze. I thought, “what the… what the heck was that?” But the really weird part was that I could feel the breath on my ear. So I panicked. I pulled the pillow up over my head. I was 21 at the time [laughs], but I was panicked!  And all of a sudden it happened again. It was like the pillow wasn’t even there. I could feel the breath on my ear and I could hear the whispering. And I passed out. I don’t know if it was from fear or what it was. But I don’t remember anything after that.

Of course I never told anyone about it. It was freaking me out.  And three months later, I was talking to my mom about something, and she said I have something to tell you. You’re into that paranormal stuff, and I’ve got to tell you this. I had this really weird thing happen to me last night.”  She was in her bedroom and had the same, exact thing happen with the whispering in the ear. And she described it exactly as I did. I had not told her. But then I did - that I had had the same experience.  It’s never happened since and I can’t explain it. It really got me wondering what it could have been.

Resources

Auerbach, Loyd (2005) A Paranormal Casebook: Ghost Hunting in the New Millennium. Atriad Press LLC. Dallas, TX.

Auerbach, Loyd (1986) ESP, Hauntings and Poltergeists: A Parapsychologist’s Handbook. Warner Books. NY, NY.

Fluxgate Magnetometer http://beta.globalspec.com/search/products?query_2=flux-gate%20magnetometer&comp=4934&pg=0&pageSize=10&show=undefined measures the strength and direction of magnetic fields.

Lauer, J., Schumacher D. (2007) Investigating the Haunted: Ghost Hunting Taken to the Next Level. Xlibris Corporation. Additional Copies of the Book can be ordered at Orders@Xlibris.com

PRG.’s website (2012) www.http://paranormalresearchgroup.com/

Part I - A Spirited Debate: What are Ghosts Anyway?

By Robin M. Strom-Mackey

 Included in Part I are the opinions of Troy Taylor, ghost hunter and author, Leon Lederman, Nobel winning Physicist,

Few questions are like to elicit a stronger response than the question, “do you believe in ghosts?” The naysayers will quickly and adamantly deny any such possibility and call you a fool for asking. The non-committal’s will shrug and move on to another, more comfortable topic. And the dabblers and the believers will expound for long minutes recalling odd experiences they have had.

Truthfully, few topics are as divisive as this one. Those who deny the possibility often do so from vehement religious beliefs.  And, make no mistake, science became the religion of the 20^th century, with its scriptures as dogmatically adhered to by its followers as any religious zealot.  Proponents of science vehemently defend the notion of science being able to answer all questions with a rationale answer. The world around us, they tell us, is the only reality, and anything unexplained simply a riddle not yet solved. 

On the other hand, those who believe in the paranormal have a vested interest and will fight to support their beliefs just as strongly.  After all, a belief in spirits is a belief that the soul survives death. And that is a very attractive notion.

Whether you’re a believer, fence sitter or fierce non-believer it is undeniable that people have been seeing (and hearing, and smelling) ghosts since the dawn of mankind.  Not every person among them is a fool, charlatan or notoriety seeker. Indeed most people who experience something paranormal are absolutely normal. Many are reluctant to even talk about their experience, afraid of being ridiculed.  The paranormal knows no class bounds. Emperors and peasants, politicians, and garbage collectors, a paranormal experience can happen (and has) to anyone.  (See my series on famous people and the paranormal to find out what the many of the greatest minds thought on the subject.)

So what is the explanation for these odd events?  There are as many answers to that question as there are people who have experiences.  Compiled here are the opinions of many experts both within and without the field. These are the words of writers, thinkers, scientists, college professors and lifelong investigators.  This is what they have to say about the possibility of ghosts.

Pros

Justification

Long-time paranormal investigator, Troy Taylor, is the author of 50 books on the subject of ghosts, and founder of the American Ghost Society of Illinois.  With his vast experience investigating he admits that he has experienced events that defy rational explanation.  He understands that science mocks any hint of the supernatural, but says that this doesn’t mean that hauntings are not real. “Unfortunately, the supernatural does not conform to the idea of repeatable experiments. We can measure, document and record, but ghosts do no perform on command, which is what scientists demand….Thanks to this, science tells us ghosts cannot exist (Taylor, 2007).” 

 Taylor points out that, despite the stance the scientific community takes, many Americans believe in the possibility of the supernatural.  “Nationwide polls tell us that more than 1 in 2 Americans believe that houses can be haunted and more than 20% believe that people can communicate with the dead (Taylor, 2007).”

He goes on to point out that people have been reporting experiences from before written history, and that they still occur today in our so called ‘modern age.’  This he says makes the scientific community uncomfortable, “Not because they are afraid of ghosts but because they are afraid that the grip they have tried to impose on society, demanding that we not believe in anything supernatural, has started to slip once again (Taylor, 2007).”

The scientific stranglehold on reality slipped once before, with the Spiritualist movement of the 1800’s.

“Angered that new innovations in the scientific world had  started to break the monopoly that superstition and religion had on society, they immediately set about to debunk everything possible…And while many hoaxes were exposed there were just enough genuine mediums…to send many of the scientists back to their universities and laboratories in fear (Taylor, 2007).”

And a notable few, such as Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge, actually became spiritualist converts using their private time and resources to investigate paranormal phenomena – often to the detriment of the professional reputations. While most people believe that investigators have done little to prove the validity of ghosts in the 150 years of research, he says he disagrees with that assessment, because while we cannot scientifically prove the existence of ghosts, he says we can verify hauntings historically.

What Are They?

So what are ghosts? Taylor points out that paranormal events are extremely varied, making one simple explanation impossible. He does explain that most ghost ‘experts’ do not believe that ghosts “are literally the ‘spirits’ of people who have died and have remained at a location.  This is not to say that they reject the possibility that some hauntings are caused by the activities of the dead, though they don’t believe that the ghosts themselves are the actual forms of the dead.” While this may be a popular notion for novices, Taylor explains that most ghost hunters believe that haunting are not the doings of the dead. Mainly they scoff at this notion because many locations leave no historical evidence of past tragedies or deaths. Therefore, why would the “dead person” be hanging around? “And they also add that no evidence exists in many locations to say that any past personality is present there (Taylor, 2007).”

However, Taylor says he disagrees with this theory:

 “…I agree that many locations do not boast events that might spawn ghosts, but isn’t it possible that the ghost may have stayed behind for other reasons altogether?....There are likely many reasons for hauntings….Just like the theory about what causes a place to become haunted, the idea that a ghost (or type of haunting) could be a single all encompassing thing is a nice idea, but an unrealistic one (Taylor, 2007).”

He explains that the word ghost is an umbrella term in the field of paranormal research, a term that is used to describe both spirits (actual human personalities) and apparitions (recordings of past events) [his terms]. Because of the wide variety of activity, he concludes that “no one theory can be used to describe them all adequately (Taylor, 2007).”
Troy Taylor
Author and Paranormal Investigator

 Cons

Paranormal Phenomena Fail to be Scientifically Verifiable

Nobel Prize Winning Physicist, Leon Lederman scorns the whole notion of ghosts, primarily from the standpoint that the paranormal fails to produce in a laboratory setting. “’You don’t have haunted houses. You have either gullible people or some dishonest people who are making this all up. Science has no room for ghosts.” No ghostly phenomena, according to Letterman, are scientifically verifiable, nor do the claims meet the demands of the scientific method. “The claim that I see it, I have to prove it. It goes beyond I can see it to I have to prove it. The burden is on the owner of that site or the writer of that book, and in 400 years of innumerable claims no one has succeeded in convincing the scientific community (Hauntings, 1997).’”

Leon Lederman, Ph.D.

Nobel Prize Winning Physicist

 Resources

Auerbach, Loyd (2005) A Paranormal Casebook; Ghost Hunting in the New Millennium. Atriad Press, LLC. Dallas, Texas.

 Documentary Produced by The History Channel (1997) The Unexplained: Hauntings.

Conover, Rob. a former private investigator turned paranormal Investigator http://robconover.net/default.aspx

Steiger, Brad (2003)  Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits and Haunted Places. Visible Ink Press. Canton, MI.

Taylor, Troy (2007)  Ghost Hunter’s Guidebook: The Essential Guide to Investigating Ghosts & Hauntings. American Ghost Society. White Chapel Press: Dark Haven Entertainment. Decatur, Illinois.