Occult Investigator. Bob Psy.D. Johnson

stories of his Italian grandmother (thought to be a striga, an Italian witch) who regularly communicated with the dead, threw curses and was responsible for at least a few “mysterious” deaths in their small Italian village, I knew I had a shot at developing what was to be X-Investigations, the first paranormal and occult investigative arm of a licensed detective agency.

      My background investigating the occult and the paranormal to this point was not on a professional basis. Although I had consulted numerous times with the preeminent ghost hunter and author, Professor Hans Holzer, and earned a certificate from his New York Committee for the Investigation of Paranormal Occurrences, my investigations had been of mostly of an academic nature, albeit fulfilling in their own right. Most of my experiences centered on the “possibilities” of paranormal and occult workings, more than actual sightings or first-hand encounters with the unexplained. That was until I attended a ghost hunting excursion with the International Ghost Hunters Society (IGHS), to Salem, Massachusetts that opened up a fascinating and sometimes frightening world of the unexplained and often disturbing glimpse of the “other side.”

      Toward the end of the first day’s field work exercise that included a walk through of a local cemetery and instructions that a ghost hunter must “respect the dead” by asking their permission to photograph their resting places, our group headed for a building on Essex Street in the center of the town’s commercial pedestrian mall that once was a Colonial library building, now converted into a local retail establishment. The wood frame store was vacant for the most part – quite large and creepy by most standards – with huge open rooms filled with covered furniture accentuated by the store’s high ceilings and a central staircase that wound around to a landing with doors to a number of rooms on the second level. The building gave our group needed shelter from the cold Salem October night, but curiously did not feel secure. Although the temperature was warmer than outdoors, it was still surprisingly damp and somehow uninviting to us. The yellow cloud covered moon intermittently shone through the windows on the upper floors of the building and at first was the only light we saw as we entered. Everyone in our group briskly rubbed warmth into their hands and commented that it was good to be out of the cold, but as we ventured further into the darkness, waiting for the lights to be switched on, the group became silent – as if we were waiting for someone to say, ”It’s alright. The lights will be on in a minute and we’ll all feel safe and warm.” But no one spoke, and after about five minutes of standing in the glistening moon lit ground floor waiting for the caretaker to find the fuse box, some of us began to become “antsy,” demanding that some light be available. I was not the only one who said the place felt strange and foreboding…almost evil.

      Our instructions from the person in charge of the ghost hunting organization, a stout, bearded fellow named Dave, was to scout around the building, using our Gauss meters (devices that measure electromagnetic variance, a standard ghost hunting apparatus) and cameras in order to capture any paranormal activity. Our group broke up into small scouting parties with the bravest of us venturing into the back rooms and deserted hallways looking for spirits or whatever unworldly manifestation might occur. I took it upon myself to head to the furthest room in the back of the building along with one of my fellow ghost hunters, Betsy, a middle-aged grammar school teacher from Lubbock, Texas, who was armed with a state-of-the-art digital camera. I wondered if Betsy knew what she was doing with such a high-tech camera. Her large, ill-fitting black eyeglasses and frumpy manner didn’t exactly speak of technical proficiency, but I admired her for her courage nonetheless.

      We both walked gingerly into the center of the room, turning our heads from side to side as if we were cartoon characters in a Scooby Doo episode waiting for the typical malevolent force to strike out. But this was no cartoon. Immediately upon entering the room, we were both overcome by an overwhelming feeling of being watched. The kind of feeling that prompts people to jerk their necks around to see who’s there. We also felt a strange presence emanating from a darkened corner portion of the room directly beneath a window that stretched from the floor to almost ten feet in height. I couldn’t see anyone or anything, but I knew instinctively that there was something crouching in the dark. I felt its coldness cutting a path in the air right toward my face. An instant later Betsy and I both turned around to see if there was someone looking over our shoulders precisely at the same moment. Of course no one was present, causing us to look at each other in the eyes and exchange a non-verbal agreement that we should just keep walking because acknowledging this strange feeling would make it all the more real.

      Despite our fear, a distinct feeling of dread, and a strong urge to run out of that damp room, we headed toward the area in question to investigate why it wreaked so much of something unknown. After all, that’s why we were on this trip, to discover a ghost or some other paranormal event, so now was not the time to run screaming.

      I clicked on my hand held plastic Gauss meter and watched the black needle hover at the green colored low end of its Miligauss range of 0 to 2, which usually indicates nearly virtually no electromagnetic activity. Betsy sighed a breath if relief and began to snap some digital photos of the area. But her relief soon ended when I placed the gauss meter at the bottom of the window – the area we sensed the crouching presence – and the needle literally jumped through the safe green and yellow areas of its dial from 0 to 2 mG, shooting into the meter’s red zone of 7 to 20 mG, whirring violently in my hand. I yelled to Betsy that she had to look at what was going on with my meter. But instead of running to see for herself, the photographer in Betsy instinctively took over and she began snapping photos of me holding the Gauss meter at the bottom of the window. I managed not to move from my pOccult Investigatortion for a good five minutes so Betsy could click away, all the while transfixed on the windshield wiper motion of the meter’s needle snapping back and forth. Something was present in this spot, I was certain of that much, and I was grateful that Betsy had the presence of mind to take pictures while I was frantically yelling for my colleagues to watch this phenomenon. Needless to say I was spooked, and I’m the first to admit that a big reason that I stayed glued to the spot was because I was literally paralyzed by fear.

      Thanks to the instantaneous feedback from digital cameras, we were able to see just what, if anything, would show up in the photos Betsy snapped. Two of the most common manifestations of spirits caught on camera, according to Dave our ghost hunting expert, are white wisp apparitions that appear like smoke, or round floating objects called “orbs” that can be spotted almost anywhere in the picture, but usually not in front of or on top of a person.

      I watched closely as Betsy thumbed the top of her camera searching through the shots, not truly convinced that we were going to discover anything out of the ordinary. But then Betsy curiously stopped fidgeting with the buttons on the camera. Her gaze became fixed and her face literally blanched. She first whispered some inaudible expletive to herself, and then suddenly blurted out, “You are not going to fucking believe this…Look at this shot!”

      She handed the camera over to me and as I brought the small rectangular image close enough to see what was there, I became speechless. It was a photo of me holding the Gauss meter at the bottom of the window. But what caused us both to look at the photo with dropped jaws was the image of a large white orb that sat hovering precisely at the top of the meter as though it landed on my electronic instrument! More of Betsy’s shots showed the orb moving first toward the meter and then upward toward the top of the window. Goosebumps, hair standing on the back of the neck, spine tingling chills; none of these descriptions fit how both Betsy and I felt when we saw the photos. And what was even more upsetting was that we felt that presence again, along with the coldness. We sensed a force very near to us and we had two technical devices confirming as much as possible that we were witnessing a manifestation of something unexplainable in “normal’ terms. There was no electrical current near the Gauss meter, nor any electrical wiring in the walls that would have sent the mechanism into its wild behavior. There was no possibility of “spots” on the film in a digital camera because there is no film. And Betsy was certain that he camera lens had been cleaned and air dusted right before she left her hotel room. There was only one logical conclusion…WE HAD FELT AND SEEN SOEMTHING PARANORMAL AND POSSIBLY SUPERNATURAL. WE HAD CAPTURED A GHOST!

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      THE BIRTH OF X-INVESTIGATIONS