Close Encounters of the Rude Kind: Ghost Hunters Tell All

By Tim Kelly's account, dying doesn't do much to improve one's manners.

"I've been shoved, been pushed, been swore at, had my name called and told to get out,” said Kelly, a member of the Hastings Paranormal Team. "We've never had anyone get physically harmed so we've been very fortunate."

This was just one of many insights offered by members of both the Dakota County Paranormal Society and HPT, as it is known, who presented their experiences to a packed room at the on Tuesday. Their first piece of advice? If you don’t want to meet a bad-tempered spook, stay away from the Ouija board.

"If you pull the Ouija board out of the closet and decide you're going to contact someone, first of all, you have no idea who you're going to contact. You have no idea if that entity is going to be friendly or upset for being disturbed," said Juli Glazebrook, a sensitive with HPT. According to the group, sensitives are able to perceive the spiritual realm. "You don't know what that thing is capable of, either. You could end up with something attached to you or your residence and not be able to get it to leave."

Once, a girl called a member of the team sobbing. The kids were messing around with Ouija board when an invisible member of the party evidently became irate. The client claimed that the board flew up into the air, landed on the wall, and then wouldn't budge. Kelly said it took nearly an hour of praying to get the thing back down again.

"It's not so much the board, as the people around it. They're concentrating so hard," Kelly said. "When you get that much collective energy it's almost like a beacon. If there's something out there looking for an in, you've just given it that in."

Such cases are beyond the ghost hunters’ purview. HPT and DCPS usually do not attempt to expel spirits, a la the Ghostbusters. For them, ghost hunting is a fact-finding mission, they said. The goal is to establish whether or not there are spirits on the premises through using sensitives, electronic equipment and a meticulous survey of the space.

"We don't go with the goal of finding something. We go to find a reasonable explanation," Glazebrook said.

According to the team, spirits emit energy, which can be sensed in the physical world by the same instruments that detect electromagnetic fields thrown off by power lines, wiring and other devices like microwaves. A spirit needs more energy to manifest, move items, and make other ghostly mischief, they said, which often results in newly-charged electronic devices going dead.

Here's where it gets complicated: If too strong, those electromagentic fields produced by modern technology can affect a person's mental and physical health. People living in an area with intense electromagnetic activity can experience paranoia, hallucinations (which could account for some "spectral" encounters), headaches, skin rashes, dizziness and nausea.

Thus, the answer is not always a ghostly one.

"If you have a lot of that going on in your home it may not be anything paranormal. It may just be bad wiring," Glazebrook said.

In one case, the client called HPT complaining that a small child in their household was having trouble sleeping. The team went in to see what was going on. Kelly took an electromagnetic field detector and went through the wall in the living room, which adjoined the child's bedroom. As it happened, the family had a large aquarium set up there.

"I got three feet away form the aquarium and (my electromagnetic field detector) started going off like crazy. I went over to it and sure enough it was the filter underneath, which had a huge magnet in there,” Kelly said. “I went to the child's room, where the bed was pushed up against the same wall. I got about four feet away from the wall and I picked up really high EMF.“

The team asked the couple to move the child's bed to the other side of the room and all the child’s complaints disappeared.

Other cases are not so easily explained. It is these that are the investigators’ bread and butter, though Kelly and company say that these encounters are not for the faint of heart.

"Yell and run and you're done," Kelly said. "If you're going to get scared we don't want you on the team."

HPT and DCPS work in darkness, with just red lights to illuminate the space, though ghosts are active at any point in the day. Kelly explained that many of the day’s distractions are minimized under the cover of night, when the environment is quiet and settled.

In such a setting, the buddy system is a must. None of them ever venture into the dark alone.

"You can draw strength from your partner. If something grabs my shirt, it’s better to have her across the room,” Kelly said, gesturing to Glazebrook. “We're there for support and for verification and for safety reasons."

Sometimes, they have actually seen or brushed up against spirits in a direct encounter, they said. More often, they pass what seems to be an uneventful night bumping around a client’s home or business. The most disturbing revelations come hours after the fact, when the ghost hunters review audio recordings taken during the night and hear voices that can’t be accounted for.

"You never know what you're going to find. The big thing is when you hear your own name for the first time," said Gary Jahnke, the lead investigator of the DCPS. “That's the creepiest part.”