The Haunting

“If you’re here, can you give us a sign? You can speak into this red light,” says Dwight Wickham, holding out a digital voice recorder like an offering.

For a few moments, there is nothing but silence and the sound of rain falling outside. The eerie blue-white light of an LED flashlight upside down on the table throws shadows across the room. We wait, barely breathing in case the response is quiet.

Suddenly, a loud creak breaks the silence.

Wickham, a paranormal investigator with the Inland Northwest Society for the Investigation of Ghosts, Haunting and the Transcendental (INSIGHT), jolts upright in his seat, blinking eyes silhouetted against the LED light behind him. Is this the response he’s been waiting for?

“Uh, sorry… that was my chair. I moved,” I explain apologetically.

“You scared the heck out of me!” Wickham says, sounding half-relieved, half-disappointed.

We’re been conducting an Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) session — trying to pick up sounds on a recording device that we might not hear unaided — in the basement bedroom of a North Spokane home plagued by weird happenings: light switches spontaneously becoming powerless, household members suddenly awakened in the night… by what they swear is a man shaking them.

This is the INSIGHT team’s third visit to the home, and Wickham is seated right in the spot where he recorded an EVP last time: a garbled whisper with an oddly metallic quality, like the sound of a handsaw whistling through a board.

We laugh off the creaky chair a bit nervously and get back to listening.

In the main room of the basement, the rest of the INSIGHT team and the owner of the house are scattered about taking photos and various readings. Three video cameras, a weather station, a thermometer and several electromagnetic field meters are set up around the room, but it’s hard to see any of this. The team moves about in almost compete darkness, disturbed only by the occasion flashlight beam or camera flash.

“I’m feeling that cold spot on my right elbow again,” announces Toni Mucklow, a petite middle-aged woman in Tina Fey glasses. She says she’s innately intuitive when it comes to the paranormal and spends most of the night sitting in the same spot, waiting for a sensation or a noise.

Joel Harz, INSIGHT’s director, points a flashlight in her direction.

“Let me check the temperature in that area,” he says. INSIGHT’s thermometer is about the size of a walkie-talkie and takes measurements using a wire that extends into the air like an antenna.

Mucklow’s necklaces — a cross and a crystal pendant that used to be her mother’s — shine against her black INSIGHT polo. She wears the necklaces for protection against anything harmful she might come across during the course of the night.

“I think it’s probably that door behind you,” says Harz, fiddling with the thermometer. “It’s probably a draft.”

As it turns out, Harz is probably right: the door in question opens to a hallway leading to the backyard. Still, there’s a palpable undercurrent of tension in the room as the owner of the house, Heather, recounts an incident that occurred during her housewarming party.

“Well, I brought three of my friends down to see the basement, and it was so cold you could literally see your breath — and all of them commented on how cold it was,” she says, in the sort of tone you’d use to relate juicy office gossip. She pauses briefly before she delivers the punch line: “And this was in the middle of July.”

A murmur of appreciation travels around the room as Harz confirms that the temperature around the door is in fact a little lower than the rest of the room.

Harz, who co-founded INSIGHT four years ago, isn’t the type of paranormal investigator you’d expect to meet after watching a TV show like Syfy’s Ghost Hunters.

“Personally, I don’t even believe in ghosts,” he says. “It’s just fascinating to me. Usually there’s some other way to explain it.”

He’s quick to add that the group doesn’t charge for its services. While he and the rest of the INSIGHT team ultimately seek definitive proof of paranormal activity, he stresses that the group’s primarily purpose is to help ease their clients’ worries.

“The fear of the unknown is always there, and if we can take the edge off that fear, that’s least we can do,” he says.
Fastidiously logical, Harz searches for natural explanations and emphasizes the use of modern equipment.

“There are no ghost detectors, so we’re adopting equipment from other fields to help us,” he says. (There’s a little MacGyver in every ghost hunter.)

The “bread and butter” of any paranormal investigation are electromagnetic field (EMF) meters — one type to measure man-made electromagnetism like TVs and computers and one to measure naturally occurring electromagnetism like the electricity in the human body.

The natural EMF meter is extremely sensitive — wave a hand over it and it squeals — and Harz notes that constantly moving the meter around is a common mistake.

“I’ve seen people on TV carrying these around. And of course you’re going to get readings because it’s measuring every minute change in the electromagnetic field from point A to point B,” he explains.

The EMF meters can’t detect paranormal activity, but they can detect changes in the environment that may explain or indicate apparently paranormal activity, Harz says.

As for EMF meters measuring man-made energy: “In a lot of cases, I have found that if someone reports, ‘When I walk down my hallway, I feel like someone’s behind me or I feel a cold shiver,’ I’ll walk down the hallway with the meter and the readings there will be higher than normal,” says Harz. “And there’s the thermostat, light switches, light sockets, all in this confined area. And that might contribute to feelings of unease.”

The most tangible evidence of the paranormal collected by the team is in the form of EVPs, or Electronic Voice Phenomenons. You can hear them on the INSIGHT Website, INSIGHTSpokane.com.

Special attention is paid to EVP sessions in this house. The team’s first trip yielded the strange voice recorded by Wickham. The second gave them what appeared to be an “intelligent response” from something: Seated in the dark — with cameras running and the natural EMF meter whirring just a little — Harz asked the alleged ghost to tap on something in the room if it wanted the investigators to stay and to tap on something in a different room if it wanted them to leave. No response came. But they waited. And waited.

A minute and forty seconds later, a loud “tap” resounded, followed by two more.

Harz asked for one more tap for confirmation.

“And there was one more — right behind my head!” laughs Heather as she relates the story. And though she’s laughing, her eyes widen with the memory of momentary panic.

Only Heather (the homeowner) and one other INSIGHT member heard the fourth tap and it wasn’t picked up on any recording devices. The taps might simply have been the sound of the plastic shell of a TV shifting, but regardless, whatever happened seemed highly coincidental and more than a little bit freaky.

There appears to be a link between TV shows about the paranormal and the urge to investigate. Like most of the other INSIGHT team, Harz grew up intrigued by the paranormal, watching TV shows like In Search Of. And with advent of recent reality TV shows tracking paranormal investigators, “it just basically clicked into place,” he says.

Likewise, Mucklow sought out a paranormal investigation group after watching ghost hunting reality shows because they made her realize that paranormal investigating was something that she could do.

“Ghost groups are a fairly recent phenomenon,” says Michael Breckenridge, a member of the recently dissolved Spokane Paranormal Society and founder of a new group, Flickering Torches. “It’s always been individual people involved with ghost research. A lot people seek out a group after seeing a show. It allows for camaraderie and delegation.”

Harz points out that groups come and go. “People watch the TV shows, they get very excited, and then they get out into the field and it’s not exciting. It isn’t. For every four hours of mind-blowing boredom, maybe you’ll get a little excitement.”

Still, each state has a least one paranormal society, mostly concentrated in more populated areas. “But you do get organizations in smaller areas, like the Corporation in Walla Walla,” says Breckenridge.

Whether they agree with the tactics used on ghost-hunting reality shows, TV has brought believers like Breckenridge and Toni and skeptics like Harz out of the woodwork and into a growing subculture.

Even the skeptics have a little believer in them, though. Harz, who still doesn’t believe in ghosts, had a strange encounter last year at the Bing in Spokane.

“I had the mental impression of someone screaming right in my face. Just getting right in my face and going ‘Raaaaawwwwww!’,” he pauses, shrugs. “But that’s all it was. It was all mental, but it was enough to make me step back.”