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- Nothing quickens the dead like a good electrical storm.
Lightning flashed and thunder crashed above the Sussex Woods in Vernon
as a group of ghost hunters staked out an isolated house said to be haunted
by restless spirits. The weather this rainy night was ideal.
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- "I was sort of laughing as we were coming up here.
I was thinking, all we need is the background of rolling thunder and lightning,"
John Berkenbush said as he adjusted an electronic sensor that looked like
a slide projector.
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- The sensor's red and blue lights blinked eerily in the
pitch-black living room of the darkened house. Lightning flashed across
the night sky. Charged particles filled the air.
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- Berkenbush, 56, and other members of the Vestigia Scientific
Anomalies Investigative Team from Wayne are dead serious about trying to
see dead people.
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- Tabloid television shows and scary movies about Blair
Witches and Sixth Senses come and go, but Berkenbush and his crew have
spent years trying to document real-life spooks, weird lights, UFOs, and
other unexplained phenomena.
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- Over the past two years, they have made a dozen trips
to this house on a wooded mountain ridge surrounded by farmland. Sandy
Hanekamp insists her home has been overrun by ghosts since she moved five
years ago from Arizona with a retired architect named Ed, who died in January.
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- Hanekamp, 56, says she and Ed were followed to New Jersey
by the spirits of three Hopi Indian elders who acted as Ed's guardians.
More recently, she says, she was visited by deceased neighbors -- a disturbed
farmer and three consumptive sisters -- from the late 1800s.
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- A little boy who died in an auto accident in the 1950s
bounces a ball in her bedroom, said Hanekamp, who lives in the house with
19 cats and three or four dogs.
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- "I at least hope to find out why these things are
going on, and whether it's something drawn here because Ed was here,"
she said.
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- Ed himself has not put in an appearance, and things have
quieted down since his death, she added.
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- The Vestigia team is still waiting to find proof.
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- "This new sensor is a recent development. It senses
any change in electrostatic pressure; any ionization, I call it,"
said Berkenbush, a burly lab technician for a biomedical electronics firm
in Fair Lawn.
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- "It measures the house's 'breathing.' You can actually
see a slow pulse from the house moving" on the sensor's scope, as
charged particles called ions rush in and out, he said.
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- This atmospheric mayhem, the theory goes, may cause people
to hallucinate about seeing ghosts. Or, just maybe, the amok energy might
actually conjure up an apparition -- a holographic imprint from the past,
like an old home movie -- or even a spectral presence, Berkenbush said.
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- Vestigia is the Latin word for footprint, as in Bigfoot,
the mythical man-beast of the forest. Vestigia investigators say they pursue
the paranormal purely out of scientific curiosity.
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- "We're strictly researchers. People say we're ghost
busters, but I say no, we're ghost hunters," Berkenbush said.
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- The five men and one woman of Vestigia all have day jobs.
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- "It's a hobby. My original interest was in Big Foot,"
said Bob Kusma, 50, a teacher in Sparta. "We're not ghost busters
at all. We find out if there's anything natural that could cause this phenomena."
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- Kusma, Berkenbush, and other Vestigians got some national
publicity in the late 1970s for solving the mystery of the so-called "Hookerman
Spook Lights" haunting railroad tracks in Long Valley, near Schooley's
Mountain in Morris County.
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- For years, the lights were said to be the ghosts of maimed
trainmen walking the rail bed. Vestigia revealed the glow to be what is
known as piezoelectricity, pent-up geologic energy released from highly
pressurized quartz under the tracks.
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- "People's imagination can go wild. Most of the time,
we can find a rational explanation. But it's a very interesting hobby,"
Kusma said.
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- The ghost hunters finance their own field trips, said
Randy Liebeck.
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- "It's more fun than playing golf. You've got to
spend your money on something," said Liebeck, who said he works "in
federal law enforcement" in New Jersey, and left it at that.
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- "We do this out of personal fascination with the
field. A few of us make money on the side writing and lecturing,"
he said.
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- "This is no ghost-busting service. We can't get
rid of entities. I'm very skeptical of people who say they can get rid
of them.
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- "We can't guarantee we'll find something. We operate
on hypothesis. We have many more questions than answers.
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- "Our process is to help people with their experience
and reduce the fear factor. We explain to them that thousands of people
report the same things," Liebeck said.
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- Peter Jordan, 37, of West Orange is a psychologist and
a parapsychologist who specializes in otherworldly occurrences. Jordan's
primary job with the team is to interview and do psychological profiles
of haunting victims to detect any signs of fraud.
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- A haunting is a set of symptoms of unexplained visual
manifestations or sounds. "Although I have witnessed none of the anomalies
here," Jordan said, referring to the Vernon house, "I have no
reason not to believe the witnesses here.
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- "I suspect something is going on. But this case
isn't very high on the scale. A lot of times, nothing happens."
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- But, as the song from the movie "Ghostbusters"
goes, who you gonna call? Hanekamp wasn't afraid of departed souls. Still,
things were getting out of hand, and her cats were on edge.
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- She called Vestigia a couple of years ago after lights
in the house started switching on and off by themselves, she said. Some
days, disembodied voices moaned throughout the building, or she heard steps
on the stairway. Other times, Spanish songs and gardenia-scented after-shave
wafted in from nowhere. Fleeting gray shadows flew from behind appliances
in her basement laundry room.
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- A visiting psychic found "hot spots" in cool
rooms, and currents of cold air in warm rooms, both indicating some kind
of presence. Last fall, Vestigia and a television crew from New York witnessed
but did not film a "black runner," a dark shape that darted across
the room. Everybody swears it was not a cat.
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- "I'm up to here with all this going on," Hanekamp
said.
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- This time, the Vestigia people arrived at the house in
three cars at twilight, just before the rain broke. They unloaded piles
of gear and hauled it inside.
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- The equipment included infrared cameras, audiotape and
videotape recorders, two-way radios, motion detectors, temperature gauges,
light meters, Geiger counters to read radiation levels, and static electricity
sensors. Berkenbush also was trying out a small, mirrored "infinity
box" said to levitate if it captures a phantasm.
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- They also brought four large pizzas and soda. It could
be a long night just sitting around in the dark, taking instrument readings.
Even with the lights off and the thunder rumbling, it was not a particularly
creepy evening.
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- "I wasn't scared, but I've been spooked a few times"
during previous investigations, admitted Garrett Husveth of Morristown.
Husveth, 32, said he had been startled by heavy footfalls and slamming
doors while taping sounds in purportedly haunted mansions in Port Monmouth,
Basking Ridge, and Bernardsville.
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- "Tonight the storm can charge the atmosphere and
aggravate anything that's here. It's the best time for an investigation,"
said Husveth, a systems engineer for a software company.
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- But, "there's not much going on at present. I've
been on one other late-night investigation. That was here. It was pretty
uneventful."
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- The ghost hunters admit they have little, if any, hard
evidence to show for their hours of patience. Sometimes anomalies show
up later when they review their tapes. Much of their work is a matter of
faith, Liebeck said.
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- "We have a fascination with the unknown, with unsolved
mysteries. That's the thrill of the hunt. If we are experiencing it, we
know it's valid. We're not faking it," he said.
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- "Anything can be falsified. It's right to be skeptical.
We have no illusions. Even if a ghost appeared in front of us and everyone
saw it, and we released film to CBS, heaven knows it wouldn't be accepted
by a large percentage of the audience," he said.
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- Maybe there were too many people milling around this
night, or too much hubbub with all the equipment, or too many pets underfoot,
or not enough psychokinetic energy in the field. Or maybe the spirits had
simply moved on.
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- By 10:30, Liebeck officially called it a night.
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- "There's no indication of anything anomalous. There's
a certain point when you have to call the patient dead or alive. We could
sit here until 2 a.m.," he said.
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- "We did have a thunder-and-lightning storm, and
nothing got stirred up," Berkenbush lamented.
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- "There's no bad investigation. If nothing happens,
we always learn something," Kusma said.
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- Vestigia investigator Janet Kroenke sees this work as
being part outreach to those who feel haunted.
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- "So many people have something like this happen,
an anomalous event, and are laughed at and get no support," Kroenke
said.
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- "I'd like to be the one who says, 'I'm here not
to laugh at you.' No one deserves to be laughed at after they've had a
bad experience," she said.
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- A lot of these cases, Jordan said, "normally wane,
then suddenly fizzle, and go into dormancy. A lot of times, nothing happens.
It's very time-consuming."
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- The team members began packing their equipment. They
have been having more luck recently, Berkenbush said, documenting a case
in Greenfield, Mass. There, Communion wafers have been appearing mysteriously
-- out of thin air -- in a garage that a man converted into a chapel.
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- Liebeck was pragmatic. "I'm sorry we couldn't give
you an electrifying display of ectoplasmic experience.
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- "We may sit at a location for hundreds of hours
and nothing happens, and the next case, there's enough of a bone thrown
to us to keep us going," Liebeck said.
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- "It's a matter of being in the right place at the
right time. We intend to keep at it until we become ghosts ourselves."
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- Copyright © 2000 Bergen Record Corp.
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