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HurricaneIan
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Posted: Mon Nov 23rd, 2009 02:06 pm |
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http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chicago/chi-paranormal-house-south-zone-.ar0oct28,0,2377935.story
Paranormal investigators check pulse of Beecher buildings
Group takes photos, records video, sounds in hopes of finding something amiss
Amateur paranormal investigator S. Raj Kumar of Villa Park searches the basement of Teapots Cafe and Antiques in Beecher. (Photo for the Tribune by Tim Hunt / October 17, 2009)
It's a cold, wet Friday night before Halloween, and the tiny eastern Will County village of Beecher is a ghost town, with one exception: Teapots Cafe & Antiques.
Dozens of teens are milling around, filling the renovated downtown storefront and spilling out onto the street in front. It's the only place for them to hang out, and they make enough noise to wake the living and -- maybe -- the dead.
Next door, in a decrepit building that once was a hardware store and the town's first post office are 10 people who patiently wait for the kids to go home so their work can be done without interruption. They're members of the Chicago Paranormal Research Society, and Teapots Cafe, with its building next door and garage behind, is one of their favorite haunts.
They've visited a half-dozen times in the last year, and on three occasions have captured images they say indicate the place is inhabited by more than meets the eye.
Perhaps the most dramatic is the imprecise but obvious outline of a figure caught in two successive frames as it moves from one spot to another. In another photo, there is a solid bar of light, identified as a vortex, which bends at an inexplicable 90-degree angle. The third is a cloud of mist that fills a large portion of the shot.
This is not a group whose members believe everything they see or think they hear. If anything, they look for explanations and take seriously only those things that cannot be disproved, said Doug Oram of Aurora, an investigator with the group.
"You don't want to debunk everything for the sake of debunking it, but you don't want to be grasping at straws either," he said.
The society was formed in 2006 and has about a dozen investigators, Oram said. On this night, four of them have been joined by six others interested in paranormal incidents.
They will shoot hundreds of photos and record hours of video and sound that will be meticulously reviewed, said Tim, a Beecher resident and paranormal investigator since 1994 who declined to give his last name for fear his employment could be jeopardized.
Traumatic events that have occurred in a place in the past sometimes result in paranormal activity, Tim said. One of the stories about the tea shop involves a young girl allegedly being raped by family members and forced into prostitution in the room that once was a butcher's shop, he said.
Teapots owner Bob Tully dismisses that story, but said there have been hundreds of incidents he cannot explain in the 10 years he's lived there. When he opened the tea shop two years ago, his customers began having similar experiences, with the most common being the sensation that a ladybug is crawling behind your right ear when you sit in one specific seat, he said. Sometimes people feel as if they're being poked or caressed, he added.
There's a recurring apparition of a woman who's described as being attractive, in her early 30s and wearing her brownish-blond hair in a bun, Tully said. Her dress goes to her knees and is covered by an apron with a heart print, and she sits in a spot that would have been behind the counter of the building's original dry goods store, he said.
Once he saw a man dressed in suspenders and sporting a walrus mustache who disappeared in front of him, but Tully said he later was able to identify him from a photo as the butcher shop's owner.
On this night, no one experiences anything like that, but cameras have been set up in four spots in an attempt to capture images. Tim is watching each room on a large monitor not unlike those used by security firms.
The group has been divided into three units, and one has decided to check out the garage's attic. It's a large room of bare wood rafters and is almost black save for the light cast by two small windows, the red glow of an electronic voice phenomena recorder and the green dot from a hand-held electromagnetic field meter.
Investigator Caroline Farrow, a freelance writer/graphic artist who lives in Chicago, wants to take a voice recording. She has member S. Raj Kumar, a Villa Park computer programmer participating in his first investigation, listen through headphones to the sound they pick up.
Farrow begins asking questions. "Is there someone here?" "Do you live here?" "Did you work at the hardware store?" "If you're here, make a sound so we know it."
At one point, member Allison Berns of Chicago asks, "Did you hear that?" It's a light knocking sound she's heard twice coming from the first floor. The group goes downstairs to see if they can get it to happen again, without success.
Later in the night, another group goes into the shop's basement, where the electronic devices have been set up. All of the paranormal images they've caught in the past have occurred here.
Questions are asked, but there is no response. A request to knock on the wall is met with silence. An invitation to activate the electromagnetic field meter -- which will flash in a range of colors when it senses a presence -- goes unheeded. Oram wanders the length of the room taking photos, but there's no other sound.
Then, a flash. Oram asks, "Is that the best you can do?"
The more Oram throws out taunts, the more the lights flicker. It grows particularly strong as he goes into the butcher shop area. Then it stops.
That's one of the problems with paranormal work, Oram said. It's not a science, and unless you can get something to repeat an action over and over again and in a way that can be documented, it's almost impossible to verify, he said.
The Chicago Paranormal Research Society does as many as six or eight investigations a month, Tim said. Unlike the ghost shows on television, not every investigation yields results.
And unlike scary movies, paranormal activity is rarely evil, Oram said. What members believe, though, is that something beyond the realm of the normal world exists. "Once you experience it," Kumar said, "it can be as addictive as a drug."
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PRISSY
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| Joined: | Thu Oct 22nd, 2009 |
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Posted: Mon Nov 30th, 2009 12:45 am |
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INTERESTING.
PRISSY 
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Nightowl
FLORIDA PARANORMAL RESEARCH
| Joined: | Mon Apr 28th, 2008 |
| Location: | Fort Myers, Florida USA |
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Posted: Wed Dec 2nd, 2009 04:56 pm |
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"And unlike scary movies, paranormal activity is rarely evil, Oram said. What members believe, though, is that something beyond the realm of the normal world exists. 'Once you experience it,' Kumar said, "it can be as addictive as a drug."
That statement from the article you posted is so true - you need to get a personal paranormal experience "fix" every once in awhile - also, the Skinnerian Reinforcement Principle keeps us all waiting for that 5% chance of getting a hit - 
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HulaDoll
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| Joined: | Sun May 31st, 2009 |
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Posted: Tue Dec 8th, 2009 06:54 pm |
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LOL @ 'Fix' but that is so true! Most of what we see can be 'debunked' or explained with a natural cause. But it's for that little bit that we can't explain that we live for. I can go months with dead investigations (no pun intended) and no concrete evidence of the paranormal, and sit through hours of evidence review with nothing. Then there's that two seconds of something that catches my eye that I can't explain that makes it all worth it!
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