Dark World: Into the Shadows with the Lead Investigator of the Ghost Adventures Crew (13 page)

I say this—after six million years of evolution, is there anything else more in tune with the planet than the human body? We grow muscles to withstand fourteen pounds of air pressure per square inch at sea level. We develop senses to detect changes in wind patterns and know when a storm is approaching. We can hear threatening footsteps approaching and feel the stares of an angry ex-girlfriend as her eyes burn a hole in our back. We have millions of nerve endings in our skin to feel our environment. In short, we evolve. We become more in tune with the world, like birds that use the Earth’s magnetic field to help guide them on their long migration or mammals that can feel winter coming and prepare for hibernation. So when my body tells me there’s a spirit present, I trust it.

An experience at the Stanley Hotel bolstered my confidence in the human body’s ability to detect paranormal activity. We were in the hotel’s carriage house and to be honest, we were having a pretty uneventful investigation. It happens sometimes. For hours I had not gotten any EVPs and had no personal experiences. The whole night was going sour, when I decided to bring in Bill Chappell (a complete skeptic) and several devices he engineered.

Bill built a double histogram that uses simultaneous thermal imagery and sonic emanations to detect any disruptions in the local EMF. The sonic waves are used the same way sonar is used to map the ocean floor and the thermal imagery detects changes in temperature. We were all standing in the hotel’s carriage house when I suddenly got a hit on my body. I felt a very cold presence and the hairs on my arms and neck raised up. Everything I knew was telling me that something was with us.

At this exact moment, Bill Chappell got a reading on his instruments that something unseen was in the room and moving. On film we captured a mist move and moments later we recorded a few disembodied voices. As I moved around the room, the apparition moved with me and my body continued to register that I was not alone.

Bill not only saw this spirit move with me on his instruments, he also saw an apparition with his own eyes. It had enough mass to block out our thermal camera and trigger it to take a photo, which revealed an unexplained energy source. These three pieces of simultaneous evidence combined with the familiar feelings I had (goose bumps, heavy air, the feeling that someone was watching me) all tell me that,
yes
, my body
is
a reliable detector of paranormal energy, no matter what anyone else claims.

The Stanley Hotel is not the only time I’ve had scientific instruments detect something when my body did as well. At the Salem Witch House in legendary Salem, Massachusetts, I was in an upstairs room when I got a hit on my body. I felt the normal goose bumps and chills, but also felt an extreme sadness, just like I did at Preston Castle. Several young children perished in this house over the years, and I felt like someone (probably a parent) was transferring the sadness of their loss onto me. I grabbed my Mel meter and sure enough, it was registering EMF readings far above normal. The milligauss spikes were off the charts, so I knew what my body was telling me was correct. Something was there with us.

But as suddenly as the feelings and the EMF spikes came, they also went away. We immediately conducted an EMF sweep of the room and found no natural or manmade EMFs that could have caused the spikes. The trail was cold, so we quickly followed up the encounter with an EVP session, hoping that the spirit had not left. In cases like this, it’s better to press forward than to leave and be happy with what you’ve captured. I believe in Patton’s old mantra—“Attack, Attack, Attack!”

Moments later I got a class A EVP of a man’s voice that said, “Don’t go in there.” Even better, the disembodied voice had a Northeast accent! It dropped off the
R
in “there” like a Bostonian would.

In baseball terms, it was like batting for the cycle or pitching a perfect game. In one room I got cold, felt the emotion of the spirit, had a spike on the Mel meter, and captured an EVP all at once. It was a case study in detection that I will put up against any skeptic any day.

I’m not suggesting that anyone is capable of detecting spirits with his or her body just by going into a cold, dark room and feeling around. Sometimes people who haven’t done this before can psych themselves up too much and mistake a natural cold pocket of air for something paranormal. Looking back on some of my earliest investigations, I am probably guilty of this. The only thing that attunes an investigator to his environment is time. I have been on over a hundred paranormal investigations and have gotten to the point that my senses are trained, which only comes with a lot of experience. Many times I can tell when there’s something otherworldly with us and when there’s nothing at all. Being sensitive is something you have to grow into and something you have to learn to work with. I am comfortable calling myself sensitive after all the investigations I’ve endured.

It’s like a Montana fishing guide who looks at a river and immediately knows whether he’s going to catch anything by the water’s height, the current’s speed, the activity of insects on the waterline, the weather, cloud cover, and the time of day. His eyes are trained to see the river for more than what everyone else sees. He can feel the environment above and below the water and knows exactly where to go and how to cast for pay dirt. I’ve known a few investigators who are like this, and their experiences are invaluable.

As unlikely as it seems, I actually look to Mixed Martial Arts for inspiration when training myself for a paranormal investigation. Professional fighters train their bodies and minds on several different disciplines. Wrestling, Muay Thai kickboxing, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and Western boxing have proven to be the dominant forms of fighting, so MMA fighters have to train themselves in each of those techniques.

In that same way, I train my senses—sight, smell, hearing, feeling, and even taste—to detect the presence of paranormal energy. Since I was a kid I knew I was detecting things other people weren’t, but I never knew what those were until now. I try hard to put myself into the era I’m investigating. I study the history, talk to the locals, and listen to the music of the era (like Chumash flutes). I almost use my body like the DeLorean from
Back to the Future
so I can time travel back to the time frame that I’m investigating.

Zak’s Favorite Detector: - The Mel Meter

I don’t like clichés but “necessity is the mother of invention” is very true in the case of my friend Gary Galka. Gary was never a believer in the paranormal, but now he spends much of his time inventing device after device designed to communicate with the afterlife. I love the RT-EVP Real Time EVP device, but the Mel meter is my favorite. Before I tell you why, you have to hear the story of how it came to be.

In 2004, Gary’s seventeen-year-old daughter was driving home when she lost control of her vehicle and slammed headon into a tree. Four days later, the Galkas were forced to take her off of life support and watch her heart beat for the last time. Her name was Melissa.

That day they started having experiences at home. They smelled her perfume. The doorbell rang for no reason. The TVs in the house changed channels by themselves. The stereo would turn on when no one was around. These experiences were not limited to one spot in the house and soon shifted to more personal moments. The entire Galka family (they have two other daughters) kept feeling kisses, touches, and hugs and heard Melissa’s voice around the house. The youngest daughter even saw an apparition of Melissa brushing her hair two separate times. One night Gary and his wife felt Melissa climb onto their bed and lie down between them at the same moment.

Overall, Gary estimates that they had around seventy encounters with the spirit of their beloved daughter in their home, and this helped them to heal and move forward. The Galkas then began to reach out to other bereaved parents who had lost children. He tried to show them there’s a light at the end of the tunnel and the pain is a surmountable obstacle. The Galkas wanted to help more people, but there was only so much they could do.

A test and measurement engineer with over thirty years of experience, Gary decided to come out of retirement and do something to help. His profession in life was to solve problems and make manufacturing businesses more efficient. He would visit factories and identify friction points in their production processes and help them become more streamlined.

After watching one of the paranormal shows on TV, he saw the same thing—a need for more efficient and streamlined equipment. So he created a line of products that helped him communicate with Mel and helped the paranormal community take a huge leap forward. In honor of his daughter, he called his device the Mel-8704. The 87 stands for the year she was born, and 04 is for the year she passed to Spirit.

The Mel meter is the only multipurpose tool designed specifically for paranormal use and does more than any plain EMF detector can do. It operates between 30 and 300 hertz, which avoids broadband frequencies used by CBs, walkie-talkies, and cell phones. The Mel-REM, which is what I use, also has an antenna that radiates its own independent EMF at a different frequency that does not interfere with the main component itself.

This allows the Mel meter to measure disturbances around the antenna. When it senses an interruption, the field around the antenna collapses and triggers audible and visual LED lights that correlate to the amount of distortion in the field. The antenna is not influenced by anything within the environment unless it comes up to the antenna and has conductive properties. So it won’t go off if you get a phone call or put it next to a breaker panel or a fuse box. The Mel meter is compatible with AC and DC EMF.

So in a nutshell, it can’t be tricked like regular EMF detectors.

In the movie
Ghost,
what is the most frustrating element of Patrick Swayze’s character? It was the living not being able to hear or see him and not being able to move things. How sucky would it be to be trapped in a world where you can’t get anyone’s attention? If there was a device that you only had to wave your hand in front of for the living to hear you, then that’s a breakthrough. The Mel meter’s antenna does that.

To add to its appeal, the Mel meter has a very accurate ambient thermometer and a red flashlight that doesn’t interfere with night vision. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of paranormal meters and I’m so grateful that such a talented individual decided to take action and use his skills to further the science of paranormal investigation. You can spend a lot of time in an empty room trying to find spirits and get nothing even when they’re there. But with a Mel meter, it’s like an eyeball for a blind investigator.

This might sound like a product plug, but the reason I bring it up is to show that the paranormal community is using stateof- the-art equipment and not Radio Shack transistors to achieve our goals. The Mel meter is a high-quality device with internal shielding, gold contacts, a brass tripod mount, and the best parts to ensure its accuracy in EMF detection. Despite that, Gary kept the price reasonable and continues to donate a percentage of the Mel meter proceeds to grief counseling organizations like Compassionate Friends. For him, it’s about helping loved ones communicate with each other, even if they exist in different planes.

Electromagnetic Fields

I’ve talked about EMF a few times already, but what exactly is it and what is its relationship to paranormal activity? Electromagnetism is defined as one of the four fundamental interactions of particles in nature. The other three are gravity, the strong interaction, and the weak interaction—also known as the strong and weak nuclear forces.

Electromagnetism is the force that causes the interaction of electrically charged particles in our world, which takes place in an electrically charged field. Other than gravity, nothing affects our existence more than electromagnetism. Electric fields, electric currents, generators, motors, batteries, transformers, magnetic fields, magnets, and the magnetosphere that surrounds the Earth are all forms of electromagnetism. It’s the force responsible for holding electrons and protons together in atoms, so it’s a building block for molecules and all life as we know it.