Ghostbusting' suburban cops land TV gig

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Ghostbusting' suburban cops land TV gig
January 24, 2009
BY FRANK MAIN AND ANNIE SWEENEY
Chicago Sun-Times

Who you gonna call?

A group of suburban cops who call themselves the Chicago Paranormal Detectives have landed a show on the A&E television network showcasing their skills as ghostbusters.

Stone Park police Sgt. Ron Fabiani, who started the group about two years ago, said he has been hooked on ghosts ever since he went on a bus tour of haunted places in the Chicago area more than two decades ago.

He remembers visiting the Northwest Side forest preserve where the bodies of the two Schuessler brothers and Bobby Peterson were dumped in a ditch in 1955 after they were murdered. He says he smelled violets -- a supposed sign of ghosts.

Then, about six years ago, an acquaintance told him he thought his business was haunted. Fabiani said he showed up with a video camera and captured a shadowy image moving inside the building. Fabiani said he ruled out possible physical explanations and wonders whether the apparition was linked to an Indian burial mound near the business.

"Something paranormal was going on," Fabiani said. "As policemen, we see things that defy logic, and we must find out what is going on. It's our nature."

A&E says "Paranormal Cops," a show focusing on the group's exploits, is "tentatively slated" to premiere at an unspecified time later this year but didn't offer any details.

The officers in Chicago Paranormal Detectives say they work with a spiritual medium, conduct their investigations when they're off-duty and don't charge their clients.

"What separates us from other paranormal research groups is that, as police officers, we have been trained to question everything and to examine every possible alternative," wrote Maywood police Officer Pete Schleich, another member, on the group's Web site. "We evaluate the location as a whole and look for any other possible reasonable explanation, be it something as simple as a vent being open and blowing on a plant or something more complex, such as electrical fluctuations."

The group volunteered to help Galena business owner Jack Coulter, who opened a restaurant there two years ago only to find his building filled with unexplained voices and apparitions. Fabiani and his crew agreed to bring in technical equipment that recorded voices and caught evidence of energy fields inside the building, which Coulter has since learned once housed an early funeral home. Other paranormal experts who have since been at the restaurant found similar evidence, Coulter said.

"It just sort of backs up what the Chicago Paranormal Detectives said,'' Coulter said. "It ... verifies there is energy beyond what we see in normal everyday life."