Group looks for ghosts aboard USS North Carolina

Group looks for ghosts aboard USS North Carolina
May 2, 2009
By Ben Steelman
StarNews Online

“This being the South, some people think we’re dabbling in witchcraft,” said George Matthis.

Often, Anderson said, the group can find a non-paranormal explanation for strange or frightening phenomena, ‘like, ‘You need to trim those tree limbs that are hitting on the windows.’?’
If homeowners are dealing with an apparent ghost or poltergeist, though, the options are slimmer. Port City Paranormal does not claim to perform exorcisms or do anything to drive spirits away. Its goal, Anderson said, is not to provoke any presence or otherwise make a tense situation worse.
‘Oftentimes,’ adds George Matthis
of the Paranormal Research Alliance, ‘people just feel better if they understand what’s going on.’

“They expect us to have the nuclear packs and the night vision goggles,” said Doug Anderson.

Either that, or they expect ghost hunters to be like the ones they see on television, with screams and ectoplasm flying everywhere.

The truth is a little more mundane. As I learned on a recent overnight excursion aboard the Battleship North Carolina Memorial, real-life paranormal investigation often amounts to hours of sitting around in the dark with nothing happening at all.

Unless, of course, things get weird.

The battleship, firmly anchored in the Cape Fear River opposite downtown Wilmington, has become “Spook Central” in recent years, in the words of its museum services director, Kim Sincox.

Ever since the Sci Fi Channel’s “Ghost Hunters” program profiled the North Carolina in 2005, dozens of groups, from as far away as Alabama, have petitioned to investigate possible psychic phenomena below decks.

The memorial – which is state-owned but essentially self-supporting – is willing to oblige for a price.

I’m shelling out $75 for the privilege of waiting around for a clanking sound, or a whispered voice or possibly even the Holy Grail of the paranormal, a rare “full-body apparition.”

I’m joining members of Port City Paranormal (PCP), a volunteer investigation group that Doug and Jane Anderson founded back in 2006. The group has since done studies of some local homes and sites, and Doug Anderson claims a particular coup: The first photo in decades of the Maco Light, the Lower Cape Fear’s most famous ghost.

Virtually every source claims that the Maco Light vanished after 1977, when the old Seaboard Coast Line railroad pulled up the tracks near the old rail stop in Brunswick County, outside Wilmington. Legend claimed it was the ghost of a brakeman, beheaded in a train wreck, still searching for his head.

“There used to be nothing out there,” said Jane Anderson, who remembers hunting for the light on dates as a teenager. “Now there’s a convenience store.”

The Andersons went out, and they didn’t see anything. Still, Doug Anderson’s digital camera picked up the image of three reddish orbs, seeming to hover over the old track bed. He swears it wasn’t a glitch or a malfunction.

Joining the group this particular night is George Matthis, a Raleigh resident who’s president of the Paranormal Research Alliance, an umbrella group for local organizations like Wilmington’s PCP and Haunted N.C., an 18-year-old group based in the Raleigh-Durham area.

“Our objective,” he said, “is to demystify the paranormal.”

Specifically, what they’d like to do is recover enough empirical evidence – “something the scientists have to pay attention to,” Jane Anderson said – of phenomena that can’t be explained by normal, physical laws, phenomena demonstrating that something, or somebody, remains after death.

“The more information you’ve got,” Jane Anderson said, “the clearer the answers might be.”

“Of course,” Mathis added, “there’s so many things we don’t know.”

‘007’ gear

To find that elusive data, they tote a lot of gear – not nuclear packs, but digital and video cameras, audio recorders, digital and infrared thermometers, hand-held meters that can measure electromagnetic field shifts, which might be caused by a nearby electrical current, or possibly by something else. One version, nicknamed “The Screamer,” has an audible alarm; another has a lit visual display that looks like something Dan Aykroyd might have hooked on his belt.

Add in bottled water, snacks, flashlights and several hundred yards of electrical utility cord. PCP packs a lot of luggage, much of it in what Jane Anderson likes to call “007 cases.”

What are they looking for? A photograph of a manifestation – most likely a shadow in a place where a shadow shouldn’t be. A recording of a voice or some other sound. (Haunted N.C.’s Web site has recordings made on the battleship, supposedly of unknown, disembodied voices reading off headings or hatches slamming shut where no hatches are open.)

Sometimes the sounds manifest themselves as EVP, or electronic voice phenomena, according to Doug Anderson; you don’t hear them at the time, but they pop up later, more or less clearly, on tape recordings.

Some sounds or voices, he noted, seem to be “residuals,” like echoes or recordings of events that just seem to have lingered for decades. Others, however, seem to have an intelligence behind them and even answer questions.

The group assembled about an hour before sunset in the battleship’s parking lot: six men and five women, many of them wearing bill caps or T-shirts with Port City Paranormal’s yellow-and-black patch, showing a full moon over a ghostly tree.

Nobody is a full-time professional at this sort of thing: “There are no real Ph.D. programs or even simple certifications,” Jane Anderson said.

Doug Anderson trained with The Atlantic Paranormal Society (T.A.P.S.), a respected New England-based group that is trying to establish standards. Jane learned from Doug and took an online course. They’ve tagged along with more experienced teams to major paranormal sites, such as a closed insane asylum in upstate New York or an especially active plantation house in the Virginia Tidewater.

Their backgrounds vary. Jane Anderson is a retired nurse; Doug also works in health care. Among the team members on this particular night were schoolteachers, law enforcement officers, computer technicians and PPD employees.

After lugging all the boxes and cases aboard – this took awhile – the group made base camp in the North Carolina’s officers’ wardroom, now used for a museum display on the main deck.

Amateurs vs. pros

Jane Anderson then called the members in a circle and reviewed the rules of the road: No unnecessary conversation. (If you make a noise, ghost hunter etiquette requires that you say so, to confirm it’s not a manifestation.

Throughout the night, team members would call out “Camera!” or “Flash!”). Stay with your assigned team; don’t wander off. When someone calls “Stop! Freeze,” you stop and freeze.

“Now remember, guys, no pranking,” Jane said. “Show respect. Cell phones? Shut it off.”

Along with releases, Jane circulates a copy of PCP’s code of conduct. It’s a sore point with the ghost hunters of the Paranormal Research Alliance that amateurs, kids, careless thrill seekers are ruining the field for the more serious researchers.

“There was this one group, they were just high school kids,” Jane Anderson said. “They claimed they were doing a home investigation and they ran out and left the owners there. That’s not right.”

Other groups have entered buildings without permission, vandalized sites, carried off souvenirs and left behind piles of beer bottles. The problem has grown so serious, that most government-run historic sites – most recently Fort Fisher – have banned all individuals from their grounds after sunset.

“It’s a crying shame,” Doug Anderson said.

Before the ban, some PCP members claimed to have seen full-body apparitions, in period uniform at Fort Fisher: “The way he was staggering,” Doug Anderson said, “he was either drunk or wounded.”

Almost immediately after they came aboard, the team got bad news. Danny Bradshaw, the battleship’s longtime caretaker, came in say that, because of repairs aboard the ship, the night’s visitors would be limited to the regularly marked tour areas below decks.

That meant that some of the hottest spots for paranormal activity in the North Carolina would be off limits, such as the brig and the forward port shower room, where a Japanese torpedo hit on Sept. 15, 1942. Four sailors died in the vicinity of that explosion.

Bradshaw – who wrote a book about the battleship hauntings, on sale in the memorial’s gift shop – was eager to talk about what he’s seen. Jane Anderson was a little impatient with him; she wanted him to call back his supervisors, to see if some exceptions could be made. Also, she didn’t want him to “contaminate” the observers.

The team did advance research; they know the names of all 10 of the North Carolina sailors who died in action during World War II, and the two others who died in accidents. The Andersons, however, are not sharing this information with the rest of us, so we won’t have any preconceived notions.

“If you’re expecting to hear the name ‘Todd,’ you’ll hear it,” she said.

Waiting game

More experienced technical types ran out the electric cords, setting up recorders and cameras in remote spots.

The rest of us settled down, in darkened compartments, and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

At first I was with a four-person unit in a galley/mess hall area. When the “Ghost Hunters” crew was shooting here, the lid on a huge cooking pot suddenly fell with a crash. Danny Bradshaw says he saw a full-length image of a sailor down here, back in the ’90s. (Most apparitions are a little more shy: Observers claim to see heads and shoulders peeking from behind doors.)

On this particular night, however, the spirits were quiet. George Matthis and Jane Anderson periodically called out conversational questions in an effort to draw a response: “What’s your favorite song?” Do you get any letters from home?”

After a while, someone plays a tape of ’40s big band music, hoping to get the ghosts in the mood.

The only response is a seemingly random array of creaks, clanks and other metallic noises.

“Old ships make noises,” Bradshaw said.

The ship’s hull tends to creak as it cools off after sundown, Matthis said, with the sounds trailing off after 10:30 p.m. or so. But wait a minute – were those four taps in a row just coincidence? And were they repeating again?

After a few hours, units rotated and we moved to a hallway near the warrant officers’ mess.

At this point, things turned interesting. The K-IIs – electromagnetic meters that are a little less intrusive than “Screamers” – suddenly started to light up, seemingly randomly, every couple of minutes. We couldn’t find a nearby electrical current or other source that could explain the activity.

Then Jane Anderson, who had a thermometer, noted that the temperature was started to drop, a degree of Centigrade here, a degree there – once, by as much as 5 degrees in a minute.

Then Sheila Warren, a volunteer who’s regarded by the rest of the group as a “Sensitive,” suddenly said that her left shoulder was tingling, as if something were touching her. Jane Anderson looked over and swore that strands of Warren’s blonde hair were lifting up spontaneously, for no apparent reason, as if someone invisible were fingering it.

Had we come in touch with a real ghost? Or were our imaginations running away with us, like kids sitting around a campfire?

I later found out from Sincox that a sailor had tumbled through an open floor hatch near the warrant officer’s mess, not far from where we were standing, and had fallen three decks to his death. Just a coincidence?

“What we’re trying to find,” Jane Anderson said, “is hard to prove and easy to disprove.”

Later, the team found lots of clanks, pops and bangs from the remote recorders that could be ordinary ship noise – but whenever investigators walked nearby, all the sounds ceased. Recordings picked up some voices and what sounded like a scream, and PCP members in the sick bay seemed to get responses to some of their questions. A final report is still forthcoming.

Intriguing stuff, but no smoking gun.

The folks at PCP will keep on looking, here and elsewhere.

“I just think,” said Jane Anderson, “wouldn’t it be nice to know for sure what happens after you die? To have proof, to have a clue?”

Who you gonna call?
Port City Paranormal gives house calls. The organization will visit private property and conduct an investigation at the owner’s request. ‘We try to explain what’s going on and calm people down,’ said co-founder Doug Anderson.
No fee is charged.

To contact Port City Paranormal, visit www.portcityparanormal.com or email portcityparanormal@yahoo.com.
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