Local Authors: Team tracks Adams County's ghosts

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Local Authors: Team tracks Adams County's ghosts
December 23, 2008
By JESS KROUT
The Evening Sun

New Oxford resident Steve McNaughton realized his house was haunted, and that's partly how it all started.

He's washed away fingerprints on his stainless steel refrigerator, he's been poked in the back and he's had his shirttail tugged.

Those experiences, and a few others, made him wonder, are there really ghosts?

McNaughton writes that he's more and more a believer in ghosts and less and less a skeptic since he started to search for answers.

"It is our own skepticism that makes us a better investigator," McNaughton writes in his nonfiction book, "Pennsylvania's Adams County Ghosts."

The book is based on research conducted by the paranormal investigative group McNaughton formed called PEER, Paranormal and Environmental Explanations from Research.

Using digital cameras, camcorders, audio recorders, electro-magnetic field detectors and thermal detectors, McNaughton and his team, including his wife Tina, look for ghosts in Gettysburg, New Oxford, Cashtown and East Berlin.

In the book, he starts at the Farnsworth House Inn and then continues investigating paranormal activity in the Gettysburg area. He takes on New Oxford, where he and Tina live in and operate Chestnut Hall Bed and Breakfast. There's a whole chapter dedicated to Chestnut Hall hauntings, but McNaughton also visits other town businesses and private homes.

Another chapter talks about ghosts at the Cashtown Inn in Cashtown and another chapter discusses Bechtel Victorian
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Mansion Bed and Breakfast Inn in East Berlin.

McNaughton includes photographs of the haunted houses and also some pictures of the hauntings. In some photos, there is ectoplasm, a cloud or mist that is said to be expelled from a medium communicating with the spirits; in others, there are orbs, spheres related to the energy of a spirit that is often captured on film.

McNaughton describes all of the terms and technological devices he uses in the beginning of the book, along with an explanation of why Adams County is so spooky.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know that many lives were taken during the Battle of Gettysburg. But McNaughton explains in detail that more than 50,000 people died over a three-day period during the battle, which is nearly seven times Gettysburg's population in 2000.

Yet most of the houses that McNaughton talks about are not haunted by soldiers, but by family members - members who died tragically, accidentally or with guilt.

The stories - a sea captain rumored to have hung himself in the attic and always feel remorse that he didn't spend more time with his family, a son who was trampled by a horse - are pieces of Adams County's history. Whether or not they are also ghost stories, is for the reader to decide.

But McNaughton warns - as long as you're in Adams County, you may not be walking alone.

"Pennsylvania's Adams County Ghosts," by Steve McNaughton, is available online at http://www.SchifferBooks.com and Target.com. Learn more about McNaughton's paranormal investigative group, PEER, at http://www.peergb.com. Find out more about McNaughton and Chestnut Hall Bed and Breakfast at http://www.ChestnutHallBB.com.