Investigation: Private Residence - Long Island, NY

Date of Investigation: 10/3/09

Case File#: PRLI - 10032009

The Scene

On Saturday, October 3rd, the EPIC team was called in to investigate a private home on Long Island, NY. The residence is a 1-family home in a quiet residential neighborhood. The mother and son in the family had been reporting hearing knockings, scratchings in the walls, shaddows, and whispers.

The EPIC team set up its base of operations (or "safe room") in the kitchen on the first floor of the house, since most of the activity had been reported on the second floor. The first floor also contained a living room, TV room bedroom, bathroom, dining room and a den. 

The Investigation

For this investigation, we conducted a normal setup, using the DVR, 4 IR hard-lined cameras, 3 Hi-8s, digital and wireless audio, digital and 35mm cameras, and a wide variety of EMF meters, (Digital Tri-Axis, K-II, and Tri-Field naturals), IR motion sensors, and an ion generator (experimental).

Teams of three investigators were used for this location, since the house was fairly large and even the smaller rooms needed to be covered properly. The child's room and hallway were the main focus for activity, however there was mention by the homeowner of additional activity in the den on first floor and the tv/bedroom area.

The Findings

During this investigation, nothing of note was really captured. There were a few unusually high EMF spikes around the house, with a baseline of about 2.0, and upon further investigation, they were found to be higher in the basement. But even on the second floor, the overall readings in the house were a bit higher than normal. Although high EMF levels were noted in the home, it was not rare to find them since the residence had many modern electronics, as well as outside power lines adjacent to the residence. For this simple reason, the only accountable source of EMF readings that we could rely on were from the Tri-Field natural meters, noting its readings which were nominal.

As far as photographic and video evidence, no anomalies were found upon analytical review.

In regards to our audio analysis, there was one anomaly caught by the team. In the child's bedroom, we had strategically placed the wireless microphone on a 4-drawer chest (which weeks prior to the investigation, the homeowner had set a video/audio camcorder which had audibly recorded what sounded like a small object being tossed to the floor. Upon entering the room, she found a number of her sons miniature toys on the floor at the base of the chest). Two Investigators were finishing up an EVP session, and as they exited the room they closed the door and made sure that there were no other individuals on the second floor. This was verified by video as they walked down to the first floor and returned to Command Base. At one point during the night, when no investigators were in the room and the second floor was clear, there is a sound as if something was touching or moving the mic. It almost seemed to sound as if it were curious, almost to the point as if it was inspecting the mic. Paired with video at the same time, you can see that nobody has entered the room nor was there anyone by the chest of draws, and yet something is seemingly touching the mic. We checked on numerous occasions for possible rodent activity within the room and area of question, but saw no droppings or signs of such. Non-human interference was verified by one of our cameras which was focused on the chest and mic while the sound was occurring, and no movement was detected.

Listen to Microphone being "touched"

Conclusions

The EPIC team didn't have any personal experiences on this investigation, and after careful analysis of the evidence, in our professional opinion, there were no signs of paranormal activity to note at the actual time during the investigation. Although there was the unexplained odd sound of the wireless microphone being possibly touched by something unseen. While it is interesting to note that nobody was present within the room at the time of the event and no visual anomalies appeared on video to be near the mic, scientifically we cannot call it paranormal at this time, but simply an unexplained occurrence. We hope to return and conduct additional tests and data collection as well as a follow-up investigation of this location in the near future.