'Who is in the room with us right now?'

by Michael Rundle / metro new york

OCT 31, 2007

STATEN ISLAND. Lit from below on a brisk night, the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum can look very frightening. For ghost-hunters, it looks like a challenge.

“It’s a very active place,” explains Emily Gear, the museum’s director and curator. “Honestly, as we bring more ghost-hunting groups in, it only becomes more active. It’s like we’ve opened a line of communication to the other side.”

The Italian-heritage museum began accepting paranormal investigations in 2005, after staffers said they experienced hauntings. The first groups said they captured voices of the dead on tape, and photographed floating orbs.

Monday night it was the turn of the Eastern Paranormal Investigation Center — an up-and-coming ghost hunting squad whose founder, Artie Matos, was profiled in Monday’s Metro.

Dressed in matching T-shirts, the four-person team (completed by co-founder Jason Stroming, Laura Pennace and Jimmy Bricks) placed ion generators, infrared cameras and voice recorders at strategic points throughout the house. The equipment, totalling around $17,000, was controlled from a bank of monitors in a downstairs room.

“Every case is going to be unexplained, basically,” said Pennace, as she arranged wires and cameras in the basement. “It guess it’s all about the thrill of the hunt.”

The group’s investigation was methodical and patient. They entered each room and dispassionately asked spirits to make contact — either by speaking into voice recorders or moving objects. But when something happened — or appeared to happen — excitement quickly took over.

In one room a camera battery quickly drained itself of power, sending ripples of adrenaline through the group. Upstairs Matos swished an eerily clicking radiation detector looking for “fields” of static. Every time the detector beeped, the group held their breath. And in the total dark of the library, Gear felt something pressing against her ankle.

“Is that you?” Matos asked the spirits in the darkness. Then, Stroming’s camera went haywire, switching modes at random and draining battery power. “Did you shut down the camera, or touch Emily’s ankle? ... Who is in this room with us right now?” Matos urgently asked.

There was no response.

But the team was pleased, and pledged a lengthy review of the tapes. Gear was also upbeat.

“It’s been spookier,” she said. “But this was a big night. They came out exactly perfectly. There were things happening.”

Click here for the original article on Metro.us

See the first article in Metro on EPIC