Ghost hunters guided 300 University students through Pioneer Cemetery with paranormal detective equipment on Saturday night.
Todd Baker of the Pacific Paranormal Research Society was excited to find that in addition to multiple detections, one student even captured on camera the smoky residue of psychic energy called an ectoplasm.
“He got something real,” Baker said. Not only was he positive that this was evidence of the supernatural, Baker said it was actually very rare. “For a first-time investigator, that’s a really big deal.”
But what the student had hunted down was not actually a ghost — it was a spirit. According to Baker and his wife, Martina, a spirit is someone who dies and might visit the next day. Spirits go to wherever it is that dead people should go, but they can drop by at any time just to say “hi.”
Ghosts on the other hand are more stubborn.
“They’re kind of like dead real estate agents,” Martina Baker said. Instead of going on to their final resting place, ghosts decide to stick around, lingering at a location that was significant to them in their lifetime.
“They could be waiting for something to happen or someone to come back,” Martina Baker said. Ghosts have unfinished business, and that is why the Bakers believe ghosts have no reason to hang around the cemetery.
Martina Baker, a records keeper by day, first met ghosts in her own haunted childhood home. At night, she was routinely woken up when someone grabbed her feet from underneath the bed. Other times, she found nothing but air when answering the doorbell. Her family never talked about any of the events. Her husband, an archaeologist, was fascinated by his grandma’s ghost stories as a child, making him want to prove that they were true.
“They really exist,” Todd Baker said. “With the advancement of technology that we have had in the last years, we’re able to prove more than, say, 10 years ago.”
The Bakers have completed more than 100 paranormal investigations in the last 10 years, mostly for private residences and businesses.
“Most of our clientele want to know that they’re not crazy,” Martina Baker said. Using electromagnetic field meters, night vision cameras and dousing rods, the Bakers go to places where doors open for no particular reason and little girls chase their cats through concrete walls.
When the Bakers do find ghosts, they try to help them in any way they can. Most of the time ghosts just want attention or to have a conversation, said Martina Baker, explaining her rare ability to talk to ghosts.
If they can’t persuade the ghosts to leave, the Bakers can usually get them to stop scaring the kids in the middle of the night.
Ghosts tend to be most active when people are less active, when the house is empty or during the night. Buildings with violent histories tend to be the ones with ghoulish dwellers. Todd remarked that for a long time Portland was a rough town with a lot of murders and shady underground business. Frequent kidnapping occurred through the city’s famous shanghai tunnels. However, violent pasts don’t always make ghosts violent. Most of the time, they just want to be noticed and it is rare for ghosts to be malicious.
“Sometimes they just call you a few choice words that I would not say,” Martina Baker said with a laugh.
For five years the couple investigated an old Regal Cinema movie theater in Tigard’s Washington Square Mall, which had been built into an attraction called 13th Door Haunted House.
One night, when the two were alone in the theater, the air compressor and lights were suddenly turned on. They went to turn the compressor off, only to return finding that their tools had been stolen. From other rooms they could hear someone giggling.
“They basically ran us out of that place,” Todd Baker said.
The theater actually had five ghosts, according to Baker, one of whom was a particularly grumpy old man who didn’t like women. When women worked at the movie projector, someone hurled empty film reels at them. Another woman was shoved down steps through a trapped door where she broke her leg. After that she quit working at the theater.
The Bakers have seen their share of ghosts, but only on a few occasions have they felt threatened. During an investigation at Washington’s oldest resort hotel, the Tokeland Hotel, Todd Baker found himself alone in an unlit hallway as a black shadowy figure turned around to stare at him for a long moment before continuing through the wall in front of him. Todd Baker said he was too terrified get his camera out, but the electromagnetic field readings were off the charts. “Even the most seasoned ghost hunter would freak about that,” he said.
The Bakers theorize that ghosts are from a different dimension. Todd Baker said that when ghosts pick things up in real life, they do not float through the air like in the movies. Instead, things simply vanish.
“When they take an object it disappears and it can reappear in the strangest spot,” he said.
Todd Baker has seen this happen several times and has concluded that ghosts must have some kind of physical form that is more than mere energy.
Eugene also has its share of haunted locations. The Bakers used to teach Ghost Hunting 101 at Lane Community College, where an elevator is haunted by a janitor who fell to his death in the 1960s. It is rumored that the ghost likes to play tricks, sometimes randomly sending people in the elevator to the basement floor.
The Bakers taught their first class at the Bijou Art Cinema, a haunted movie cinema which was a funeral home and a church in the past. Also haunted in Eugene is the Fox Hollow French Immersion School, where the playground sometimes shakes as if someone were playing, a Eugene Kmart where a 10-foot section of talking Elmos began talking in unison and Toys ‘R’ Us, where employees are only permitted to go in pairs.
The University also has its own haunted locations including room 101 of the Stafford Hall dormitory and the Earl Hall basement machining area.
In their profession, the Bakers make it a habit to be bigger skeptics than the non-believers who have stubbornly rolled their eyes during tours only to later become converted. Todd and Martina often have to deconstruct evidence that later turns out to be fake. An old house will creak when the heater is turned on or an alleged attic specter can turn out to be a rat. The proof has become easier to counterfeit through advancing technology, but Todd said there are some things that simply cannot be explained any other way.
“We know the difference between what’s real and what’s not real,” he said.
Interestingly enough, it is not the real stuff that scares them anymore.
“There are certainly instances when they surprise the hell out of you, but fake haunted houses scare me more,” Martina Baker said.
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A supernatural soirée
Daily Emerald
October 28, 2009
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