Midnight. I'm in a Pasco Country cemetery off a long, unlit road — just me, two women and a tape recorder. According to my companions, there are invisible beings, former living people, talking on either side of me, and when we play back the tape I'll hear them. I'm skeptical, but in the dingy grayscale of low moonlight, the notion is beginning to seem real.
Laurie Champion and her daughter, Alexis Doganci, are conducting a paranormal investigation. Earlier that evening, Laurie played me audio recordings of what she thinks are ghosts — spirits who can't manage enough energy to be seen or heard by the unaided senses, but whose voices can sometimes be picked up by the microphone of a tape recorder.
Suddenly I see a dark mass move across the headstones at the far side of the graveyard. Laurie takes off in that direction.
"Did you see that?" I ask after her.
"Yes, I saw it," she hisses, speed walking and readying her digital camera.
We each take photos, but nothing shows up in the viewfinder. I feel a little disappointed, which is strange; after all, it's not as if we expected to actually see or hear any ghosts. If there are any present in the cemetery, we will hear them when we play back that tape.
Laurie Champion lives in Holiday nearby the cemetery, on a road that threads through RV resorts, industrial parks and horse farms. (At her request, I'm not revealing the name or exact location of the cemetery; she's worried vandals will figure out where it is and vandalize it.) A dance teacher for the city of Tarpon Springs, she cares for a houseful of animals, including cats, a Great Dane and Rotweilers, and operates a haven for rescued turtles out of her front yard.
That same caretaking impulse drew Champion, 49, into the world of the paranormal. While it's tempting to call her a "ghost hunter," à la the Sci-Fi Channel series or ohioghosthunters.com, what she does isn't really hunting. She's not a ghost chaser, a debunker, a hobbyist or even a ghost buster. She'll perform an occasional cabalistic prayer to oust an especially mean spirit. But what really satisfies her is comforting the living, validating their fears, suspicions or hopes.
And one way she does that is by using tape recordings that the paranormal community calls EVP, for electronic voice phenomena.
Before we set out on our midnight expedition to the cemetery, she plays me a few.
On one, recorded at the cemetery we are about to visit, a voice tells an investigator, "Don't go to the fence." On another, a voice says, "Follow me." It's the only voice, Laurie tells me, that an investigator actually heard in the field (as opposed to hearing it just on the recording). Laurie shows me a photo she says was taken at the time; there's a white glow hovering by the investigator's shoulder, right next to his ear.
Not surprisingly, EVPs are controversial. Laurie and Alexis believe they're the sounds of ghosts who are separated from our world by a metaphysical veil, whose voices only make it across as remote whispers. But critics say that believers hear what they wish to hear, applying their pattern-recognition faculties to chaotic white noise.
Gary Posner is one of those doubters. He's the founder of an organization called Tampa Bay Skeptics, a branch of the Florida Center for Inquiry that seeks scientific explanations of paranormal phenomena. Posner's first assumption, he says, is that such whispers are made by the investigator herself — or by someone playing a trick. Laurie typically leaves a recorder running in a supposedly haunted room of a house while she investigates elsewhere; according to Posner, that practice makes it easy for someone to walk by and "surreptitiously speak into the recorder."
"We know that human beings exist. We know that tricksters exist. We know that hoaxers exist," he said. "But we don't know that disembodied spirits exist."
Others argue that radio broadcasts or CB transmissions can be picked up by some tape recorders. Posner, however, doubts this explanation. Radio transmissions would not sound like whispers, which nearly all EVPs do.
Laurie says that the hardest EVPs to debunk are those that record a ghost interacting with a living speaker. Among the audio files archived on her computer is one that was made during a house call. On the tape, her voice is heard telling team members to come quick, there's something in the kitchen; her dowsing rods (brass rods that supposedly respond to electromagnetic fields) had stirred.
"There's nothing in the kitchen," an EVP responds, "but there's something in the hallway."
Listening to this tape and others prior to our cemetery visit, I'm unconvinced. These don't sound to me like voices from beyond being filtered through some inter-dimensional membrane; they sound like plain human whispers. I don't blame Laurie. I imagine instead a mischievous teenager hiding among the graves or even a traitor on her investigation team.
But then Laurie's been encountering spirits since she was a child.
When she was 8, Laurie's family lived in a modest house in Union City, N.J., with a bluestone cellar that was cold year-round where Laurie was charged with hanging the laundry. One day she saw the sheets shake, and behind them a young woman with long brown hair, wearing a cream-colored dress and what Laurie described as "a malevolent countenance." Laurie rushed up the stairs.
Her mother didn't believe her, Laurie remained on laundry duty, and over the next six years the basement became her nightmare room. She saw the woman more often. One day, a box of candles fell on Laurie's head, and when she bent down to pick them up, she heard laughter. Pots, pans and a butcher knife were flung at her head from dark corners. "She was waiting for me in the basement the same way a bully's waiting for you after school," Laurie said.
Her mother thought she was hysterical. No one believed her except her grandmother, and she was too old to help.
Alone, Laurie researched the house's history and found that a woman who had lived there, Linda, had been abused by her father and stood up at the altar and had ultimately killed herself. Laurie began to research paranormal activity. Her studies of parapsychology taught her that a haunting may subside if a victim makes peace with a ghost.
Soon after, she was making another descent into the basement. The light switch wouldn't work. Laurie, now 14, started down the stairs in the dark, right beside the pegboard where her grandmother hung kitchenware. She stepped on a metal colander that had fallen, and bumped and tumbled all the way down the staircase.
She stood up, bruised but otherwise OK, and heard the same laughter again.
"At that point, I figured, OK, you know, obviously no one's going to help me with this," Laurie said. "The only one I have to help me here is me, so what else was I supposed to do?"
She pulled a chain to turn on the light, which now worked, and spoke. "I told her, 'I'm not afraid of you. This is going to stop. I'm done. You're not going to kill me. "She started the first of what became routine encounter sessions with the ghost, treating her with a kind of guarded sympathy.
"I would go downstairs by myself, put the lights on, sit in the middle of a basement, and I would say, 'Look, I'm not going to leave. We're going to be here. We're going to have to live here together. I feel really bad for what happened to you, but it's not my fault. I'll do whatever I can," Laurie said.
From then on, she still saw Linda every now and then, but the ghost didn't try to hurt or frighten her. What's more, Laurie now had a purpose. She would become not a ghost buster but a ghost whisperer, and a comforter of the bullied, the bereaved and the disbelieved.
Take the case she worked on this April.
Marissa Kotary missed her father very much — he died 12 years ago, when Marissa was 13. Since then, she told Laurie, the musical teddy bears he bought her break into song spontaneously. She wanted Laurie to tell her whether her father was still around.
Laurie visited the home with a few other researchers, having made certain that Marissa's children were asleep before she came. When she does an investigation, Laurie wants all children either asleep or out of the house, so they don't tremble in bed later with thoughts of what they've overheard. This policy is waived only to soothe a child who is being bullied by a spirit — Laurie has a special sympathy for such children, and she never turns down their cases.
She placed tape recorders and omni-directional mics throughout the house. Marissa's husband, Tommy, looked on, tolerant but skeptical. Laurie instructed Marissa to ask questions.
"Dad, if you're here, I just would really love to know that you're here," Marissa called. "I really love you."
Later, when Laurie played back the tape, she heard only white noise following Marissa's plea. Only after uploading it onto her computer, amplifying it and filtering it, did she hear a possible whisper: "I want to speak." Either it was nothing, or Marissa's father was having a hard time mustering the energy to communicate. Ghosts, Laurie believes, feed off electromagnetic energy. Without getting into any spooky talk about people's "auras," we can safely say that humans give off thermal energy in electromagnetic waves. In order to manifest themselves aurally or visually, ghosts are said to drain energy from the space around them, often giving the living chilled bones or sudden fatigue.
The father's spirit was remote at best, but Laurie found a few surprises in the Kotary household. Laurie calls herself a "sensitive," someone with a peripheral sense of the ghosts' realm. Near the porch, Laurie heard with her naked ear an unintelligible feminine whisper. She sent the speaker thought-messages, telling her she couldn't understand. Then the whisper's cadence changed. Laurie still couldn't make out the words, but she could make out the melody: "My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean."
She asked Marissa and Tommy why she might be hearing that song. Tommy gasped and told her that Bonnie is his mother's name. He later asked his mother whether she had ever been sung that song. She demanded to know why he was asking. Yes, her mother sang it to her all the time.
Tommy's grandmother had realized she couldn't make her words audible, Laurie reasoned, so she sent across a tune that would still let Tommy know she was there and watching.
Another unexpected voice came out on the tape, rasping, "Tommy" again and again. (This, like several other clips, can be found on Laurie's online EVP collection at http://www.esnips.com/web/newevp?docsPage=4#files.) Tommy, gradually astonished, was convinced that the voice belonged to his grandfather, who had had a throat disease. The former skeptic started grilling Laurie about her work.
Marissa, though her father's EVP was questionable, was uplifted just by the possibility. She wanted to keep the tape. A few nights later, Laurie wrote this in a blog entry about the case:
"What is your name?" Alexis calls into the darkness of the graveyard. "Were you at one time a settler in this area?"
Alexis, 29, is a self-professed medium, but the information she's gleaned about this cemetery is from research, not extra-sensory perception. She tells us that the graveyard contains what's left of the region's first colonists — among them sea captains and veterans of the Spanish-American War. She has learned that this section of Holiday was settled and abandoned several times and suffered a number of unexplained home fires.
I call out next, my skepticism tempered by the shadow-crossed graves and the dark woods beyond them. One thing about talking to ghosts is that it makes you oddly self-conscious. It's like talking to a blind person about blindness. I keep telling myself not to condescend. This spirit has been trapped in this graveyard, alone, I think, for maybe hundreds of years, in the unimaginable state of death. I'm trotting around cracking wise, asking it to speak into a tape recorder. I am tensed for it to emerge from the ether and pull me into limbo for all eternity.
Laurie may have grown up with a ghost, but this cemetery gave her one of her few scares. She was taking pictures near the dark, wooded side of the cemetery, she tells me, when she saw a blue light, like that of a dying glowstick in human form. It was moving in her direction. She called out to her partner that something was following her. Then the form glided up to her fast, like a hand coming at her face. Her camera's flash went off, and then the light seemed to somehow shoot back into the camera, which died and lost all battery power. The pictures on her memory card disappeared.
"That was an experience I don't care to repeat," she says solemnly.
She believes what she saw was the "electrovital body," which she says every living thing possesses, of a deceased person. A technique called Kirlian photography is said to render the electric field generated by an object. In an experiment contested by some researchers, a Kirlian photograph of a freshly amputated maple leaf shows all its arms intact.
Alexis tells her mother to hush — she's worried, as always, that Laurie's chatter may drown out the ghosts.
Alexis is a self-professed medium. Once, she says, she was sitting at home watching television when a ghost sat down next to her to catch the rest of Roseanne. Her mother jokes that Alexis's home is a ghost Mecca, with spirits lined up around the corner. And she insists that the house is freezing cold year-round.
When mother and daughter do a house call, Laurie makes sure that Alexis doesn't hear any account of what the residents have seen. They recently visited a New Port Richey home where the 3-year-old had told his mother he had seen "a bald man with bacon on his head." After touring the house, Alexis told the residents that a man had died of a terminal illness in the teenage girl's bedroom and that she'd seen him, even seen his bedpan, and that he had lesions on his bald pate.
They went on to tell the family not to worry; every place where anyone has ever lived and died is occupied by spirits. Theirs was not an active haunt. The old man was harmless, and he probably just wanted company.
The mother, a rough-hewn woman with a square face and bushy eyebrows, sat rapt.
"I could sit and talk with you ladies all night," said Tammy Williams.
In spite of Laurie's assurance, though, Tammy laid awake for four hours that night, imagining a ghost watching her. Finally, she decided it could just as well be an angel, and she slept.
Laurie had debunked most of the family's testimony anyway. She did a recording, but decided the voices picked up on the tape probably came from outside the house, and the rattling door was just loose on its hinges.
Posner says many of the strange noises that prompt people to cry ghost are caused by geological activity far below their homes. The shifting and scraping of the earth's crust can send up vibrations that joggle Tamara Willliams' bedroom door.
Sixteen-year-old Tamara was relieved to hear Laurie's door diagnosis, but she was startled by the news of an astral bedpan beside her slippers.
On the car ride back from the Williams home, Laurie and her daughter discussed the revelations Alexis had doled out.
"You're never going to do that again, by the way," Laurie said.
"Why not?"
"You're coming off like a paranormal hypochondriac."
A paranormal hypochondriac is a medium who broadcasts every apparition she sees. Alexis is usually careful not to.
It's beginning to rain. We leave the cemetery and drive back to Laurie's house. In the kitchen, we set the recorder on the table next to an ashtray and Laurie's cigarettes. We press play.
We listen hard to the hiss and rustle between our voices. I hear myself on the tape asking Laurie if she's ever felt afraid during one of these investigations. Listening to her answer, I hear a second, whispery female voice behind hers, unintelligible. It sounds human, but it could also be the wind or a ripple in the tape. But my neck prickles anyway, and I move my ear closer.
"This is how people get into the paranormal," she says, smoke from her cigarette rising around her purple-black hair. "They get hooked. They hear this and they're like, 'damn.' They get a rush. They get hooked."
The tape progresses to the point when Laurie and I saw the movement among the graves and were scrambling to get our cameras ready. Again in a whisper, a female voice says, "Hey! Look at this." It's unquestionably a voice. One explanation is that it was Alexis or Laurie speaking. But we were all huddled together by the headstones at the time; I would have heard them. And on tape, they are talking on either side of the whisper.
Alexis thinks the ghosts were trying to get us to notice them. They said, "Come on," because her mom wouldn't stop talking so they could speak to us. "Hey! Look at this" was a call for our attention.
Her mother is convinced they were speaking among themselves, mocking us, something she says she's used to when dealing with ghosts. One ghost saw us getting all worked up and pulling out our cameras, and said to the others, "Hey! Look at this." "Come on" was just exasperation with our dimness.
The recording continues, and we hear many more EVPs than I'd expected. Laurie and her daughter are only mildly impressed. Near the end of the tape, a voice exclaims, "There!" It's so loud that Laurie's 8-year-old son, presumed asleep down the hall, calls, "Did you notice they said it twice?"
Young Braxton Riddle makes his own trips to the cemetery, where he takes photos with a digital camera, trying to catch an apparition. His favorite movies are horror flicks. Laurie tells him to go to sleep, but he says he can't, didn't we think he wanted to hear this, too.
Finally, our tape clucks to a stop. Laurie puts it in a box with others and stacks it on a shelf full of boxes. Hearing those voices has thrown me; I think back to all the other ghost investigations Laurie's told me about. Maybe these ghosts were real, too? The ex-wife ghost who would scream in the face of the man with the heart condition, trying to kill him. The ghost who didn't know she was dead and would lie with her sister-in-law, to be close to her, unaware that she was suffocating the woman.
Then there was the story of Laurie's own validation.
Sam was her best friend. He used to live with her, and he was protective of young Alexis. He and Laurie had made a pact: Whoever crossed over first would let the surviving one know that he or she was still around.
Sam worked on crab traps for a living. One day he cut his hand on a piece of steel and contracted bacterial meningitis. He died at age 26.
Eight months later, Laurie was at home, craving a cigarette. She pulled out every drawer and unzipped every pouch looking for a lighter—she doesn't use matches. She finally found one and it didn't work. She finished her search in the bathroom, where, in the open medicine cabinet, a book of matches was standing upright.
The matchbook bore the name and logo of a Tarpon Springs restaurant called Bill's Lighthouse. Laurie and Sam ate together often at Bill's Lighthouse, where the owner would give Sam matchbooks by the handful. Those matchbooks became part of his personality. He always had one, and he gave them out to friends.
Laurie said if those matches had been there before, she would have seen them every day because there's no door on the cabinet. Although she didn't have reason to lie to me, it made sense for her to fool herself, to try to undo his departure. Posner would say that Laurie believes what she believes because she finds it fascinating, and, most importantly, it gives her life meaning. Years after the matchbook, she says, she heard Sam on the baby monitor, soothing her crying son — "She's coming, she's coming"— who was calm and cooing when she rushed up the stairs. Surely she wanted to believe she had heard his voice then, to believe that, as she said, "love transcends death." How meaningful.
But what if she's not fooling herself? What if hers really has been a supernatural life? What if she really was forced into this line of work by a gift that she's had since childhood?
Because I did hear those voices.
I think.
Justin Richards is a 2007 grad from University of Florida's College of Journalism and Communications.
This article appears in May 23-29, 2007.