Paranormal: [par-uh-nawr-muhl] any phenomenon that in one or more respects exceeds the limits of what is deemed physically possible according to current scientific assumptions.
With a soft multi-phonic hum in the background emanating from the Bose sound system of Bentley 207, 30 of us began our journey into the paranormal with Stacy Jones, Ghost Cop.
At first three of my friends and I were joking about the somewhat cheesy look of the PowerPoint slide being projected onto the Bentley big screen. It looked like something out of some late-night Lifetime channel show like Unsolved Mysteries but without the X-files music and, of course, Robert Stack.
Suddenly a middle-aged woman with short blond hair and pointy, stiletto- heeled shoes began to shuffle about before us, and I assumed she was just the person appointed to start the film or whatever it was we were about to see. But no, it was the one and only Stacy Jones. She opted not to use the microphone since it wasn’t a huge crowd and told us, in a very down-to-earth tone, how she became involved in paranormal investigation.
Her mother in grade school had seen the visage of her father standing in front of her classroom. Her mother was a conservative woman who didn’t believe in ghosts but swears that she saw her father in the classroom though he was many years dead. Jones was intrigued that almost all of her family members had their own ghost stories and by the time she was 12, she had read over 500 books and journal articles on ghost hauntings and poltergeists.
She cited the publication of The “Amityville Horror,” by Jay Anson, as a pivotal event in arousing her interest in the paranormal. The book chronicles the horrific paranormal activities that went on in the house at 112 Ocean Ave in Amityville, Long Island, when the Lutz family moved in 13 months after Ronald DeFeo killed his family there. For Jones, originally from NYC, the Amityville house was a big attraction for her as well as for hundreds of other ghost seekers drawn to the sight of possible paranormal activity.
In 1983 she graduated from high school and enrolled with her interest in the paranormal still very much intact, she decided to become a cop, attending the NYC Police Academy. She served as a police officer for the city of New York before moving on to become a special investigator for the Department of Defense investigating army officers within the United States.
In 1994 she got a phone call from a woman who had just moved into a new house and was convinced there was someone breaking in every night and suspected the intruder was her ex-husband. The TV would turn on by itself, she heard noises etc., but when Jones went there several times to investigate, there was no trace of the woman’s ex-husband or of an attempted break-in.
Jones said that in her heart she knew the house was haunted, but the logical cop part of her just dismissed it until she visited the woman a week later to find that she had moved out in the middle of the night despite having a one-year lease.
Of course she knew it was paranormal activity that had made the woman and her three children move.
In 1994 Jones began her true paranormal investigative career although she was afraid of being ridiculed. But when she began a paranormal investigative organization with two other people in 1996, she was “happy as a clam” although they were had very minimal resources or equipment.
Eleven years later, she has the oldest and largest paranormal investigation organization in New York State with over 70 members. She has done over 780 investigations and she came to JSC to share various kinds of evidence she has gathered in her years of paranormal investigative work.
She referred to investigations of mysterious, glowing orbs, house and land hauntings, of various cemeteries including the one at Gettysburg, of the infamous Landmark Theatre and of a variety of places wherever people needed her.
She has traveled widely, showing film and video footage of her paranormal discoveries, playing EVPs (electronic voice phenomena), which are supposedly the voices of the deceased, and explaining her doubts about some events (orbs) and her belief in others, including the validity of EVPs.
In the end I regretted joking about how cheesy I thought it was going to be, and actually, at many points within the grueling two-hour long program, wanted to get up and leave because I was so disturbed.
The most disturbing part of the program was appropriately left for the end. It was a long EVP taken at an old house that used to contain in one part a Bordello, or whore-house, where Jones said former first-lady Eleanor Roosevelt supposedly visited. This tortuous experience almost brought me to tears, but perhaps the volume was such that it just physically hurt my ears. There were loud indescribable noises that no regular microphone could have ever picked up, especially since she said the mic was never touched during the recording. There were screams, cries for help, men arguing, a man’s voice calling a woman various expletives and other horrifying though somewhat indiscernible mutterings that I wish to never hear again or go into detail about. I wanted to leave at this point and was almost angry that this woman had suggested we listen to this savage and upsetting recording, which she calls one of the most incredible EVP’s to date.
You can listen to this recording at Jones’ My Space page if you search for Stacy Jones “Ghost Hunter.” Decide what you think the voices in the EVP are saying. I am sure Jones would be very interested to hear your comments.