 Moved by the spirit: Spirits research team sees beyond the veil
By Kiri Lanice Walton, Staff Writer
kwalton@williamsonherald.com
It seems everyone has a story about ghosts or apparitions or spirits.
It’s the job of the Tennessee Spirits Paranormal Investigators in Spring Hill to investigate, scientifically, paranormal activity. They’re paranormal investigators, so don’t call them ghostbusters.
They use electromagnetic field detectors, night vision cameras, digital voice recorders —which they say can detect more sound than other recorders.
Brian Henry, the group’s founder and leader, said when they are called by homeowners to investigate activity that could be caused by spirits, they first “try to find a rational reason why things are happening.”
Their investigations, which are free of charge, can last anywhere from four to eight hours and there is usually a follow-up investigation as well.
“Our first priority is helping the client and teaching the general public,” Henry said.
The difference between an investigation and a hunt, said Investigator Jef Martin, is that an investigation is when the group is called and a hunt is more spontaneous.
A local business owner recently told the paranormal sleuths her own ghost story.
About a year and a half ago, she opened the door to the home in which she’s lived for 25 years in Arrington to let her cat back in, and something pushed her head back inside. She wiped her forehead.
“I never saw anything. I never heard anything. I never smelled anything. All of a sudden, I was flying through the air. I mean, my feet off the ground, and then I fell, and I broke my back.”
The only thing she could find to explain her experience was a bat, but then she realized it had to be a spirit. “If I wanted to get both feet off the ground, I don’t think I could.”
The business owner told the spirit to go away, and nothing like it has ever happened again.
The team members told her she made a great decision in telling the spirit to leave, and that her story is not that uncommon.
Spirits can be attached to a house, a person or an object. Henry explained that maybe a spirit shows up because an individual bought a ring from a pawn shop that had a great deal of significance for the spirit.
“They don’t know they’re dead. That’s the problem,” Henry said.
“We’re trying to find answers. There’s so many people out there that are afraid to come forward and tell us about their problems and even try to investigate it themselves, so that’s why I started this,” said Henry.
For each of the members of the team, they have reasons for wanting to investigate the stuff that well, gives a lot of people the heebee-jeebees.
For Martin, he found out the Franklin home he grew up in, not far from the Battlefield of Franklin, was haunted.
“I’d get poked at night. Before I went to sleep at night, I’d have somebody shake me awake, get my attention. I always thought it was like a muscle spasm or something. I kind of attributed it to getting older and my body changing, but it happened one night when I was sitting up wide awake at my computer desk. Somebody came up and pushed me. I looked around and my bedroom door was shut. No one was around me.”
His mother had seen two different apparitions on three different occasions and also admitted being nudged at night.
Martin, who said he is not a psychic or a medium, but has a heightened sense of awareness. He can tell the general nature of a person, decided to seek out other people who had similar experiences and passion for researching the subject.
Martin also has been on a hunt in a Williamson County cemetery, not known to be haunted, one summer and felt a temperature drop of 30 to 35 degrees on an 88-degree night. It was an “intelligent haunting,” he said, which means the spirit that is very aware that you are there and is capable of having a conversation and moving things. He made contact with someone by asking questions and replaying back what was recorded, he was able to hear answers.
“It felt like spider webs on my neck,” Martin said, about feeling a spirit rubbing his neck. “He stepped through me, and I could feel it…It was a beautiful feeling. It was incredible. It was like he bonded with me, and he was very polite.”
Investigator Katie Leddy saw what her friend calls a “demon.” It was a spirit with hollow eyes and mouth.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Leddy said. “It scared the crap out of me. I won’t lie.”
She said she thinks someone was playing with the occult there before.
In 1989, Henry, his best friend and a local police officer witnessed the Battle of Franklin take place for 22 minutes at Carnton Plantation, he said.
“We just sat there in awe…You could hear the horses galloping past you. There was a Franklin cop there, for crying out loud….I mean, we went out there intentionally to see any kind of paranormal activity. I mean, it’s the Carnton mansion. It’s known to seven different ghosts there, but we got a little bit more than we bargained for, which was awesome,” Henry said.
This experience would be called a “residual haunting,” Henry said, “and that haunting is specific to that area. It doesn’t happen because people are out there, it happens because it’s attached to that particular part of the land, and we just happened to be there at the particular time that the energy was the highest, and it caused the haunting to manifest.”
It’s not so easy to become a member of the nine-person Tennessee Spirits Paranormal Investigators team, which includes a demonologist and exorcist. Prospective members must go through rigorous interviews.
For the last decade, investigator Marge Bernstein has been studying theology, near-death experiences and angelic relations.
“A friend of mine had come and told me about Tennessee Spirits were investigators, and I thought that was my chance. For all of these years that I have studied, now I can actually put it out into the field because it’s scientific research. That’s all life basically is,” said Bernstein, who is the organization’s historical research chairwoman.
They have met their share of skeptics, and Henry understands their mindset on the subject.
“What you have to understand about paranormal phenomenon is everything we’re telling you is theoretical because nobody knows,” said Henry. “If we come face-to-face with a ghost, we don’t really know what it is.”
“As a paranormal team, what we know is maybe 2 percent of the reality of what paranormal is…Every bit of evidence that we collect, we’re trying to save. Hopefully in the future, and it probably won’t be in any of our lifetimes, the scientific community will acknowledge that there is something after death, and that’s why we’re doing what we do,” Henry said.
“Because right now, scientists do not believe ghosts exist. They also don’t believe God exists. It’s very apparent. It’s very real that there is something we don’t understand. Every one of us here has encountered it,” Henry said.
For more information, visit: www.tnspirits.com.
Posted on: 2/5/2009
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