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By: Chris Harris, Staff Writer, Commonwealth Journal
Publication Date: October 31, 2007
Halloween is the time of year when people wonder most if there really is something out there, in the netherworld beyond.
Kyle Kadel and Zach Bales don’t know for sure — but they say they have a pretty good idea.
The two individuals behind PICK — Paranormal Investigators of Central Kentucky (www.thebestpick.org) — Bales and Kadel claim to be “the best paranormal investigators of central Kentucky.” They’ve been doing it for about three years now, said Bales — and have had their opinions swayed over that time.
“There’s tons of places in the area that you’ve always heard are haunted, like Soule’s Chapel — places like that,” said Bales. “We thought, ‘Well, we don't believe in ghosts and we’ll just prove that there's no such thing as ghosts.’ We started going to these places — like Short Creek, the MIll Springs battlefield — and more times that not, at the end of night, there were unexplainable things that left us kind of shaken up and wanting more and more and more.”
Bales and Kadel — who have teamed with local ghost hunter and author Bill Scott on a number of PICK projects — maintain a skeptical edge.
“There are a lot of things people call spirits that we won’t,” said Kadel. “If something spooky happens to us, there’s pretty good chance that we can debunk it. There's not a whole lot left usually.”
Added Bales, “Obviously, if you're looking for something, you’re probably going to find it. (We would have to find) something pretty big before we'd ever say that anything is ever haunted.”
The process is this — once you’ve found a rational explanation for everything that you can, if there are any elements to a “haunting” scene left over that aren’t explainable, then you have something paranormal, according to Kadel.
One thing they couldn’t explain — and made believers out of them both — was a ghost that supposedly followed them home from a trip to the downtown Somerset Cemetery.
“When we got home, we listened to the tape recorder. Plain as day, it sounded like a girl's voice broke in and say the exact same sentence I had just said (on the recorder),” said Bales. “Then, less than a week later, I heard the exact same voice without a recorder or anything. (It was) just in my house, in my bed, and I heard it speak my name.”
Bales said he didn’t say anything to Kadel — but nevertheless his partner claims to have experienced the exact same thing around the same time.
“We’ve both have very personal experiences that correlate with each other in a hunt we had that followed us home,” Kadel. “Because of that one experience, I would say that I’m a believer.”
Hearing a mysterious voice on a record is called an EVP, or electronic voice phenomena. That’s not to be confused with an electromagnetic field detection, or EMF. All technical terms involved in the myriad pieces of equipment PICK uses in its ghost hunts — costing the pair thousands of dollars out-of-pocket.
“We use a professional camera, and two or three more digital cameras — on occasion, we use a 35 millimeter (camera),” said Kadel, who says he’s personally spent as much as $3,000 on the unique hobby over the last few years.
“You can capture a lot of things (with those cameras),” he added. “Sometimes you get an anomaly, something that looks like an orb (which is) just a ball of light. Neither of us are very confident in orbs. It so easy for it to be a piece of dust.”
Bales agreed, noting that anything from dew to a glare from a nearby light can cause an eerie anomaly to show up in a photo. That’s why they take a before picture to ascertain what the quality of the shot would look like in normal circumstances, then ask for a spirit to show itself and hold out their hand — if something materializes in the “after” shot, the paranormal investigators believe they might have something.
Other equipment used is the EMF detector, a “little wand” which ferrets out high concentrations of energy in a room and thermometers to measure temperature.
“It’s like in ‘The Sixth Sense’ (the 1999 Bruce Willis movie), where the kid sees his breath,” said Bales. “You’re constantly checking the room for cold spots, because it might be a sign there’s some activity going on. And is something like that happens, something else might happen — the EMF might go off or you might see a shadow.”
Still, “you have to take it all with a grain of salt,” he noted. “99 percent of the things we encounter can be explained rationally. And then there's that one percent. ...”
The group recently did some paranormal investigating at Somerset Community College, where a few buildings — including Stoner Little Theater and the Strunk Library — are often said to be haunted.
“I’ve heard that the janitors have seen things move, or have supposedly seen a ghost or floating objects,” said Bales.
Despite having plenty of surveillance equipment, the trip wasn’t so fruitful — as least not as much so as a later trip to the Mill Springs Battlefield, where PICK encountered some strange things at Zolicoffer Park.
“All of us were looking in one direction one time and we all saw a shadow move from the other side of the tree,” said Kadel. “I saw something red move. Bill Scott actually asked if anything was around to come closer, and we heard footsteps.”
The hunt wasn’t long after the recent national Civil War battle re-enactment at the end of September, said the members of the 10-person PICK group — “Paranormal enthusiasts would say something like that might stir (spirits) up,” Bales noted.
Bales said he’s actually writing a book on the subject called “The Amateur’s Guide to Ghost Hunting,” which he expects to be published soon. In it, he tries to explain what he believes the ghost phenomenon might be — though he admits it’s “a touchy subject.”
Added Kadel, “I don’t think anyone could really tell you what it is.” He doesn’t consider “residual hauntings” to be legitimate spirit activity. Scenes where there have a great emotional output — such as a war or murder scenes — can leave behind energy imprints that replay themselves over and over like a videotape, he suggests. The spirit world is something else entirely — and much more rare.
“The hauntings we’re more interested in are the ones where you can actually communicate with the spirits. (such as) the first EVP we ever got (where the girl’s voice) repeated the sentence,” said Kadel. “Those are a lot harder to come by.”
So how realistic are the stories — or myths, say the skeptic — about Halloween? While the ancient Celts believed it was the time of year when the worlds of the living and dead collided and the deceased walked the earth again, Bales said Oct. 31, has never proven especially busy in terms of afterlife traffic as far as their investigations go.
However, Kadel said, “I'm sure with all the beliefs people have — with how many living people think ghosts come around on Halloween — I’m sure that when they die, they decide to come around on Halloween.”
In other words, if great-great-great-grandpa stops by to say hi tonight — don’t be surprised.