MILLIONS OF AMERICANS go about their lives in what is considered a “normal” way. Their interests are not the supernatural but ESPN, Wall Street, Better Homes and Gardens. They wonder, What’s on TV tonight? and What’s for dinner? Sometimes they enjoy a ghost story, or catch a rerun of a popular reality show like Ghost Hunters or Finding Bigfoot. Maybe they have had an eerie experience, but they just shrug it off. Maybe they think it’s all foolish folklore, kid stuff. And then back to the routine. Job promotion. Parking ticket. Pay bills. Field trip permission form.
And for downtime? Weekend fishing trip. Art museum. Video games. Curl up with a good book. Meet up with friends for a drink. Millions and millions of people, normal lives, normal hobbies.
This book is not about those people.
The universe is full of mystery, I thought to myself after getting off the bus and wandering into an unfamiliar neighborhood in Milwaukee named Granville. I’ve lived in Milwaukee most of my life, but I had never set foot there before.
I walked into a quiet subdivision and dug my notepad out of my pocket to check the address. I looked up and saw the house down the street: a nice townhouse with the garage door open and a classic, freshly washed hot rod parked inside. I rang the doorbell.
A woman with a wavy mane of red hair answered the door and looked at me curiously.
“Tea?” she said, smiling. “Come in.”
She motioned for me to follow her down a hall. We walked by a living room table with a spread of potato chips, pretzels, and two-liter bottles of soda. I walked in and found a group of nine people seated on couches and chairs, staring at me politely. They all had matching shirts that identified them as the Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee (PIM).
“Hi,” I said.
Then I walked around the room shaking hands as people introduced themselves. I had spent some time studying the “Members” section of the PIM website, and my brain worked to match the two-dimensional profiles with the living people in front of me.
The redheaded woman at the door was Jann Goldberg, boisterous paranormal investigator and paralegal. Then there was Noah Leigh, meticulously organized team leader and founder, a research scientist with three degrees. I met Michael “Gravy” Graeve, with a soul patch and arms sleeved in tattoos, who worked at a printing company; Missy Bostrom, a polite, petite hair stylist; and John Krahn, a gruff ex-cop—you know he likes you when he starts viciously making fun of you. Three other team members introduced themselves: Chris Paul, in the auto parts and salvage biz, his gray hair pulled back in a ponytail; Tony Belland, intense-looking guy with a shaved head and beard, an HVAC repairman and construction worker; and Randy Soukup, a kindly pharmacist. A ninth member was present but would be parting ways with the team before I saw him again.
I felt a touch of nervousness. It was obviously a tight-knit group. One of the first things that happened as I made introductions was that one of the members made an inside joke and everyone laughed while I looked around, puzzled. PIM was a little different than my usual peer group, too. PIM is composed of white suburbanites, most between thirty and forty-five years old and middle to upper-middle class—and all of them are married with children. Ghost hunting is apparently something that appeals to those in the suburbs who need a more exciting and mysterious hobby than forming a bowling league.
After introductions, I sat down. All eyes were on me. And then I realized this wasn’t just a casual PIM meeting I was sitting in on. I had been called in front of the board for a job interview.
“Could you tell us more about yourself and the book you want to write?” Leigh asked.
“Well, I uhh …”
My own interest in the paranormal began when I was young. My library card was a prized possession that I used to check out every book I could find on UFOs, ghosts, and Bigfoot. I particularly remember Time-Life Books’ Mysteries of the Unknown, a popular thirty-three-volume series that covered everything from “Alien Encounters” to “Visions and Prophecies.” I would load these books up in my gangly arms and haul them to the checkout desk. I also occasionally caught the classic mystery documentary shows In Search Of … and Unsolved Mysteries. I loved these stories, and part of me believed them.
As I got older, a new love—journalism—turned me into more of a skeptic, a person who needed fact-checking and hard evidence to be satisfied. I still thought the topic was fun stuff, but my view on it had changed. Bigfoot was nothing more than foolish folklore, wasn’t it?
I imagined Jason Robards’s Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men frowning at me for even daring to consider approaching the topic as news.
My interest in the paranormal was piqued again with the same thing that captivated a lot of people’s attention, a reality show that premiered in 2004 titled Ghost Hunters. Although ghost hunting dates back to the Spiritualist movement of the 1840s and has had a devoted following ever since, Ghost Hunters popularized paranormal investigation for a new generation. After the show premiered, amateur ghost hunting groups spread quickly and widely. There are now hundreds of these groups all over the country, in cities big and small.
Noah Leigh, PIM’s founder, was inspired by Ghost Hunters as well. Leigh had a prior interest in ghost stories, reading them as a kid growing up in the small rural town of Berlin, Wisconsin.
“When I was younger, I liked Halloween,” Leigh later told me in an interview. “Not the gory stuff, but the spooky stuff that really intrigued me and scared me a bit. I remember there was one book on ghosts in our middle school library that I would check out.”
In high school, Leigh was intrigued with a piece of local ghost lore, a legend that a plot in a Berlin graveyard was supernatural. “A certain sarcophagus with a lid featuring a hand holding a dagger in the local cemetery was the resting place of a man and two ex-wives he had murdered. When it rained, supposedly the dagger would bleed, is the story,” Leigh said. After a cross-country training session near the hills of the graveyard one day, Leigh decided to look for the grave. He found it.
“It had rained the night before and there was water in the depression. You could see a red tint.” But Leigh suspected that it was something more commonplace than blood, and ultimately “I found the rusty color was indeed iron oxide.” Leigh moved to another small town—Ripon, Wisconsin—to go to Ripon College, where in 2004 he got a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in history. While there, he also studied papers on local ghost stories.
After graduating, Leigh moved to the big city of Milwaukee, where he continued his education at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
His schedule changed drastically.
“I only had class once a week, for eight hours on Thursdays. Other than homework, the rest of the time I didn’t have anything to do. I was used to having class four to five days a week and homework at night and on weekends. So, as a bachelor guy in Milwaukee, I filled my days with video games quite a bit. But that got old after about a year. By August 2005 I was bored. During that summer, there were previews for this Ghost Hunters show that I happened to catch. I thought, Huh, that’s interesting.”
“I thought, These guys are plumbers and going around doing this. Come on. I have a master’s degree in biology, I should be able to do this easily. So I started looking into it and found someone who was on the ground level of starting a group in Milwaukee.”
This group was the Greater Milwaukee Paranormal Research Group (GMPRG), and Leigh joined in 2005. Eager to fill his time with this new hobby, Leigh immersed himself in learning everything he could about paranormal investigation. He contributed so much, he was given the title of cofounder. But after a year and a half, he had a falling-out with other members of the team and was ousted from the organization. Using what he had already learned, Leigh faced the rejection by becoming highly motivated to start his own group.
“After I got kicked out of the group, I was pretty ticked off,” Leigh admitted. “Nothing motivates me more than showing people they’re wrong. And so what I wanted to do is build a group that was better than the group I was kicked out of, to show them that they had made a mistake.”
After a lot of work, Leigh put together Paranormal Investigators of Milwaukee in 2007. The group slowly began to expand membership and build a base of clients, and it gained publicity through a series of events, media appearances, and social networking.
Leigh taught a Paranormal Investigation 101 class, in which I later enrolled, and hosted workshops and presentations at public libraries and other venues. The team sometimes has tagalong investigations open to the public, so the curious masses can try their hand at finding a ghost. The team grew, and now membership fluctuates between eight and ten members at any given time.
Leigh gave the group a simple descriptive tagline: “No charge. Scientific. Professional.”
PIM concentrates on looking for evidence of ghosts, but paranormal is an umbrella term that covers several areas that participants call “fields” but skeptics deride as “pseudoscience.”
Besides ghost hunting, there is cryptozoology, which is the study of unknown animals such as the hairy hominid Bigfoot, the elusive Loch Ness Monster, and perennial bloodsuckers known as the Chupacabras. Ufology is the study of unidentified flying objects, aliens, and related topics. The term demonology is sometimes used to describe the study of demonic entities, possession, and exorcism. Other related fields include parapsychology, which is the study of psychic ability, and cerealogy, the study not of breakfast cereals but of crop circles.
These are the people that I wanted to learn about, that I wanted this book to explore: people who have dedicated a significant part of their lives to looking for evidence or hunting for unknown entities—ghosts, aliens, Bigfoot, demons … entities very real to some yet dismissed by others.
After scouring the Internet and looking at a couple of groups in the southeastern corner of Wisconsin, I decided that PIM would be the best group to contact.
PIM seemed professional and dedicated to active investigation. Some paranormal groups have every intention of being active but are able to schedule a hunt only once in a blue moon. Many groups form but after the initial excitement fizzle out. Leigh would later tell me that a lot of groups don’t even make it to their one-year anniversary. Others do a sloppy, half-hearted job of learning to do an effective investigation.
“For them, it’s a fun Friday night, but for us it’s more,” Leigh explained.
PIM has maintained a busy schedule. In 2013 it conducted about forty investigations, a large amount by any group’s standards. These cases are all thoroughly documented in case reports on PIM’s website, accompanied by any relevant audio or video clips.
I e-mailed Leigh and explained that I really wanted to be part of the team. I wanted to join them in investigations, not just stand there gawking. I wanted to learn how to investigate and help with their cases. After a talk on the phone, Leigh invited me to meet at Jann’s house to talk to PIM at the monthly team meeting. Walking in, I could tell they wanted to size me up, and I didn’t blame them. It may be spooky to track ghosts, but inviting a writer to snoop around in your affairs is an equally hair-raising concept. I met the team and explained my intentions as best I could.
“You know what I’m concerned about,” Michael Graeve said at the meeting, “is what your expectations might be. This isn’t like you see on the reality show, where there’s lots of evidence and spook factor. Investigations can be really long and uneventful.”
The team discussed my request after I left the meeting, and Leigh sent me an e-mail the next day that said, “Welcome aboard!”
After receiving that e-mail, I enrolled in Leigh’s Paranormal Investigation 101 class and signed up for a Cryptozoology 101 class online. I started following a media company that specialized in information on UFOs and began to amass a couple of huge stacks of books on various paranormal topics that covered most of my desk.
I was preparing for the hunt, but was there anything to find?