They Don’t Mean to Stare
My ghost hunting friend Brian Fain, founder of MGHS (Massillon Ghost Hunters Society), has been interested in the afterlife since he was a child. I’ve found this is true of most of us paranormal enthusiasts, both professional investigators and armchair ghost hunters alike. But what stands out most about Brian is that he founded MGHS in 2004—long before the paranormal craze had begun. In fact, he organized MGHS the month before the TAPS show was first aired. As most of us who’ve followed the rising popularity of ghost hunting know, TAPS was the TV show that first brought ghost hunting to public awareness in a huge way.
Brian’s wife and several family members formed the core group of MGHS at first. After Brian got his first digital voice recorder, he decided to go to Massillon Cemetery, a huge burial ground with more than twenty thousand bodies interred, a literal city of the dead. That first trip, Brian and his wife Lena walked through the beautiful grounds, which were covered with fall leaves. They began to notice what sounded like another person following them—the crunching of the leaves under an extra set of feet! The couple motioned to each other, synchronized their steps, stopped simultaneously, and sure enough, crunch, crunch followed them. Brian had brought a small camera and started walking again, then wheeled around and snapped a picture. After the film was developed, the image displayed a large mist right behind them. It was a clear day, and nothing could explain this anomaly.
Brian could also hear a faint voice when he played back his recorder, but he couldn’t make it out. Both of these bits of evidence were intriguing, but not enough to pass muster with Brian. So he decided to go back for more. This time, his sister-in-law Chris was with him. They spent time walking around and recording. Later on, listening to the playback, a voice could clearly be heard saying, “Chris, it’s me.” They were never able to figure out who this might have been. But it was enough to drive them forward in founding MGHS, and they began to refine their skills as a paranormal investigation group.
MGHS finally got their first haunted house case a year later after they’d gotten their website up and running. The woman who contacted them to investigate had a house that was more than one hundred and thirty years old, and it had been in her family all of those years.
The family had many experiences in the house. One night, the woman got up for a drink of water and heard someone walking in the hallway. She thought it was her husband, but she saw no one. One day when her daughter was six, the little girl pointed to the stairs and said, “Mom, who’s that man?” The woman looked at the stairs and saw an old man with white hair and a long beard standing there. As they stared, the man disappeared before their eyes! Not long after that, the medicine cabinet door opened as she stood in front of it. The woman would also sometimes run into “somebody” in the hallway and experience a stiff shoulder bumping her back.
MGHS investigated the house, taking readings, temperatures, and EVP recordings. While the team was in the attic, which was filled with heirlooms, all three of their flashlights went out. Brian had just put fresh batteries in each one, so he knew something was draining the energy. Upon playback of the digital recorder, an EVP of a man’s voice asks, “Who the heck is that?” Upstairs, a clear female voice was recorded saying, “They ain’t cousins,” as if in answer to the man! Could these voices be long-deceased family members recognizing that the MGHS team were strangers? It sure seemed that way. One other EVP was a female saying, “Help me.” Getting this kind of evidence on their first major investigation was heady stuff.
Brian and another MGHS member met with the woman and her daughter, who had grown into a teenager, to give them their evidence. When Brian played the EVP of the man asking “Who the heck was that?” a huge sound came from upstairs. It felt as though a bowling ball had been dropped! All four of them sitting at the dining room table jumped—the reverberation was that loud. Brian asked the woman if her husband was home, and she said no. They all went upstairs expecting to see something big that had fallen over. It would definitely have to be big to create that amount of noise and vibration. Nothing was out of place, and no cats or people were upstairs. Nothing upstairs could’ve caused it. They all speculated that the man’s spirit heard his voice being played back and in his shock, somehow created this huge sound. It was uncanny.
The woman’s haunting came and went, with long spells of quiet in between, and as soon as the family would almost get used to the silence, the haunting would start once again with no rhyme or reason. So MGHS has kept in touch with the family over the years. The fledgling paranormal group’s first case had proven to be a good one, and it only stoked their ghost hunting fire!
One cold day in October, Brian and two members of his group went to a cemetery in Canton, Ohio, to try to capture some EVPs. As Brian begins each EVP session, he usually makes an announcement. “The device you see in my hand will help us pick up evidence of your existence. It will pick up your voice on tape. So please come close and speak into the device.” But it was too cold to stay very long, and on their way out, they passed by a headstone with the name Bye. As Brian passed it, he jokingly said, “bye,” and Christine who followed him also called out, “bye.” Finally, Brian’s wife, Lena, the last one out, laughed and said “bye.”
Half frozen, they made their way home and huddled around the recorder to hear the evidence. They hadn’t recorded very long before the weather chased them away, but they listened carefully to what they had. Finally, they came to the end of their EVP session when each of them had said “bye.” First Brian, then Christine, then Lena gave the name on the tombstone beside the exit. There was a small pause, and suddenly a fourth voice answered: “bye.” The MGHS members jumped up from their chairs—four voices and only three of them were there!
The day after hearing the extra “bye” they’d caught on tape, Brian took his totally skeptical brother-in-law out to the cemetery. Brian’s brother-in-law didn’t believe they’d really caught anything; he believed someone else there had said “bye” twice. Once at the cemetery, they walked to some old mausoleums, and Brian stuck his head in one of the broken windows. Just then, his brother-in-law coughed and Brian jumped. “You scared me,” laughed Brian.
When they got home to play back the day’s recording, Brian’s brother-in-law sat on the sofa with arms crossed in a “prove it” stance. The recorder picked up the sound of his brother-in-law’s cough and then Brian saying that he’d scared him. Then a woman’s voice says, “Leave us!” The formerly skeptical brother-in-law made Brian play this back a dozen times, simply in awe that an invisible woman—a spirit—was there with them at that moment. This was definitely the cure for his skepticism.
At another EVP session, Brian and a team member went to a cemetery to see what they could pick up. At another old mausoleum, the team member peered into the gap in the chained doors and asked a rhetorical question: “I wonder what’s in there?” When they got home and played the tape back, a woman’s voice is heard immediately after the question. She answers, “Nothing.”
Sometimes it seems spirits are aware of their state. Another EVP was caught as Brian called out the name on a stone, which he sometimes did as he walked through, as a marker. A plaintive woman’s voice can be heard clearly, answering, “I’m dead.”
The same day the woman noted her deceased state, Brian recorded another voice. Just after Brian announced out loud in his usual fashion how they could capture the spirits’ voices on tape if they would just try to speak to the investigators, a man’s voice said, “I can’t believe they’re getting us on tape.”
Another time at a cemetery, Brian read the names of the deceased from the headstones as he passed by. When they listened back, after a man’s name is read, a woman’s voice says, “Give him my love.” Of course, no one knew who this might be, whether it was his wife speaking or not. But it does give one pause for thought: If his wife is there, and still needs to send him her love, where is he?
Ghost hunters don’t always need to search the largest cemeteries to gather good evidence. Brian described an old Quaker cemetery with only twelve graves where the group asked a few questions of the residents.
“What is your name?” was the question that got an interesting reply. Upon playback, a little boy answers, “Timmy!” He sounded happy and excited, but soon after, a woman’s voice is heard asking, “Why are you with them?” as if to show her disapproval. Perhaps Timmy was her young son and he’d run away from his mom to see what the investigators were doing. Apparently, even in the afterlife children get scolded!
This same small cemetery was the source of another interesting EVP. One day as Brian and his group moved among the stones asking questions, a neighbor came out of her house and walked over to them. She asked them if they’d like to have some more information on the old cemetery.
Of course, Brian was very interested, and the lady brought out a huge stack of old papers and files. In those days, record-keeping was shaky at best, and one of the articles about the old cemetery told of how it was too cold in the winter to bury the dead, as the ground was too hard—and so their bodies were kept in cellars or other places until the graves could be dug. Because of this, the dates of death were often wrong, since many bodies waited until the spring thaw before they were able to be buried. So if you died in December of one year, you may not have been buried until March of the following year. This apparently caused a mix-up of dates. That day, knowing this information proved helpful.
According to his usual practice, Brian read off the stone as a marker, showing where the group was. The stone was broken off, so in effect, this woman buried there was nameless. All that could be read was: “was buried with her two children.” And below that, the date, 1811. On the recorder, following Brian’s announcement of her death date, a woman’s voice is clearly heard correcting him, immediately saying, “1810.” Brian also recognized this woman’s voice—it was the woman who’d scolded Timmy for going over to the ghost hunters! It seemed as though this may have been Timmy’s mother, the lady buried with her two children, of whom Timmy may have been one.
At another cemetery, fifteen minutes into the EVP recording, a male’s voice is heard saying, “Please come over here” in a desperate tone, as if he really wanted to talk to someone. Unfortunately, EVPs are hard to check in real time, so his plea wasn’t heard until they’d gone home hours later. Brian checks in on these disembodied voices/spirits at various times during the year, and I believe he may have built a rapport with them over time.
A reassuring spirit was caught on an EVP from Massillon Cemetery on a day when all six team members were present. Brian happened to look up and notice the groundskeepers, the custodians, and several others staring at their group as the team members made their way among the graves. Brian’s niece then made the comment, “Look, they’re staring at us.” The MGHS members smiled and waved in the direction of the curious cemetery employees, always friendly and professional in their pursuit of the paranormal. Once at home, having downloaded the audio from the day, a class A EVP was captured at that very moment. A little girl’s voice rings out in answer, saying, “They don’t mean to stare.” I bet her mother had taught her manners well, and the girl was giving the caretakers the benefit of the doubt!
MGHS chooses to post only class A EVPs (clear and easily understandable voices) on their website, or solid class Bs (audible, but not entirely clear), and these can all be heard at www.massillonghosthunters.com.