Chasing Spirits: The Building of the "Ghost Adventures" Crew (28 page)

My audio recorder of choice is the Olympus 4100PC digital recorder, which has been working great for me since the beginning. I recall seeing one investigator doing an EVP session where he literally laid out six different audio recorders—different brands and models. Then he’d ask questions and review all of that audio later. If a response is picked up on one recorder but not another, that’s really interesting. And I can tell you that happens. Sometimes my recorder will pick up responses that others’ in the same room do not.

EVP is amazing when you get results. The first few times I tried it, I got nothing. But the more you work with it, the more you start to pick up voices.

OVILUS II:
The Ovilus is another Bill Chappell invention, and it’s sometimes a controversial one in the paranormal community. I never thought much about the device until I was working on this book and figured people might want to know the story behind it. So I called Bill. First, the name: “It roughly means ‘the great one’ in Greek,” Chappell said. The idea started back in 2005 when Bill watched a ghost investigator trying to communicate with spirits by using dowsing rods, or metal rods bent into an L-shape and held in each hand. The rods would cross to indicate “yes,” and spread apart for “no.” Bill thought that looked a bit unscientific, so he wondered if he could improve on the concept.

The idea of dowsing goes back thousands of years. People have used forked sticks, bent wires, and weighted objects at the end of chains or strings to try to focus their intent on what they’re looking for.

Bill is an engineer by trade and knew that there are electromagnetic forces moving around us all the time. If those forces could move bent wires, then he could build something to measure the response. His first “digital dowsing rods” were a machine with two rows of LED lights running down each side. If the electromagnetic force favored the right side, then those lights lit up showing the strength of the force. If it came from the left, then lights to the left lit up.

Chappell took that digital dowsing a step further. He developed a system that would measure when the environment changes. What kind of changes? Bill said, “I’m looking for when the environment changes in either electromagnetic force, ionization, static electricity, or capacitive fields.” Translation: when energy moves or gets stronger or weaker in a given place, Bill’s machine measures the change to get a result. Based on the result, the Ovilus II will speak either a word or phonetic sound (depending on which setting you select), and speak it. It’s believed that spirits can manipulate the environment to get a message across using this device.

I know this sounds complicated, but hang in there for a minute. If I’m holding the Ovilus II in an old mental hospital in a ward where a doctor was once arrested for torturing patients, and I ask a question like, “Who hurt you?” and the Ovilus II says, “Doctor,” then a few seconds later says, “hurt,” then a second later says, “knife,” what are the odds that those responses are due to random chance? When you add up these remote chances, the evidence becomes compelling. And if we can combine interesting Ovilus data with temperature fluctuations or personal experiences such as hearing voices or seeing an apparition, then I’m very interested in what’s going on at that location.

PX:
The PX is another Bill Chappell device, but this one has a few extras. Bill explained that he was tired of people dissing the name Ovilus, so it was one part name change and another part better technology. The PX is more sensitive than the Ovilus; it’s smaller and it has outputs so we can plug it into a display, like our heads-up goggles or a video feed, while we use it. There’s no confusion over what has been said with the PX, because you also see the word the dictionary just spit out; plus the software will put a time stamp on each word as it’s said, so you know exactly when each word was said during the investigation.

The number one question Bill gets about the PX and the Ovilus is, “Can it hear what you’re saying?” The answer is no. It’s not equipped with a microphone and doesn’t have the capacity to process what was said anyway. Bill does believe that our subconscious mind might be able to affect the device—which would still be amazing!

PUCK:
Also developed by Bill Chappell, the Puck was launched in 2006, and was meant to give investigators total control over what the device is looking for. It’s similar to the Ovilus and PX, but the Puck has the ability to move its sensitivity and scale through software. “If you’re in a room with a bunch of devices operating at 60 Hz,” Bill explained, “you can tell the Puck to ignore 60 Hz and only look at higher frequencies.” He stopped making the Puck because a lot of people found it too complicated to use. On
Ghost Adventures
we still bring ours out to investigations, though, because you never know what device is going to work where.

MEL-8704 METER:
We use the Mel meter a lot on
Ghost Adventures
because it shows us an EMF reading and a temperature
reading at the same time and in one device. The Mel-8704 meter was developed by electronics engineer Gary Galka. The story behind the meter is touching and personal—its history is quite different from any other piece of equipment out there.

Gary’s daughter Melissa was born on Valentine’s Day in 1987. One night in late September of 2004, she was out for the evening. Her curfew was twelve thirty. “Around twelve fifteen, I got up and I felt something was wrong,” Galka said. “So I got up, got dressed, and went to the front bay window and was looking out. I felt something in my gut… something wasn’t right. All of a sudden I see car headlights coming down the street and then up our driveway and I’m thinking,
Thank God, she’s home
. But then the doorbell started ringing frantically, so I ran downstairs and one of Mel’s good friends said Melissa was in front of her and she saw Melissa run off the road and hit a tree.”

A parent’s worst nightmare was coming true. Galka jumped into the car and raced the two minutes down the road to the accident scene. Later police would estimate that Melissa had hit the tree going sixty miles per hour. The car’s engine was pushed right up to the dashboard, and it wasn’t possible to get Melissa out of the car when Gary first arrived.

“I held her hand through the broken window and talked to her,” Gary said. “Even though she was unconscious, she was moaning.” Gary figured she could hear his words.

No one knows exactly what happened to Melissa to distract her from driving. She was alone in her car and following her boyfriend, who was driving very fast. Maybe an animal jumped into the road; maybe it was something else. The Galka family will never know.

Rescuers used the Jaws of Life to cut the metal around
Melissa so they could remove her from the car and rush her to the hospital. During the ambulance ride Melissa regained consciousness and was able to tell the EMTs her name and date of birth. Hopes were high that Melissa would recover, but after four days in the intensive care unit, doctors determined her brain had suffered too much trauma and she would not survive. The Galkas had to make the most difficult decision of their lives, and consented to turning off life support for their daughter. Melissa passed away on September 28, 2004.

When the Galkas returned home from the hospital, they started getting signs from Melissa. “As soon as my wife and daughter got out of the car we could smell Melissa’s perfume,” Gary said. “And when we got into the house and were comforting each other the doorbell started ringing, but nobody was there. And that’s never happened before.”

Other strange electrical phenomena started happening for the Galkas. The TV would turn on and off or change channels by itself, and lights would flicker. Today Gary believes he was seeing his first signs of after-death communication, but he didn’t recognize it at the time. He’d spent his career working as an engineer in electronics testing equipment, so the paranormal was very new to him.

Gary’s other daughter saw an apparition of Melissa in the bathroom brushing her hair. His wife started having experiences she couldn’t explain, like hearing Melissa call out “Mom.” Gary would feel a phantom embrace and even a kiss on the cheek, though no one was there. The Galkas took a lot of comfort in this spirit contact.

After watching psychic Chris Fleming using a KII meter—a simple type of EMF meter that uses lights on a scale from green to
yellow to red in order to measure the intensity of the electromagnetic field—on a ghost television show, he got curious and thought maybe a tool like this could validate his experiences and help him establish some much needed contact with the spirit of Melissa. Being an instrument engineer, Gary believed he could develop a better tool. His first meter would combine EMF and temperature readings, plus offer a recording feature so users could see the highs and lows during the recording period. He called this device the Mel-8704, after his daughter Melissa, born in ’87, passed away in ’04.

“The Mel meter was the fruition of all the passion I had for exploration and learning more about these things that I’d been exposed to, but I couldn’t really put my finger on,” Gary said.

Since the first version of the meter, Galka has been steadily adding to the device so it includes lights (like a KII meter), a flashlight feature, and room for expansion modules as he continues to build onto the device. It’s a true all-in-one paranormal research tool.

I take a lot of comfort in knowing that the inventor of this device is so passionate about the subject, because for Gary Galka it’s deeply personal.

When I use the Mel meter on an investigation, I’ll reach for it as soon as activity seems to be going on in a certain area. If I’m getting strange feelings, I’ll use the meter to try to validate whether there are temperature or EMF spikes going on. If so, I may be in a hot spot and I want to be sure my audio and cameras are recording… something paranormal could be close and I don’t want to miss it.

AMPLIFIED E-POD:
Electromagnetic energy isn’t the only kind of energy floating around us. There’s also
electrostatic energy. Electrostatic energy is easy to understand: try putting on wool socks and dragging your feet across dry carpet, then touch a metal doorknob.
Ouch!
You just created an electrostatic discharge. By rubbing your feet on the floor, you positively charged the atoms that then traveled through your body to the metal doorknob and sparked the discharge of energy, bringing everything back to neutral.

Electrostatic energy is all around us. The less moisture in the air, the more buildup can occur. Gary Galka helped develop the Amplified E-Pod to detect an electrostatic charge in the air around it. We’ve used this device on several episodes of
Ghost Adventures
, especially when the air is dry. We set this round canister down, extend the antenna from the top, turn it on, and leave it alone.

If there is a negative charge in the air, the green, blue, and red lights will dim and then go off as the negative charge gets stronger and moves closer to the E-Pod. If the conditions are positively charged, then the lights will be off at first, then begin to light up. The machine also makes a small alarm sound as the charge grows stronger—that is, closer to the antenna.

While walking through a paranormal hot spot, you can sometimes feel that the room is charged with energy. You may see us holding our arms out to watch the hair stand up. When that happens, we reach for the E-Pod to see if it also picks up the electrostatic energy that our bodies are feeling.

Below is a list of Web sites and organizations that can help you learn more about the paranormal and the equipment we use to investigate.

You can find me on:

twitter: @NickGroff_

Tumblr: nickgroff-1.tumblr.com

YouTube: www.youtube.com/NickGroffVlogs

WhoSay: www.WhoSay.com/NickGroff

www.ghostshop.com

The Web site of Bill Chappell and his various inventions including Ovilus X, EM pumps, EM Vortex, plus many others. Chappell is always coming up with something new to explore hauntings and ghostly phenomena.

www.pro-measure.com

Pro Measure is the Web site for paranormal inventor Gary Galka, who’s developed items like the Mel meter, E-Pods, and the SB7.

www.rhine.org

For those looking to get more academic in their paranormal research. The Rhine Research Center was once Duke University’s Parapsychology Laboratory. Founded in 1927 to study psychic phenomena, the organization spun off from the university in 2002 but maintains its mission to test and prove the existence of the afterlife. It has decades of data and experiments worth checking out.

www.parapsychologylab.com

Founded by Dr. Andrew Nichols, this nonprofit organization studies anomalous human experiences involving the paranormal.

www.spirits-speak.com

EVP specialists Mark and Debby Constantino have been working with
Ghost Adventures
for years. These two get amazing results with electronic voice phenomena. Their Web site features a gallery of their recordings and techniques.

www.zakbagans.com

The home page for Zak Bagans and information on all his endeavors.

www.agoodwincollections.com

Aaron Goodwin has a huge collection of his artwork, photography, and his Big Steppin line of clothing and products.

www.ghostvillage.com

This site was founded by Jeff Belanger back in 1999 as a central location for all things ghostly. There are feature articles on the paranormal from believers, disbelievers, the religious, and the scientific, plus a collection of hundreds of ghost encounter experiences from all over the world.

www.darknessradio.com

The home page of Dave Schrader and his
Darkness on the Edge of Town
radio show.