by Erin Gilbert
Sadly, we never set foot in a single haunted house while in high school. We didn’t know the first thing about finding a location to investigate. Not that we had the kind of money we thought you needed to perform metaphysical examinations. We spent hours scouring electronics catalogs, marveling at EMF meters and Geiger counters far out of our price range.
Senior year, however, we finally got a chance to put our growing knowledge of the paranormal to good use. Our AP Physics teacher, Mr. Gannon, broke us off into groups of four. He assigned us topics for the science fair. We forget what topic our team was supposed to explore, but we took some creative liberties and switched it up to focus on the paranormal. Our partners, Robin and Ben, weren’t too pleased with us taking such a wildly different direction. They bowed out of the project, which we performed at the fair as a rap (copied here from memory). Abby had a little experience with the rap genre already—she used to spit rhymes with this little blond neighbor kid when she would visit her aunt and uncle in Detroit. Marshall something. Great kid. A little tightly wound.
Nuthin’ but a Ghost Thang
Spoken Word Intro
Erin: Oh my God, Abby. Look at that ghost. It’s so big. It looks like one of those composite ghosts.
Abby: Whoa, you’re blowin’ people’s minds, E. A composite what?
Erin: A composite ghost, which consists of multiple interconnected entities.
Abby: There’s, like, seriously brain matter all over this room right now. Minds be blowin’ up for real. Who knew there were different types of ghosts?
Erin and Abby: (together) We knew!
Erin: Yo. How many different types of ghosts we got, A?
Verse (Abby)
Humanoids, vapors, several dozen more
Free-roaming, anchored, are you keeping score?
Possessing, repeating, alone or in swarms
Powerful metaspecters changing forms
Chorus (Erin)
Ain’t nuthin’ but a ghost thang, baby
We ain’t talking ’bout no Patrick Swayze
Ghosts are real, there ain’t no “maybe”
Why does everybody say we crazy?
Actually, let’s cut it off right there.
Mr. Gannon told us we were making a mockery of science. And of rap. It didn’t matter. We were leaving for college in the fall. In Ann Arbor, we’d meet forward-thinking professors who would embrace us for our unconventional beliefs. Like people undergoing near-death experiences, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Ann Arbor Days
At the University of Michigan, we tested out of the lower-level liberal arts courses. We went straight into the good stuff: Physics 107—Twentieth-Century Concepts of Space, Time, and Matter; Physics 115—Principles of Physics; and Quantum Mechanics I.
The professors were every bit as open-minded as we’d anticipated . . . except when it came to the paranormal. They believed in higher dimensions, but make even a tiny suggestion that interdimensional entities could cross over into our world and you’d be laughed out of the classroom. We know, because that’s exactly what happened to us in Professor Rice’s Quantum Mechanics I course. It was high school all over again.
Unsurprisingly, we never really connected with our new classmates. There was an unbridgeable gap, and it wasn’t just our belief in the paranormal. We simply weren’t into what the other kids were into (drinking, Wolverines football games, and drinking). Who needed friends when we had each other? Unfortunately, the heavy course load—plus our part-time jobs in the dorm cafeteria—meant the Metaphysical Examination Society took a backseat.
During our sophomore year, we signed up for the most advanced course available for undergrads: Professor Alderman’s Particle Physics & Theoretical Cosmology. When we walked into his classroom on the first day, we were greeted by row after row of empty desks. We later learned we were the only students brave enough to sign up for the notoriously tough class.
“Glad you could make it,” a bearded and bespectacled man said. He was about our parents’ age, and spoke with a vaguely Eastern European accent. He was busy writing a complex equation out on the chalkboard, and didn’t turn to face us. Such was our introduction to the infamous Professor Alderman.
Erin muttered a weak apology, and we took seats in the very back of the classroom. The overhead lights were turned off, the room lit only by what little light filtered through the blinds.
“You can sit closer—I’m not going to bite,” the professor said. He turned to us as we moved up a row. “Do either of you have the text?”
We nodded and raised our books triumphantly. Professor Alderman snatched Abby’s book away. He flipped through it with a sneer on his face. “Theoretical cosmology is evolving much too fast for print,” he said. “This text was published last year, and half the theories are already out of date.”
He strolled back to the front of the room, where he casually tossed the two-hundred-dollar book into the wastebasket. The professor was as eccentric as advertised. Still, he seemed to sweat knowledge from his pores as he launched into his first lesson. Or maybe that was just sweat.
Discovering the Truth
A couple of weeks passed. We were just beginning to get the hang of our fall schedules when our world was shattered. The exact date is forever etched into our memories:
Friday, September 10.
The day The X-Files premiered.
It was like somebody had drawn up a list of our favorite things and turned it into a TV show. The FBI’s X-files—investigated by two incredibly photogenic agents—covered paranormal phenomena from unexplained flying objects to cryptids. Special Agent Dana Scully, played by Gillian Anderson, even had a bachelor of science in physics. She was a smart, successful woman kicking ass. That would have been enough right there to get us to tune in, week after week. But there was more. Much more.
There was Fox Mulder (Figure 3.2).
While Scully was the scientist, we saw more of ourselves in her partner, played with dry wit by David Duchovny. Mulder was a believer. “The truth is out there,” he famously said. That’s all any scientist wants: to discover the truth. He wasn’t just obsessed with explaining the unexplainable—much like us, “Spooky” Mulder was consumed by it. He was a fellow weirdo.
Figure 3.2.
FBI Special Agent Fox Mulder
Is there life on other planets? Maybe.
Does it visit Earth? Anything’s possible.
Would David Duchovny ever return our fan mail? We wanted to believe.
A Fateful Turn of Events
A couple of days later, we were whispering about whether Mulder and Scully would ever hook up when Professor Alderman paused his lecture and called us out. “Is there something more important than electric quadrupole moments?” he asked with irritation in his voice.
Erin was too embarrassed to answer, but Abby jumped right in. “I don’t know if it’s more important,” she said, “but it’s pretty close. We were discussing The X-Files.”
The professor narrowed his eyes. “I’ve heard of it. Aliens, right?”
“And other stuff,” Abby said. “Cryptozoological creatures, the paranormal—”
“The paranormal?” Professor Alderman said, setting his chalk down. “You don’t . . . believe in that sort of stuff, do you?”
It sounded more like an accusation than a question. Abby started to answer, but Erin kicked her under the desk. Pointedly ignoring her, Abby responded to the professor: “We have an open mind about it. Unlike some people.”
“This is a rather fateful turn of events,” Professor Alderman said. “The rest of the physics department here—hell, the rest of the university—are goats. They don’t believe in the paranormal.” He paused to smile. “But I do.”
“You’re kidding,” Erin said.
“I’ve never made a joke in my life,” he said, “and I’m not about to start now.”
&
nbsp; We had to take him at his word. His teaching style was rather severe and mostly consisted of him mumbling to himself while scratching out equations on the chalkboard. He wasn’t the joking type.
As he would go on to explain, he held dual degrees—one in physics, and one in parapsychology. He’d previously taught parapsychology at the New York Institute of Technology, making him one of the few supernatural researchers to ply his trade within an academic setting. Not only was he an educator, but he was a ghost hunter who had traveled the globe investigating haunted locales in his free time.
“If any of this gets out, I could be fired,” he cautioned us. We swore to take his secret to the grave. Although now we’re publishing it, so . . . sorry? But not sorry. Read on.
Our First Ghost Hunt (Finally!)
Since we were the only two students in Professor Alderman’s course, talk often turned to the paranormal. He had some interesting theories about the way the paranormal intersected with particle physics. It would eventually become one unified field of study, he said. He seemed surprised at first that we could keep up with his ideas, but quickly caught on that we’d done plenty of our own research. We weren’t just a couple of novice ghostheads. We were the real deal.
Our final exam was scheduled for December 18. When we arrived in the classroom, however, he told us the final had been moved to later in the evening. He instructed us to meet him in the campus parking lot that night. “Bring a couple of flashlights and as many batteries as you can find,” he said. “And dress appropriately for the weather. We’ll be going on a little field trip.”
Michigan was in the grip of a bitter cold spell, so we bundled up in our best winter gear—ski goggles, stocking caps, and parkas so big they made us look like a couple of polar bears that ate other polar bears. We met Professor Alderman at ten o’clock. He was dressed as usual in his brown sports jacket with elbow patches, looking every bit the same as he did every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon. The below-freezing weather didn’t seem to bother him.
He looked us up and down. “You girls ready to go on your first metaphysical examination?”
It was finally happening!!!!!!!
“Then let’s go,” he said, reading the looks on our faces. He slung a duffel bag over his shoulder and started toward the parking lot exit, on foot.
We arrived at an ordinary-looking ranch house about a mile off campus. We knew that paranormal activity could happen anywhere—it happened at Erin’s house, after all, and nothing is quite so mundane as your own house—but we’d been hoping our first real field excursion would be something a little more traditional. You know, an old Victorian home lit up from within like a jack-o’-lantern, with a couple of gargoyles standing guard at the entryway for good measure.
We stopped behind Professor Alderman on the front porch. “Are you nervous?” Abby asked Erin. “You’re not having, like, flashbacks . . .”
“No way,” Erin said. She’d been scared of Gretta once upon a time, but that had been long ago. People change. They grow up. For instance, Erin hated broccoli when she was a kid. Now she only sort of dislikes it.
Professor Alderman shushed us. “Don’t want to scare away the ghosts,” he explained, turning the doorknob. The professor ushered us inside. The room was dark—not ominously so, but dark enough. He turned on a lamp on an end table, but left the overhead lights off.
As he pulled tools out of his duffel bag, he told us the story of the mysterious goings-on at the house. The phenomena commenced some months ago when the owner, a single woman, started to feel uneasy for no apparent reason. At first she thought it was just anxiety, but soon unexplained chills were creeping up and down her spine. She started seeing things out of the corner of her eye . . . dark, shapeless things. When the shower ran red with blood, she finally gave her old professor a call.
He handed us each an audiotape recorder. During the stakeout—which he estimated would last four or five hours—we would sit still in a room and hold the recorders as they ran, changing the tape as necessary. While he didn’t expect us to hear anything, such devices have been known to pick up spectral voices heard only on playback—so-called “electronic voice phenomena,” or EVP. The professor said he needed to hit the bathroom. With that, he disappeared down a dark hallway, leaving us alone in the living room.
After about fifteen minutes, Erin went to check the kitchen for something to eat. Standing around doing nothing can be pretty taxing work! Erin stared inside the fridge, as if gazing into the abyss. Nothing spooky, mind you. Just a lot of junk food. Erin sniffed at a carton of chocolate milk, which had apparently gone bad sometime in the Reagan era. She shut the fridge. When she turned around, she came face-to-face with a woman in a robe.
To Erin’s credit, she didn’t scream.
The woman, however, did.
She pointed at Erin. “GHOST!”
Erin swung her head around, searching frantically in the low light. “Where? I don’t see anything.”
“You’re not a ghost?” the woman asked, catching her breath.
“We’re college students,” Abby said, joining them in the kitchen. “And if anyone’s a ghost here, it’s you.”
The woman flipped on the overhead light. “If you’re not ghosts, what are you doing in my house?”
“We’re on a paranormal investigation,” Erin said. “With Professor Alderman.”
“Professor—” The woman caught herself, and then nodded. “You mean James. Was tonight the night of the stakeout? I told him I’d be staying with my sister. I’m so sorry.” She paused. “Where is he?”
We explained that he’d left to use the bathroom down the hall, but we hadn’t seen him in at least twenty minutes. “He must have a copy of Scientific American,” Erin said. “Sometimes you just start reading, and, next thing you know, an hour’s passed.”
Abby glared at her roommate. “That explains so much—about you, that is. But maybe we should check on him. Make sure he wasn’t attacked by a ghost or something.”
The woman agreed, and disappeared down the hallway.
Seconds later, we heard her scream.
We rushed down the hall and found her standing at the open bathroom door. “What is it?” Abby asked, peering over the woman’s shoulder. “Is there blood in the shower again?”
The woman stood mute, pointing at Professor Alderman. He was slumped back on the toilet with his jeans bunched around his ankles, a blank expression on his worn face. He wasn’t breathing. At his feet lay a copy of Scientific American, which had slipped out of his dead hands.
The Journey Begins
An autopsy later confirmed our professor died of a heart attack. Frightened to death by something he saw in the bathroom of the woman’s house, or from natural causes? We may never know for sure.
By the time we gave our statements to police, it was two in the morning. The homeowner (whose name we’re withholding) gave us her condolences. She zipped up Professor Alderman’s duffel bag of paratechnological gadgets and handed it to us. The professor, she explained, had no family. His students were his family—and we were his only students this semester. Ergo, we were the closest thing he had to a next of kin.
We slept until noon the next day. When we woke up, we rewound the recordings we’d made the previous night. Erin had shut her audio recorder off when she’d gone to the kitchen, but Abby had accidentally let hers run in the living room for the length of the tape—sixty full minutes. We didn’t expect to hear much more than static and the sounds of our voices in the background, and we were right . . . up until the 52:43 mark. That’s when a man’s voice broke through: “THE TRUTH . . . IS OUT . . . THERE.”
Every time we listened to the tape, the words seemed a little different. EVP is notoriously difficult to decipher. Was this Professor Alderman’s voice, relaying a message to us from beyond the grave? Another specter that haunted the woman’s house? A stray radio signal picked up by the tape? The truth was out
there, and it was up to us—not the FBI—to find it.
We immediately quit our jobs in the cafeteria. Without our boring part-time jobs, we had plenty of time for the Metaphysical Examination Society. We took out additional student loans and donated plasma to cover our living expenses. We had Professor Alderman’s bag of ghost-hunting equipment, which aided our transition from lunch ladies to ghost hunters. We would carry on his work. If he was out there somewhere, we would make him proud.
We even convinced some homeowners to let us into their houses to investigate, something we’d struggled for years to do. Whether it was our newfound confidence or simply that we presented ourselves as professionals, things had certainly changed. We spent thousands of hours outside our classes chasing ghosts—both literally and figuratively, to echo this book’s subtitle.
We witnessed some strange, unexplainable phenomena over the past two and a half years while juggling the paranormal with our school work, but no confirmed spectral entities (Erin’s childhood vision of Gretta DeMille notwithstanding). Professor Alderman never spoke to us again or showed himself. That might sound like we failed. Quite the contrary: We succeeded insofar as we honed our techniques through trial and error, to such a degree that we’re now able to pass that knowledge on to you.
What follows in this book is everything we’ve picked up along the way on our journey as conductors of metaphysical examinations—and as best friends.
Part 2
Our Research
Part 2—At a Glance
Although we are now on the cusp of the twenty-first century, we can only identify 4 percent of the matter in the universe. What else could be out there besides planets and stars and the vacuum of space? According to astronomers, the missing 96 percent of the universe is actually DARK MATTER and DARK ENERGY.