Tuesday, February 13, 2001
Ghost hunters spook around
Encountering cold and wind,
group tries to find specters
By Vivi Hoang
Reporter-News Staff Writer
COTTONWOOD — As the last remnants of
light fade on a February evening, two men prepare to walk among
the dead.
Wielding a camcorder, flashlight, camera
and electromagnetic field reader, they enter the
gateway of the old Cottonwood Cemetery,
a few miles north of Cross Plains. Only the occasional sound of
a creaking gate, barking dog or the men’s own footsteps across
cold earth mars the silence.
The two have come to Cottonwood to answer
a siren’s call, fed by local tales about the old cemetery
whose graves date to the early 1880s. Some residents feel watched
whenever they are in the graveyard. Others speak of a chill that
strikes in certain spots of the cemetery.
Richard Foreman of Abilene and Daryl Cozart
of Rising Star want to investigate.
They have come here to hunt ghosts.
The hunters
The search for specters began in November,
when the 24-year-old Foreman organized Ghost Hunters of Texas.
The organization has about eight members and looks for places
with a history of haunts to explore and research.
The group has fielded inquiries from across
the state. People tell them stories of lights turning off and
on, moving objects, a sense of being watched, malfunctioning electronics,
agitated pets and cold spots. Many seem like coincidences or the
products of overactive imaginations.
But the possibility that they are not drives
the ghost hunters.
“Around the world, there are millions
of people who believe in ghosts,” Cozart said. “They
can’t all be wrong.”
Cozart, 35, considers himself a skeptic.
He has never seen an apparition or heard voices from the great
beyond. But he hopes to. If the facts show otherwise, “eventually
I’ll convince myself it’s hooey,” he said.
So far, the group has combed through one
of its member’s homes and the Cottonwood cemetery. While
none of the forays have yielded concrete proof that ghosts exist,
Foreman is a believer still.
Foreman is the group’s Mulder to Cozart’s
Scully, the paranormal-stalking sleuths on the television show
“The X-Files.” Where Scully is a skeptic, Mulder is
a true believer in all things otherworldly.
Foreman believes he has seen the paranormal
truth in the form of his father — who died when Foreman was
16 and who, he says, visits him regularly. Sometimes the clues
are slight — an indentation on the bed or switches turning
off.
“I tell him to turn it back on and
he will,” Foreman said.
Sometimes the signs aren’t so subtle.
“I’ll be sitting on the chair
watching TV,” he said, “and he’ll walk through
the door.”
Still, the pair admit parapsychology can
hardly be called hard science. No one has ever dissected a ghost.
But just because mainstream society doesn’t believe in spirits
doesn’t means they don’t exist, they say.
After all, the hunters point out, people
once firmly thought the earth was flat.
The hunt
Ghost hunting is a subtle art. The specter
sleuths rely on the faintest of clues: a vision out of the corner
of their eyes, a temperature change, a shift in the wind, a flicker
of light — and the hair rising on the back of their necks.
“I won’t discount anything as
totally insane,” Cozart said. “If you discount it as
crazy, you might miss an important piece of information.”
To aid their search, they turn to a variety
of tools, such as tape recorders, a thermometer and two-way radios.
Cozart brings with him a pocket-sized electromagnetic field reader
he mail-ordered from New Jersey. Spirits, like all things, he
explains, emit a certain amount of electromagnetic radiation.
“We want the proton fields from ‘Ghostbusters,’
but they don’t exist,” Cozart says, only half-jokingly
referring to the movie.
They visited the cemetery last fall, but
have returned for practice — they want to be professional
when visiting people’s homes — and more conclusive information.
Of the three rolls of film taken the first time, one photo showed
a pale orb of light floating above Cozart — which, Foreman
admitted, “could have been anything.”
Just the two of them are hunting tonight.
The group’s other members are no-shows, perhaps more spooked
by the 36-degree weather than the possibility of ghosts.
As the two walk around, they explain aloud
what they are doing to any ghosts that might lurk nearby to calm
any supernatural nerves. When they near the back end of the cemetery,
an area they left largely unexplored the last time, Foreman exclaims,
“Something just flashed across the screen. It looked like
a vortex.”
But their senses and the EMF reader reveal
nothing. The same happens later, when Foreman says he glimpsed
something standing nearby.
The feeling strikes yet again when he walks
into a fenced-in area that holds two tall headstones. The cemetery
has two mini-graveyards like this, and local residents say they
avoid them.
Foreman says he feels something following
him and pauses, the skin on the back of his neck prickling. While
nothing visible stands behind Foreman, Cozart snaps a picture
just in case.
Near the second fenced-in area, Cozart discovers
a “cold spot,” where the wind, he says, seems to blow
in a different direction and the air feels chillier than the surroundings.
Still, they can get no second confirmation on the EMF reader.
Finally, after meandering through the entire
burial ground and taking a few parting pictures they call their
second hunt to a close. While excited by some of the hints they
felt and witnessed, Foreman can’t help but feel a little
disappointed that nothing manifested.
“It’s kind of a dead night tonight,”
he sighs.
Contact staff writer Vivi Hoang at 676-6736
or hoangv@abinews.com.
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Copyright ©2001,
Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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