Deep in the hold of the USS Battleship of North Carolina, James Hall searches for the voices he is picking up. Hall, a science teacher at Margaret B. Pollard Middle School, is looking for some sort of paranormal activity on the TV show Ghost Hunters (season 2, episode 4). Banging and suspicious noises surround him and his team. Separated but in contact with each other, each member shares evidence as it is happening. Cameras moving by themselves, loud prison doors banging and voices caught on tape are not considered odd for these paranormal seekers.
“Do I think that there is a possibility of some sort of paranormal activity? Yes,” Hall said. “Do I believe that the spirits of dead people cause that paranormal activity? That has not been proven.”
Hall began ghost hunting in high school and continued for nearly 30 years. He first joined a professional team in 2002 and retired in 2011. Even though Hall does not believe in the dead coming back as ghosts, his experiences as a ghost hunter have exposed him to a variety of unexplained phenomena.
“Paranormal activities are things that can’t be explained by other beings,” Hall said. “We’re talking about voices that are captured on audio when there wasn’t a person present while it was being recorded. We’re talking about seeing objects being moved when there isn’t a force moving them, you know, being physically touched when there’s no one there to touch them or feeling like they’re being touched.”
Hall has been on various TV shows, like the popular show Ghost Hunters.
“They just follow you around with cameras, and they may occasionally stop and ask you to repeat something they didn’t hear clearly, but the investigations themselves, at least 10 years ago or longer when I did it, those were legit,” Hall said. “They weren’t staged.”
During Hall’s investigations and on Ghost Hunters, he used various tools such as still cameras, Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) recorders and video cameras.
“We would try to record things like the temperature, if there were any changes in the electromagnetic field, changes in humidity, air pressure or anything to let us start looking for correlations between this sort of data and if there was anything unexplainable going on,” Hall said.
An Electromagnetic Field Reader (EMF) is one of the main tools that Hall and other ghost hunters use.
“Electromagnetic Field Readers have a constant background of electromagnetic radiation being around you at all times,” Hall said. “A lot of it comes from the sun, sometimes the earth itself, but there’s always a constant background of it.”
Hall checked his EMF readers and continuously watched for changes over time.
“If we have a meter going off and we notice an anomalous change in the magnetic field, then we might go back to one of our audio recorders and see if there was a voice on tape caught,” Hall said.
According to Hall, voices captured on audio recorders and fluctuations in the EM fields are not uncommon.
“[Unknown entities] say various things; there are usually little snippets of a voice coming in the middle of someone else’s conversation,” Hall said. “Sometimes they seem to be direct answers to people’s questions, but it always sort of seems random.”
Hall acknowledges the fact that ghost hunting is widely viewed as frightening by non-hunters, but he responds to this from a scientific standpoint.
“What we’re doing is actually really more observational science; when you do it, it’s very dry and not scary at all,” Hall said. “Most people don’t find it scary, because you’re usually just watching monitors or sitting in an empty room while you’re collecting data and waiting for something to happen.”
There were two types of locations that Hall and his team typically investigated.
“Number one would be private homes where someone has called us up and said, ‘Something weird is happening in my house. I’m having experiences; can you please come check it out?’” Hall said. “That was probably about half of them, and the other half were usually historical sites and places like the Stagville Plantation, a place in Durham, the Battleship of North Carolina, battlegrounds, places like that.”
Sophomore Jaxx Delgado, an amateur ghost hunter, explains the feeling of encountering a ghost.
“I haven’t experienced anything touching me, but I have gotten chills and stuff like that, cold breezes just out of the blue when it’s hot out,” Delgado said.
Hall explains the controversy of the truth behind EVPs and ghosts from a parapsychologist view. Parapsychologists are scientists who study paranormal and psychic activity.
“Most legit parapsychologists, and when I say legit, I mean people who have actually gotten a doctorate in parapsychology and do actual scientific research, believe that what’s going on somehow is not ghosts or spirits but human beings that are unconsciously affecting their environment,” Hall said.
According to Hall, most parapsychologists believe certain people can control EMF readers and audio recorders in an unconscious or psychic way.
“It’s either teenagers or older women going through menopause,” Hall said. “Just that their body temperature is all out of whack, with some kind of psychic ability that they don’t have conscious control over, somehow affecting their environment.”
Hall realizes that scientific observers rarely ever consider poltergeist as a ghost or a spirit, while most inexperienced people do.
“When we talk about poltergeist, even though that literally translates from German as ‘point ghost,’ what they call poltergeist activity… is actually normally somebody going through some kind of extreme hormonal change,” Hall said.
Similar to questioning the existence of God or gods, Hall is unsure of his opinion regarding ghosts.
“So, if you’re asking me what I believe in terms of my faith, I believe that our spirits live on,” Hall said. “If you’re asking me what I believe as a scientific researcher, I have to say that there is no proof one way or the other.”
– By Ellie Saksa and Harleigh White