"Do you know how to enter a cemetery?"
Mike Einspanjer stands at the gate to an overgrown, forgotten place where the dead of the 1800s are buried beneath the weeds, where they are marked by crumbling tombstones, and where they can be captured on film and tape.
Before his team of ghost hunters enters Old Raleigh Cemetery, they do what they always do - clear their heads of negative thoughts, because Einspanjer says that spirits feed off them.
"Not every ghost is a nice ghost," he said. Einspanjer is founder and head of his paranormal research group, Memphis Paranormal Investigations (MPI).
"You kind of are in death what you are in life. If they know you're scared, they'll play on that."
No one is scared here. This team of four receives the dead into their lives as an animal lover might receive a lost puppy - with the utmost care and respect.
Allen Brewer is careful not to step on the headstones, and he apologizes if he does.
Shay Walker drifts through the dark with a late 1970's model Zenith recorder, murmuring into the night, "We're here for you. We're here to listen to anything you have to say."
Walker and Brewer pick up a portion of wrought iron fence that has been ripped off a family plot and flung aside. Beside it is a 24-ounce can of Bud Light, suggesting a culprit other than the wind.
"That's some bad karma," Walker said. "Wouldn't want that on me."
The team makes it a priority to visit the cemetery on holidays, because they are the only ones who come, and the ghosts respond well to that.
"We try to treat these people with the respect that they may not have received in life," Einspanjer said.
And the team is rewarded by the dead. Old Raleigh Cemetery is an extremely active hot spot. The team usually gets a good response from the residents, many of whom might get no other visitors.
"Some don't have families," he said. "Yellow fever might have wiped out their lineage."
The ghosts show themselves most often in the form of Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVP) and photos, in which they appear as balls of energy, called orbs, or sheets of mist, called ectoplasm.
Walker captures EVP on his old tape recorder.
"It has yielded the best results by far," he said. "The overall quality of digital is not as good as what we get on tape."
Cassettes are also hard to manipulate. They offer very little wiggle room for someone out to fabricate evidence.
"With digital, you can alter anything you want, but on a tape recorder, there are five buttons, and that's it," Einspanjer said.
The team is not out to entertain, according to Einspanjer, who rails against the Atlantic Paranormal Society and their show on the SciFi Channel. He said they are fake ghost hunters who are out only to entertain and shouldn't be taken seriously.
"You don't have to fake this stuff. It's stupid. (Evidence) is there and easy to get," he said.
MPI plans to clean up the Old Raleigh Cemetery in the spring. No caretaker has tended to the residents in years, and nature is reclaiming the place where the first generations of those that settled Shelby County came to bury their dead.
But there are at least four people who haven't forgotten.
"Do you know how to leave a cemetery?"
Einspanjer asks the question as he passes through the gate, and answers it himself.
"Thank you for letting us come. Please don't follow us home."
http://www.dailyhelmsman.com/media/stor ... lmsman.com
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