The investigators of otherworldly reports star in a TV piece tied to the movie "Monster House"
A new animated film hits theaters July 21 with a strong Wilsonville connection.
"Monster House," a Robert Zemeckis/Steven Spielberg production, features the voices of such well-known actors as Steve Buscemi, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jason Lee. The film's television companion piece, a Sony Pictures documentary that explores the possibility of real-life haunted houses, stars two Wilsonville investigators of the paranormal, Todd and Martina Baker.
The recently married couple run the Pacific Paranormal Research Society out of their home. They don't know whether the TV piece, shot at an alleged haunted house in Sublimity, will make it onto the film's DVD version.
"I would presume it probably would be," says Martina Baker. She notes that the 2005 film "White Noise," which also dealt with the paranormal, included a similarly designed short in its DVD extras.
Details of when the companion piece will be televised have not been released. But "Sony was extremely happy with all the footage," Martina Baker says.
The friendly, down-to-earth Bakers are also happy about their role in a potential summer blockbuster, but they are keeping their day jobs. Martina Baker works as a data entry clerk, and Todd Baker is an archaeologist, specializing in bone and burial work. They perform paranormal investigations in their free time as a labor of love.
The Bakers focus on bringing their work into a realm that is respected by scientists, scholars and skeptics.
"It's not a fringe science," Todd Baker says. "There's really something here. And now we have a lot of electronic equipment that we're starting to be able to prove that there's really something to this."
That equipment includes an infrared video camera, a digital voice recorder, temperature gauges, sound-level meters and electromagnetic field meters. The Bakers also have a Trifield electromagnetic meter, a Geiger counter, an ion detector, walkie-talkies, flashlights, compasses and glow sticks.
Glow sticks? Yes, because ghosts drain batteries -- and flashlights are all-too-common victims of such spectral horseplay.
C'mon. Surely that's a bunch of malarkey. Right?
Not according to the Bakers, who say they've encountered everything from phantom motorcycle marauders to critters outside the realm of spooks, such as an Indiana-bred Sasquatch.
"I saw something when I was a teenager that I can't explain," Todd Baker says. "It was big, it was on two feet."
Your best local bet for seeing what the Bakers see is near the Willamette River. They say any place near it is hyper-charged with paranormal activity. Ditto for Northwest Portland, where accounts of gambling and shanghaiing intersect frequently with tales of ghosts and hauntings.
In fact, the Northwest in general seems to be a lightning rod for all things paranormal. Bizarre cattle mutilations, for instance, are widespread in Oregon and Washington, according to Todd Baker, who cites the work of paranormal researcher Linda Moulton Howe.
Clearly, the field of the paranormal has enough material to keep the Bakers busy for a long time.
And, eventually, the rewards might accumulate beyond the occasional TV or radio appearance.
"We'd love to make a living at this," says Todd Baker. "We would, because it's our passion."
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