BY KIRK MOORE
TOMS RIVER BUREAU
For Bruce Halliday, the most happening place in Brick is the old Gravelly Graveyard, and it doesn't have to be Halloween.
"This is a classic old graveyard," Halliday says, walking slowly amid headstones that date as far back as the 18th century. He's holding a gaussmeter, a small hand-held instrument that detects electromagnetic energy.
"The base reading is between 0.1 and 0.3. . . . Wait ? 1.4 . . . 1.6. That's spirit activity."
Halliday is a self-described ghost hunter. It's a national enthusiasm that blends old-time paranormal interests with modern digital technology.
Practitioners tote digital cameras and voice recorders into supposedly haunted locations, then process data on home computers, searching for apparitions and human voices amid the ambient background sounds.
Halliday says he's found them here, and produces photos where he sees hints of faces peering from shrubbery and the windows of nearby homes.
"You need to develop an eye for this," says Halliday, who was involved with New York City paranormal investigators before he moved to Brick from Staten Island and formed the Paranormal Investigating Team of South New Jersey.
A skeptical attitude
It's a nonprofit group of enthusiasts who check out haunting reports, but Halliday insists they start with a skeptical attitude.
"Ninety-nine percent of the time, you'll debunk it," he says.
He says the old graveyard by the Metedeconk River surprised him: "This cemetery is definitely haunted. It's unusual because people don't die in cemeteries."
Physicist Costas Efthimiou, a professor at the University of Central Florida, points to surveys that show widespread gullibility for the supernatural.
Using science and math, Efthimiou explains in a forthcoming paper titled "Ghosts, Vampires and Zombies" why it is ghosts can't walk among us while also gliding through walls. That violates Newton's laws of action and reaction, Efthimiou recently told The Associated Press: If ghosts walk, their feet apply force to the floor, but if they go through walls they are without substance.
"So which is it? Are ghosts material or material-less?" he asks.
More than 1 in 3 Americans believe houses can be haunted, a 2005 Gallup poll showed. More than 20 percent of Americans believe in witches and that people can communicate with the dead.
"We're talking about a large fraction of the public that believes in subjects that scientists believe are out of the question," Efthimiou said. His paper is in an archive awaiting publication either in the journal Physics Education or the magazine Skeptical Inquirer, he said.
"Paranormal investigators have a big problem," Halliday admits. They cannot present "reproducible results" ? the gold standard of scientific inquiry, when independent researchers arrive at the same results.
But mostly, he says, ghost hunters like to help people by allaying fears of hauntings where none exist. When he finds something like Gravelly Graveyard, there's a spiritual aspect for him, too.
"To me, unequivocally there's a life after death," he says. "But I'm just your friendly neighborhood ghost hunter.
"I love this place. I can't wait to come back at night."
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