Alamogordo Daily News
By Karl Anderson, Staff Writer
Article Launched: 10/24/2007 12:00:00 AM MDT
All three chief investigators who founded the Southwest Paranormal Information Research and Investigation Team were guest speakers on Thursday at First National Bank for its monthly Lunch and Learn presentation. the group took advantage of this appearance to detail the inner workings of SPIRIT and how it actually functions.
Chris Knaup, one of the founders, began by outlining different kinds of spirits.
"There are residual, poltergeist, demonic, and intelligent spirits," he said. "We don't mess with demonic spirits at all."
Knaup said intelligent spirits are those that are able to communicate in some way with living people.
And the various things that people either see of feel are even more numerous than the kinds of spirits themselves.
"Ectoplasm will appear as ribbons or mist in photographs," said Warren McCrary, another of the founders. "Orbs are spots of light in photos that cannot all be explained. Shadow people are not ghosts, but figures in human form that are believed to be from a different dimension. Voice phenomenon, made popular by the movie 'White Noise,' are captured by digital voice recorders. They may be clear voices or broken up. Another form is what we call cold spots, or feelings, and lastly, we have full body apparitions, which is what every ghost hunter hopes to eventually see at some point in their lives."
Knaup said it was during an investigation of Building 800 at Holloman Air Force Base that he felt a very cold feeling against his left shoulder.
"The photos the team took of me revealed a white orb just above my shoulder," he said.
The team showed a series of photographs and explained how easy it is to fake photos, especially with modern technology.
"It is easy for us to debunk a faked photo," McCrary said. "But there are some photos we cannot explain."
One of those photos was taken in 1936, known as 'The Brown Lady,' which appears an a full body apparition above a set of stairs. Another, taken at the Borley Rectory in England, clearly shows the apparition of a monk in a field.
Still another, a group photo taken of soldiers during World War I, includes a man who had been killed two days before the photo was taken.
"They didn't have the technology to fake photos back then that could have pulled this off," said Greg Hiser, one of the three founders of SPIRIT.
A photo of King Henry VIII's palace clearly shows the ghost of a person exiting a doorway.
A series of photos taken recently at a residence in La Luz captured orbs and a white mist that the group not only cannot explain but cannot duplicate.
After the photos, the group played some recordings they have captured, known as EVPs, which are electronic voice apparitions that are not discernible to human hearing but evident when played back.
In a recording the investigators made recently at the Economy Inn in Grants, the words "I can't manage" are clearly heard.
In another recorded at Holloman in Building 800, a woman's voice saying "I love you" can be heard.
"We think she was hitting on Chris," Hiser said jokingly.
McCrary explained the three phases of the team's work are information, research, and investigation.
"Our information comes from tips we receive, legends, word-of-mouth, e-mails, and phone calls," he said. "The Internet is loaded with information that has to be sifted through. It may be good for direction at times, but the source always has to be considered."
McCrary said the telephone is the primary tool the team uses for its research.
"Then comes the investigation, which includes a lot of boots on the ground and actually visiting sites," he said.
"Investigations are free and confidential," Hiser added. "So if someone has any concerns, no one will know it is their house of who they are."
McCrary said the team looks for cold, hard data in an attempt to explain the unexplainable.
"We debunk places all the time," he said. "But some we come across are unexplainable or at best, genuinely haunted."
He said that just because a place may look creepy does not mean it is necessarily haunted.
"A lot of information out there is nothing more than the persistence of urban legends," he said. "So we think horses before zebras. We look for plain and simple explanations rather than complex ones. That's the soundest way to begin."
"We are not ghostbusters," he stressed. "We do not actually want to confront the spirits themselves."
Mike Shinabery, who works as education specialist at the New Mexico Museum of Space History, was introduced by the team.
"On the web site for Legends of America, Alamogordo is listed as one of the most haunted cities of the American West," Shinabery said, after professing to be a skeptic.
"I am skeptical, but I do have an open mind," he said.
Shinabery spoke about the legend of the ghost of Rebecca at the Lodge in Cloudcroft.
"There may or may not be something to that legend," he said. "But I can tell you that it was the national news media that embellished on that several years ago and contributed greatly to what the legend has become today."
Another area that many people have questioned regarding spirits is an area of Cloudcroft where a sanitarium for babies existed in the early 1900s.
"It's what I describe as an eerily serene place," he said. "Lots of babies died there. "It's a combination of a peaceful, tranquil feeling and the fact that something horrible happened there."
McCrary said that some areas are simply too vast to be investigated thoroughly.
"The White Lady at White Sands National Monument is an example," he said. "No one who works there has ever seen her, but the legend comes from a woman who was supposed to have been murdered there in the late 1800s. It's just too large of an area for us. We don't have that many cameras, nor do we have that many people on our team to cover something as big as White Sands."
One of the attendees asked McCrary if the team's motivation is money or passion.
"We don't get paid for any of this," he replied. "We are all in the military. This is just a hobby that has grown out of proportion at an amazing rate."
Approximately 30 people attended the presentation.
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