Group seeks apparition of barmaid at old Bernardsville
By JENNIFER MERKEL
STAFF WRITER
BERNARDSVILLE ? Author Gordon Thomas Ward spent the night in a haunted house Saturday, but this time, it wasn't his own.
"It's hard to prove a haunting, but you can collect evidence toward its existence," he said.
Ward, of Bedminster, who grew up in a house he says is haunted, was among a group that spent the night Saturday in the old Bernardsville Library in search of Phyllis Parker, a barmaid who, as legend says, went insane after discovering her lover had been hanged for being a British spy. The building, which housed the Bernardsville Library for more than 90 years, served as a tavern and inn during during the Revolutionary War. It's currently empty and up for rent.
"There's a long history of people from all walks of life having experiences in there, going back to the 1800s, of people hearing walking and screams," Ward said.
Ghost hunter Nelson Jecas of Bernardsville led the group from room to room in search of the paranormal. Armed with cameras and audio recorders, the group settled in for the night with jackets, hats, gloves and sleeping bags as temperatures plunged outside, and sometimes inside, too.
"They all loved it," said Jecas, who also teaches a ghost-hunting class. "They were all tired, but they had a great time. They were really into it."
Some said they felt a presence. Others swore the temperature changed as they walked through certain parts of the building.
"I haven't gotten any pictures, but I've gone ? in less than an hour ? through three sets of batteries," Annette Rowe of Bedminster said of her camera only two hours into the night.
Matt Malone of Manville, however, captured what he called a "white light" on his camera that he couldn't explain.
Jecas called it an orb, or proof of a ghostly presence. He said most of the pictures taken Saturday were orbs.
Ward, however, had a different theory about orbs. He said that when people take pictures in the dark, the flash bounces off dust that is only about an inch from the lens ? particles that can't be seen with the naked eye.
"People's imaginations start running away with them, especially when the place is supposed to be haunted," he said. "They're snapping photos all over the place ... thinking, "Here I am in a haunted place with a photo I can't explain. Therefore, it must be a ghost."'
Ward said the group sometimes seemed frustrated that he kept discounting their photos, "But, all the images, I could explain."
Ward, however, is no stranger to the unexplained.
He grew up in a house in Bernardsville that once was part of the estate of Francis Lloyd, who was president of clothing giant Brooks Brothers during the early 1900s. He remembers numerous times when voices were heard downstairs when the entire family was upstairs in bed. At other times, footsteps would sound upstairs when he was the only one home.
One of his earliest recollections, he said, is of him standing at the top of the stairs in his house alongside his mother and father listening to a murmured conversation going on downstairs. They were the only people in the house.
"Imagine I'm 5 or 6, and I ask my father ... "What is that?"' he said. "I thought my father knew everything. To have him say, "I have no idea' was earth-shattering to me."
He also saw an apparition of a man at least twice.
It was those experiences, he said, that "opened my mind to the fact that there are a lot of things we don't have answers for."
Surrounded by camera flashes and conversation chatter made Ward's search Saturday night more difficult ? he was looking to capture EVPs, or Electronic Voice Phenomena. At the start of the evening, he held a session in which the group sat around in one room, in silence, and asked questions into an empty room, hoping to illicit a ghostly response.
"Could you tell us what your name is?" he asked, his voice echoing off the walls. "Are you alone?"
Ward said he didn't get any audio recordings during that session but caught some noises on tape later that weren't the typical floorboards creaking. The sounds are almost inaudible to the ear and can only be heard using headphones or an audio program, he said.
After asking the question, "Can you tap twice for us?" two taps are heard on his tape. "I didn't hear taps at any other point during the recording," he said. "It wasn't people walking around or the heat (turning on)."
Ward wasn't the only one to catch EVPs. Jecas said one of the students from his ghost-hunting class also recorded a voice Saturday.
"I think it was a very good night," he said. "We got a lot of voices (on tape). It proved that there's something there."
Jecas plans to take more groups to the library, the next being this weekend. He says he has received hundreds of calls since the Courier News first published a story about him in December, including one from the Sci-Fi Channel show "Ghost Hunters." "Ghost Hunters" plans to film in the library in upcoming weeks.
"Everybody wants to go there," he said.
Though not everybody has the same reasons.
One woman who called Jecas wanting to visit the library has brain cancer. She has only about five months to live.
"She wants to know if there's an afterlife," Jecas said.
Ward plans to return to the library when there are fewer people around to influence his research. He's in the process of writing a book about hauntings in Hunterdon, Morris and Somerset counties. He has written two other books, "Life on the Shoulder," where he retraces the steps of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and "A Bit of Earth in the Somerset Hills," his memoirs of growing up in one Bernardsville neighborhood and the history of the area.
Ward, who also is director of youth and family services at his church in Harding Township, says that though he believes in ghosts, he's not looking to convince anybody.
"I'm looking to collect evidence of what I experienced as a child," he said.
Jecas says there's a lot of phenomena in the world that can't be explained.
"There are ghosts," he said. "There wouldn't be so many people interested if there wasn't."
http://www.c-n.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl ... 006/NEWS01
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