SHELBURNE -- The moon is full, and the October night air chilly as three intrepid ghost hunters wait to witness the unexplained. They are exploring the dark recesses of the Shelburne Art Center, a 290-year-old building that was a church parsonage during the 1800s and a library for most of the last century.
Jeffrey Stewart, Jason Lorefice and Sarah Vogelsang have armed themselves with gizmos galore -- video cameras, tape recorders, infrared thermal meters, electromagnetic field detectors -- to discern disembodied spirits. The white brick structure has a reputation.
Despite the high-tech equipment, one thing is missing on this spooky Shelburne venture: the gosh-darn ghost. But Stewart, a 27-year-old Burlington maintenance engineer who launched Paranormal Investigators of New England two years ago, is persistent.
"Why are you here?" he asks in the attic. "Can you give us a sign of your presence?"
Silence.
Ditto after soothing entreaties in the basement from Vogelsang of Burlington, a regular on Stewart's team. "We mean no harm," she says. "We only wish to communicate."
While not exactly communication, something does happen in the ground-floor gallery. As investigator Lorefice of Williston passes the field detector near a display of handcrafted scarves, the device emits rapid beeps and its red light flashes.
"We look for erratic fluctuations," he explains. "If we find them, there's a good chance it's paranormal."
Brenda Withey only knows what she saw with her own eyes during the building's days as a library and she was assistant to the Shelburne head librarian from 1972 to 1977.
One evening the women decided to close two large windows, 20 feet apart, because a storm was approaching.
"Suddenly, they both slammed shut and locked," Withey recounts. "We were rattled."
Her second brush with whatever was hanging around the building involved seven hardcover books in need of repair. They were stored, individually, in a locked metal cabinet while the glue dried. When Withey and a volunteer opened it the next day, the volumes had been rearranged one on top of another in a staircase formation, with no apparent support for the back end.
"As we stood there gawking," she says, "the pile collapsed."
Stewart acknowledges his supernatural sleuthing is an obsession. "It's a personal mission. I want to seek out the unknown," he says, "but we're always trying to debunk. Once you have eliminated all possibilities, whatever's left must be the truth."
Trained by a group of parapsycholgists in Boston, Stewart insists he is a skeptic, but claims a recording he made last year at the now-defunct Barlow Street School in St. Albans really tested his objectivity.
Stewart asked the unseen ghost, "Do you know you're dead?"
There was no audible reply. But later, listening to the tape, he heard a raspy male voice say: "I'm still breathing."
More information
Visit www.pinewengland.50megs.com for more information about Paranormal Investigators of New England.
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps ... 6610180328
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