By Christian Burkin
Record Staff Writer
April 15, 2007 6:00 AM
COLUMBIA - A sprawl of microphones, computers, cameras and coils of black cable litter a room at the Gold Rush-era Fallon Hotel. The tableau looks like a low-budget film set. It's not.
It's a ghost hunt.
The Fallon, and its counterpart down the street, the City Hotel, are the sites of an overnight stakeout by the San Joaquin Valley Paranormal Investigators, a group of supernatural phenomena hunters whose style is more whiz-bang than Ouija.
While visitors to the Columbia State Historic Park stroll the cobbled streets outside, SJVPI team members are wiring the room for closed-circuit video, replacing batteries and testing electromagnetic field meters, a tool used by electricians and widely adopted by ghost hunters. They use white noise generators, not only to drown out background noise, but to provide an electronic signal for spirits to manipulate. They place duct tape on the floor around furniture legs - to check whether things have been moved overnight.
Under the guidance of founder Tiffanie Helbling, 22, the group strives for rigor, and for them that means recorded evidence.
"Our approach is not exactly scientific," concedes Helbling, referring to the strict scientific method. "But we're more evidence-based than emotionally based."
Recordings aren't uncontroversial. YouTube features reels of supposed ghost sightings that are just videographic anomalies, Helbling says. A would-be investigator has to look at such evidence with a jaundiced eye.
Cristl Phillips, 33, a self-described "psychic sensitive," is the exception. Though she is as determined to collect hard evidence as the others, she's open to other signals. Phillips, who dates her first supernatural encounter to early childhood, says she suffers painful headaches when ghosts are present.
The Fallon and City Hotels, it turned out, weren't haunted. When the team reviewed the evidence there was initial excitement over a fragment of audio that sounded like a whispered conversation. But after matching it to video footage, Helbling discovered that the recorder had captured a whispered exchange between two team members. As a rule, whispering is forbidden during investigations, Helbling says, precisely for that reason.
Helbling says she doesn't relish playing the role of designated skeptic, but without it the group would risk tumbling into a loop of self-reinforcing enthusiasm.
"We could all high-five each other whenever we think we see something," she jokes. "High-five, I'm scared! Woo!"
SJVPI member Daniel Abbott, 22, of Manteca, says maybe 2 in 10 investigations turn up credible hauntings. The richest tend to be private residences, which the group examines only when asked to do so.
"Some people are disappointed when we tell them there's nothing going on," Helbling says. "They called us in for confirmation not investigation."
Even with homes, most searches come up dry. None of the investigators see this as disheartening. It's a side effect of having high standards, they say.
"I just want to find out what is real and what is not," says Rich Panzarino, 42. By day, Panzarino works in flight operations and information technology with the Army National Guard. In his spare time, he's one of SJVPI's newest members.
Panzarino imports a soldier's sensibility into his role in the group.
"The more involved I get, the more I find myself carrying all my equipment with me wherever I go," says the no-nonsense Panzarino.
The variety of the crew's personalities invites comparisons to the 1984 Ivan Reitman comedy "Ghostbusters," which are not entirely inappropriate, Helbling says. When she was a child, she had two imaginary friends who were characters from the film: Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson).
"I was enchanted by that movie," she laughs.
Helbling used to publish a paranormal newsletter but gave it up when it became too difficult to scrape together articles, edit them and get them printed. Instead, the SJVPI has taken to the Web.
The group maintains a MySpace page, and schedules monthly meetings for the curious through the social networking site Meetup.com. A recent meeting attracted nearly a dozen new people. They were eager to share their personal spook stories, and their reasons for curiosity about the land beyond. Many of them pinned their interest to the deaths of close relatives - lost fathers and brothers, who, they say, still visit them in dreams.
Helbling works and goes to school full-time. The ghost hunting she squeezes into the corners of her day. With all she has invested, she's still reluctant to say squarely whether she believes.
I've seen things, and I've had experiences," Helbling says. "But I'm not a believer; I'm an investigator.
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