Is Your House Haunted? Real-Life Ghostbusters to the Rescue

Shortly after physical therapist Sally Morgan moved into her charming, late-19th-century cottage in Northampton, MA, she realized that she and her two pet corgis were not alone.

The price of the two-bedroom fixer-upper had seemed almost too good to be true. She soon discovered why she had gotten a bargain.

“Within a week, I started to feel a presence in the house. There were cold spots, and the dogs would stop and look at [invisible] things,” says Morgan, now 59. “In the shadows in the evenings, you’d think you saw a lady in a long dress. But was it her? Was it the curtains? Was it the shadows?”

Morgan decided she needed professional help. She turned to a feng shui expert/”energy catalyst” from Texas, who specialized in “shifting the energy” in houses, even haunted ones.

The spectral specialist chanted as she walked from room to room burning incense, waving feathers to force out the bad energy, and leaving a trail of rice and spices to absorb the rest. She rattled a chain of goat hooves as she walked through the basement.Then she returned upstairs to confer with her client.

“There’s someone living with you,” she told her.

For homeowners like Morgan, who worry that malevolent forces are lurking under their beds, hiding in their cellars, or setting up shop in their walk-in closets, a cottage industry of real-life ghostbusters is available to help.

It includes volunteer paranormal investigation organizations, which have proliferated across the country in recent years, thanks largely to the popularity of reality TV shows such as Syfy’s “Ghost Hunters” and TLC’s “Paranormal Lockdown.” There are also a host of self-proclaimed psychics, mediums, witches, shamans, and spiritual healers—as well as church-sanctioned religious leaders, including Catholic exorcists.

It is, of course, a very old profession. “Every culture in the world has stories about ghosts and spirits,” says Scott Cashman, a cultural anthropology professor who oversees the paranormal studies program at Harper College in Palatine, IL. So “there’s a certain arrogance in saying ghosts and spirits don’t exist.”

The first scientific group formed to examine psychic and paranormal mysteries was the Society for Psychical Research. It was created in 1882 in London by a psychologist, a physicist, and two philosophers, and its members included Charles Dickens and “Sherlock Holmes” author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The current crop of ghostbusters don’t use proton packs and Ecto Containment Units like in the movie. Some use tape recorders and electromagnetic meters. Others help wayward souls cross over by reciting incantations or prayers. And some just opt for some good, old-fashioned Ouija board burnings.

How to get rid of pesky spirits

To skeptics, all of this may sound like a weekend trip to Loony Town. But about 42% of Americans believe in ghosts, according to a 2013 Harris Poll of 2,250 adults.

And about 33% of folks would buy a haunted home, according to a recent realtor.com® survey. Forty-two percent were staunchly opposed to the idea.

So if homeowners really do believe there is a ghost haunting their home, Beetlejuice-style, what should they do?

Cashman cautions against spending a fortune on figuring it out. Costs for spirit-banishing services range from zero to thousands of dollars. “There are plenty of sincere people out there who investigate these things,” he says.

OK, so let’s get down to the eerie brass tacks. If a spirit seems dangerous, the homeowner should skip the burning sage. This popular remedy may get rid of the spooks for a few days, but they’ll return even crankier, says Amy Blackthorn, a self-described witch in Newark, DE, who cleanses homes for a fee.

Instead, Blackthorn and her group of fellow witches use creative methods to cast out wraiths. In one case, they burned a 12-year-old girl’s Ouija board, believing it was responsible for bringing spirits into her family’s mid-19th-century Pennsylvania home. They further purged the home with a burning mixture of Epsom salts and rubbing alcohol.

Folks may also want to turn to their religion for some divine (and free!) assistance. The Rev. Gary Thomas has been casting out souls of the departed and blessing homes of members of his Catholic diocese in San Jose, CA, for the past dozen years. He starts by saying the Pope Leo XIII prayer. Then he sprinkles a mixture of holy water and salt in each room and around the home’s exterior, including lawn and garage.

Thomas’ real-life experiences training as an exorcist in Rome were the inspiration for the 2011 movie “The Rite,” starring Anthony Hopkins.

For particularly stubborn, wayward souls, he’ll bring in reinforcements: A priest will celebrate a Gregorian Mass, designed to help the person’s soul reach heaven, for 30 days.

What if it’s more Casper than ‘Poltergeist’?

These are the worst-case scenarios. Most of the time, homeowners can exist peacefully alongside spirits.

“It’s frightening … because it’s out of the norm,” says Mary Marshall, founder of The Paranormal MD, a Chicago-area volunteer paranormal investigation group. “But [often] it’s not really threatening.”

Owners of haunted homes should do their research to find out if there was a death in the home and, if so, what happened. If they would prefer to live a supernatural-free existence, they can ask the ghosts by name to stop whatever they’re doing, says Marshall. Calmly tell the souls that they wish them well, but it’s time to cross over. The majority of these ghosts were good people in life, so their spirits might turn out to be equally polite.

Or they can opt for a full-on human/spook détente.

In the case of Sally Morgan, the specialist she’d hired told her that her house was, in fact, haunted by an elderly woman and her small black dog. The ghost “was delighted that I was living in the house,” Morgan was told. “The old woman loved my grandma’s china, and liked to have midnight tea parties.

“I didn’t feel any malice from the ghost,” she says. So she decided against trying to get rid of her. But when she moved out several years ago, she told her unexpected tenant not to follow her to her new abode.

‘I ain’t afraid of no ghosts’

Even if a home is purportedly haunted, it can have some tangible benefits, like price.

Retired real estate agent Bonnie Hammer, 64, of Southbury, CT, was looking to downsize with her two children after a separation. So when she found an affordable, pre-Revolutionary War farmhouse in upstate New York on 2 acres, it seemed like a godsend.

But the trouble began shortly after she settled into her new bedroom on her first night sleeping in the house.

“It sounded like every single window in the house was being smashed,” she said of the violent noises that went on for about 10 minutes. “I thought I had moved into gangland central. I thought we were all dead.”

When it finally stopped, Hammer cautiously got out of bed to investigate—and discovered nothing had been broken. And her kids were fast asleep in their own bedrooms.

Her next night in the home was equally unsettling. She was lying in bed when she heard footsteps in the hallway. In the morning, her son asked why she had been floating near the ceiling in his room the night before.

After that night, the spirit left her—mostly—alone. Since no one had been hurt, she decided to stay.

Several months later, two women who’d grown up in the house showed up on her front porch.

“Have you met the ghost yet?” one of them asked.

They told her that their father had held a séance years back to discover what he could about the spirit haunting their home.They learned her name was Abigail Pardy, and that she lived in the home in the early 1800s, and was forever waiting for her granddaughter, who’d been banished due to an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, to come home.

Hammer believes Pardy was initially angry when she moved in and began renovations. But Pardy relaxed when she saw the improvements.

A few years later, Hammer moved and rented out the house. She got a chance to say goodbye to Pardy when she photographed the empty rooms.

“In the foyer, there was a swirly cloud. It’s hard to describe. It looks like somebody made of smoke,” she says.

Ghostbusters … or MythBusters?

But of course, all of that freaky stuff happening in your home could have a perfectly natural explanation.

Those sudden noises could just be the pipes, or the random sounds a home makes as it settles. Cold spots are often due to poor insulation or drafty windows. And apparitions can disappear once the smudges on a homeowner’s glasses are cleaned.

Or the sightings and voices can be attributed to mental illness.

About “99.9% of the time, homeowners who are experiencing paranormal activity are actually experiencing things that could be explained through logical means,” says Brandon Alvis, founder of the American Paranormal Research Association, a Los Angeles–based group. The group receives hundreds of calls a year requesting that it investigate. “A lot of times you have people who are mixing medications or have problems in their own personal lives—and that can lead to a lot of anxiety and stress.”

Victor Fuhrman, a vice president of sales at an industrial supply company by day—and co-director of the volunteer Paranormal Investigation of NYC by night—blames bad electrical wiring or other real-world problems for most supposedly haunted homes.

The outfit once investigated a Queens, NY, apartment where a man was seeing and hearing things that weren’t there and becoming sick. It turns out he had taped a piece of cardboard over a central AC duct in his home. Without a free flow of air, the duct had allowed fungus and mold to flourish—and he’d been inhaling it. His health problems ceased after the AC duct was cleaned.

“You’ve had this explosion of paranormal entertainment over the last 10 to 15 years,” Fuhrman says. “That instilled in many folks the sense that ghosts are everywhere.

“There are spirits around,” he adds. “But not necessarily causing the problems in your home.”