Published: October 30, 2009 11:25 pm      

Paranormal society says this is the time of year for ghost hunters

CUMBERLAND — Sid Evans and Scott Shreve are not afraid of the dark.

They’re fond of cemeteries and haunted houses. Their hobby is looking for ghosts.

Ironically, they call themselves ‘w(i)mps.’

“People call us different things,” said Evans, co-founder of the Western Maryland Paranormal Society, or WMPS, or ‘w(i)mps.’ “What do they call us, Scott?” 

“Paranormal investigators,” Shreve told a rapt audience at the Washington Street Library.

“Ghost hunters. Ghost busters. Ghost whisperers. Uh...crazies.”

“What?” Evans said, feigning surprise.

“Sickos.”

“What?”

“Psychos,” Shreve said. “A lot of things.”

But skeptics were scarce Thursday night — the eve of Halloween Eve.

About 75 people packed the children’s section of the library to hear Evans and Shreve talk about some of the paranormal encounters they’ve had since forming WMPS in February 2007. The two friends have completed close to 70 investigations in the tri-state area.

“We’re looking to disprove a haunting, not to prove it,” said Evans, adding that WMPS takes a “scientific approach” to ghost hunting.

A team of not quite a dozen uses tools such as an electromagnetic field detector, night vision goggles, video cameras and voice recorders to investigate possible hauntings. To date, most of their evidence of the paranormal has come from electronic voice phenomena, or voice recordings.

“This was at a residence in Ridgeley,” said Shreve, playing a short recording for the audience. “There was a room she would not go into. She said we could go in, but she wasn’t going to go anywhere around it.”

On the recording, the voices of Shreve and Evans can be heard.

“You want to check the closet?” one says.

“Yeah.”

Then, in a whisper that the investigators didn’t hear until reviewing the tape: There’s nothing in the closet.

Thursday’s audience gasped collectively.

“It’s fascinating, I think,” said Charlene Cochrane, of Short Gap, who brought her friend Samantha Steimetz, 21, to Thursday’s presentation. “I mean, who knows? Seriously. Who knows?”

The WMPS team, which has Facebook and MySpace pages, is creating a Web page and plans to shoot a pilot television episode to farm out to cable stations, Evans said. Wanna-be ghost hunters can go on an investigation with the team to get some training, and possibly earn a spot.

“We do this to help people, to try to find answers, to better understand what’s going on in this crazy world of ours,” said Evans, who anticipated a good crowd Thursday, but was surprised so many people came.

“We knew that you were out there,” Evans said. “And we knew that this was the time of year when what we call the ‘closet hunter’ comes out. Everybody wants to be a ghost hunter.”

Stephanie Dolly is considering joining the group.

“I’ve had a lot of weird things happen,” said Dolly, 22, of Cumberland, who came with her father, Bob Dolly. As a child, she often explored Rose Hill Cemetery and “felt weird being there.”

“Sometimes you feel like you’re the only one, when you have a story happen,” she said. “It’s just neat to know everyone else has stories, too.”

Take Scott Porter’s experience, for example. The 26-year-old was at Lover’s Leap one time when he heard what he swore was American Indian chanting.

“I thought I was hearing things,” said Porter, of Cumberland, who got an autographed photo of the WMPS team Thursday night. “It started off real soft, and it got louder and louder and then it faded away. It really didn’t scare me because it was in the daylight, but it was just kind of weird. You don’t normally hear things like that.”

A friend with Porter also heard the sounds, he said.

“The way I see it, the human body is a big thing of energy, you know?” Porter said. “And they say that energy never dies. It just takes a different form.”

Contact Kristin Harty Barkley at kharty@times-news.com.