I ain’t afraid of no ghosts…

Brian Anthony Miller, NBC5 Next
A Ghost Story
One day, a couple of months back, I saw a business card for “Paragon Paranormal Investigators.” Always on the hunt for news stories that are largely ignored by the media, I put the card in my pocket and the idea to a story on these paranormal investigators in the back of my mind.

After looking into the world of paranormal investigators on the Internet, I decided I would pitch the story idea to NBC. Then, I contacted Cher Anderson, the founder of Paragon. She seemed like an interesting person from our brief telephone conversation. She asked what a story would entail. I told her I needed to get some video of her and her team in “action.” I asked her what the investigators had going on for the week. She told me they were currently investigating a house in northern McHenry County. I asked if I could tag along, do an interview and get some footage of the team at work.

She said she would have to check with the home owner, (the client), to see if it was OK. The homeowner agreed. But she was adamant about keeping her identity private. So she would not do an interview and she did not want the address of her home or any exterior shots taken of the home. I had to agree to these stipulations, knowing the story would not be as good without them.

I would have preferred to get an interview with someone that went to the lengths of moving out of the “haunted” home to rent an apartment in a nearby town with her children. Clearly, the things that were happening in this house were traumatic enough to force a mother to pack up her essentials, grab her kids, and high tail it out of town.

Cher told me some of the reports that accompanied this case. The homeowner told the investigators that there was a lot of tension in the house. She lived there with her boyfriend, a toddler, and a middle-school aged daughter. They couldn’t explain it, but there were more fights, really bad screaming matches, that the couple never did before moving in. Then, the older child reported many odd occurrences. She said there were 2 people in the house. According to her, there was a fat man and a skinny, old man with very long fingernails present in the house.

These spirits, they said, were mischievous and even borderline violent. One day, the daughter claimed she was getting up off the couch, where she was napping. She said she felt someone grab her from behind and pull her back onto the couch. Apparently, this spirit was not ready for her to get up. There were many other unexplained happenings that concerned the mother. The family lived in the house for two years. Eventually, they couldn’t take the fighting, the weird occurrences any longer.

So I met the investigators at the house last night about 10:00 pm. Unfortunately for me, as Cher put it, “ghost hunters do it in the dark,” so the footage of them actually gathering electronic evidence was done in the dark. I couldn’t get video of that. But I was there as they set up their electronic equipment. They had several cameras, with video cameras connected to a monitor that recorded everything. They also had digital camera, thermometers to judge temperature changes.

Then I was lucky enough to get to go along as they presented some “evidence” to the owner of the courthouse Grill In Woodstock. This building was home to the courthouse, jail, morgue, and more for over 100 years. One could imagine all the suffering and anguish that occurred in this place. And the owner and some of her employees seem convinced the place is haunted. I have no idea, but I’ll do the story and let the public decide. One thing I learned was that these investigations are not like the movies or TV shows. The reality is a ghost hunter’s motto is “hurry up and wait.”