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L.C.C.C. Paranormal Crew’s Spirit Week events: Bake sale/“Ghost Adventures” Mon., Oct. 24, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.; basket raffle/”Ghost Hunters” Tues., Oct. 25, 11 a.m.-1 p.m.; guest speaking by Evans, 11 a.m.-noon, all on third floor of student center; open-to-the-public seminar with APRG, 6-8 p.m., in Building 11, room 131, $2 admission. Info: AnthraciteParanormal.com, mike@anthraciteparanormal.com
by Nikki M. MascaliWeekender Editor
Spirit Week is a chance for students to show school spirit, often at pep rallies, participating in themed days and more. This year, Spirit Week at Luzerne County Community College in Nanticoke will also be about spirits — of the paranormal kind.
L.C.C.C. Paranormal Crew is cosponsoring the festivities that will be held on campus Oct. 24-28. The club will hold basket raffles, a digital voice recorder giveaway, a bake sale, screenings of popular ghost-themed TV shows and an open-to-the-public presentation by Mike Evans of Anthracite Paranormal Research Group (APRG).
Following her sister’s death, Ariel Shiffer, the club’s founder and first president, began having some talks with broadcast communications instructor Paul Sinclair; the conversations often led toward paranormal things, especially since Sinclair is part of the APRG.
“I brought the idea (of a school-based group) up,” said Shiffer, who is now also an APRG member. “When I was younger, stuff always happened when people passed close to me, like my grandfather and my uncle, so I was always interested and always watched all the shows and wanted a group so bad.”
“I told her about the work Mike and I do, and she got very interested in it,” said Sinclair, who goes on investigations and uses his home studio to remove background noises from APRG’s audio footage.
The two spent nearly a semester drafting the club’s constitution and mission statement before the Paranormal Crew became official last fall. With more than 60 members, “we’re already one of the biggest, if not the biggest, organizations on campus,” Sinclair stated.
Shiffer, who is in her final semester at L.C.C.C., explained new club members will get trained on a trip to a cemetery.
“(We’ll) show them the basic guidelines for using a voice recorder, taking pictures, not to jump to conclusions, keep your head about you and maybe go on real investigations … and Mike’s probably going to help a lot.”
Evans often provides his equipment, including full-spectrum cameras, thermal cameras and voice recorders and recently took the club to Gettysburg, Pa., for two investigations. The historic spot is one of Evans’ favorite places to investigate; it was on a visit there more than 20 years ago that got him interested in the paranormal.
He was walking by the Devil’s Den area and saw a lot of poison oak, so to avoid it, he was jumping from rock to rock when he got the feeling someone was watching him.
“I just stopped and turned around, a guy was standing on the rocks, too,” Evans recalled. “I said, ‘God almighty, he doesn’t have any shoes on,’ and there’s poison oak all around … I thought he was maybe homeless and sleeping in the woods. He just raised his right arm and goes, ‘I’m over there.’”
Evans looked toward where he was pointing and when he turned back, the man was gone.
“There was nowhere for him to run, I would have heard him running through the trees,” Evans said.
Evans’ sighting has actually been certified and isn’t the scariest thing he — or Sinclair — has seen. That came during an investigation roughly two years ago on a stretch of Route 33 in Monroe County known for fatal accidents. The thermal camera picked up an ice-cold signature that would appear and disappear.
“I looked at the screen, and it was about 7 feet tall,” Sinclair said. “Then I saw it get down on all fours, shrink in size and crawl into the hillside. When you see something like that, it kind of tests your ideas of what is real. That was the scariest one for me … that really had the element of a demonic signature to it. It’s just amazing how some of the technology can really bring this up to light.”
Separating the real from the fake is what draws these three investigators to the field, and during Evans’ Spirit Week presentation, he will explain their gear and display some findings, including an EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) from near that same Monroe County spot of an American Indian issuing a warning about a bad spirit nearby in his native tongue, which APGR had decoded by an American Indian dialect expert.
“There was a lot of history in that area because when they put in Route 33, they actually leveled Indian burial grounds,” Evans explained. “They didn’t move them, they just plowed right over them.”
Sending the recording out to an expert is only part of the APRG’s extensive work because “we want stuff that’s irrefutable,” Sinclair said.
“I’d put my group up against any group on TV,” Evans said. “And we like to get the (paranormal) groups in the area together for a conference.”
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