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Who ya gonna call? Ghost hunters!

A spirited search for the paranormal

Wednesday, Oct. 11, 2006

Click here to enlarge this photo Naomi Brookner⁄The Gazette Silver Spring residents Barbara Finch (left) and Lynn Koiner search for ghosts Monday evening using their ghost-hunting tools under the ‘‘ghost tree” outside Koiner’s house. Click here to enlarge this photo Naomi Brookner⁄The Gazette Ghost hunter Lynn Koiner searches for ghosts outside her Silver Spring home using her dousing rods as tools.

Blanche died in one of the bedrooms upstairs. But don’t tell her that — she may not know she’s dead.

Blanche is one of several ghosts in Silver Spring. If you know what you’re looking for, ghosts aren’t hard to find. Silver Spring residents Lynn Koiner and Barbara Finch of the Baltimore-Washington Paranormal Investigators know just how to do it.

‘‘For me, it’s just something interesting,” said Koiner, 61. ‘‘In 2004, I just kind of took it on as a hobby.”

For Finch, 46, it’s part of her job as a feng shui consultant. She helps rid homes of cold, dark energy and helps create harmony between the home and nature. Cold, dark energy, she said, is often attractive to ghosts.

‘‘Maybe you’ve never seen something, but you’ve heard or felt something,” she said. ‘‘My clients usually call me out for other things, but then they’ll say, ‘Well, we’ve got this problem in the basement.’”

The women know of about 10 places in Silver Spring that are haunted, some of which are private residences. Families sometimes call them when they think they might have a ‘‘ghost problem.” Other times, the women will head out to public places on their own or with other members of the BWPI to search for ghosts on their own. It’s something anyone can do, they said.

Their tools are simple: small copper dousing rods (thin copper rods in an L-shape), amethyst, smoky quartz and a tape recorder with a hand-held microphone. Finch also uses a luopa, a Chinese compass with a needle that spins if it detects a ghost’s energy.

Tell us a ghost story Had any ghostly experiences in Silver Spring or Takoma Park? E-mail your tale to talkaboutit@ gazette.net. Don’t forget to include your full name, address and daytime phone number.

Dousing rods also detect energy, and when stacked, amethyst and smoky quartz attract ghosts, Koiner said.

Wind chimes also attract ghosts, so Koiner has created a ‘‘ghost tree” in the corner of her yard with chimes and crystals. It’s a shadowed part of the yard, which is important, since ghosts like dark places. Visitors, she said, usually want to see a ghost or two. A Gazette reporter did, too, but nothing appeared.

Electric voice phenomena — think of the movie ‘‘White Noise” — is real, Koiner said, and a good way to find a ghost. If there’s a ghost in a room and it speaks, a recorder will pick up its voice. She recalled one time on a ghost hunt with some other investigators, they heard a door open and shut played back on a tape that they hadn’t heard when they were recording.

‘‘Some people are more sensitive,” Finch said about seeing ghosts. ‘‘If you don’t believe in ghosts, it’s going to be harder for you to see them because it’s not part of your reality.”

People create their own realities, Finch said, and for many, ghosts aren’t a part of them. They aren’t supposed to be. But often, she said, people do wonder.

‘‘I never see the people who don’t believe in ghosts,” Koiner said. ‘‘The ones who I see are the believers.”

One day, while searching for ghosts in the National Park Seminary in Forest Glen, the women came upon a man and woman walking across the property.

‘‘He said, ‘I am a normal, very well adjusted, practical person,’ ” Koiner said. ‘‘ ‘But let me tell you a story.’ ”

The man had been to a dance when the ballroom at the seminary was still open. While he was on the dance floor, he looked up and saw several soldiers in uniforms that appeared to be from the 1960s, looking down from the balcony forlornly. The man went back to a second dance just to see if he saw them again. And he did.

It was quite a sight for the man, but it must have also been a sight for the soldiers, Finch said.

Finch recalled a house on Thayer Avenue where she used to volunteer, spending time with a dying AIDS patient. A hospice nurse who was a nun used to visit as well, but did not get along with him. He couldn’t speak, but the nun would often preach to him about his disease and about homosexuality.

The man eventually died and his family asked Finch to stay at his home for a few days while they brought him home for his funeral. ‘‘When I came by and opened up the door, I heard [the man] go ‘Hi,’ ” she said.

It didn’t stop there. While Finch was in the home, the nun came to pack up the man’s medical equipment. Her trips from his room to her car became faster and faster, Finch said. On her last trip, the nun was running. She threw her things in her car and took off.

‘‘All of a sudden, I could hear [the man] laughing,” Finch said. ‘‘He couldn’t speak before, and I guess he took the opportunity to get a little revenge.”

It was only verbal revenge, as ghosts aren’t really dangerous, Koiner said. But that doesn’t mean they can’t give a person a fright, intentionally or not.

Finch recalled a family who used to live on Thayer Avenue. They had a young daughter who kept talking to ‘‘the man in black.” They could hear her talking to someone who didn’t answer. An active imagination? Maybe ... or maybe not.

The wife started having doubts about her daughter’s imagination when she saw a partial manifestation of a man one evening when she went to pick up his shoes — she thought they were her husband’s. Her husband began having doubts when he saw one of his daughter’s push-toys spinning in circles — and his daughter was nowhere to be found.

One evening when the wife was on the first floor of the house, she thought she heard footsteps coming up the basement stairs. Impossible, she thought, because her family was upstairs. But then she saw the doorknob start to turn and yelled for the ghost to leave. The knob stopped turning and the door swung open on its own. Nothing was there.

Asking a ghost to leave often works, Finch said, but ‘‘there are some ghosts that are stronger than others.”

Do the women sometimes get the heebie-jeebies when they’re out looking for ghosts? Sure. But that’s part of the fun. Besides — you never know — they might accidentally be giving ghosts a little bit of a fright, too.