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Halloween is one of the few times a year when people can dress up as ghosts and other scary monstrosities without getting funny looks for it. During Halloween and the rest of the year, however, some people go to eerie locations and try to seek them out.
The Paranormal Investigation Club is a group of students who do just that.
“We do a lot of different things, between saving up for investigations or waiting until we can figure out where [we have permission to go],” said the club’s vice president Rebecca Wade.
Similarly to TV shows like Syfy’s “Ghost Hunters,” the Paranormal Investigation Club seeks out spots that are supposedly “haunted” and does whatever they can to prove that they are or are not. Unlike the shows, these students don’t have to sensationalize their research to maintain an audience.
“Like all the other shows, I feel there are some things they have to do to keep themselves on the air. I don’t necessarily believe in the TV shows myself, [but] sometimes it can be interesting to watch,” Wade said. “The only reason I ever find myself watching them is [to see] where they’re going. I like some of the places they go to because some of the stories behind the places are really interesting, but I don’t necessarily think all of the investigations are all that honest.”
Their process of documenting paranormal activity is similar, however.
The club collects information about any suspicious sounds, markings or occurrences that have been spotted in and around the University of Maine. Once they have secured a location and permission to explore, club members bring whatever equipment they have available, like cameras, video recorders and thermal cameras, sometimes renting equipment from Fogler Library.
“We try to distribute the equipment evenly through the groups and have people go into different rooms so we can either record noises and ask questions or videotape certain things,” Wade said.
Despite their continued efforts, the club has not yet found anything that could be considered paranormal.
“We’ve gotten some things that sounded a little weird, but they were mostly in places where it was so easy to say that the noise could have been from something else and we couldn’t really conclude that it was a paranormal thing,” Wade said.
Wade said non-members will approach them and tell stories about odd things they’ve seen, but the club has “never really experienced anything actually creepy.”
Aside from “ghost hunting,” the club does a host of other things related to the paranormal.
“We have a lot of discussions in the club about anything paranormal-related, [about cryptids like] Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, things like that. It can be ghosts, the afterlife, different psychic methods like tarot cards and what we believe in, what we don’t believe in,” Wade said.
The club isn’t only full of paranormal disciples who are determined ghosts and similar things exist and are in our midst. Plenty of members share contrasting viewpoints, which bolsters debates and multi-faceted discussions.
The Paranormal Investigation Club can’t help their association with Halloween, so they take advantage of the season as a prime fundraising opportunity.
“Halloween is our best time to make money for our club. [In] our bake sales, we try to decorate our foods to look creepy [and] we try to have haunted houses set up or something like that,” Wade said.
The club also tries to hold an investigation around Halloween, their next target being the area around the bike path behind the New Balance Student Recreation Center.
“We had a guest speaker last year who said he’s heard that those places are very haunted and he himself thinks they are, so we’re just going to check it out,” Wade said.
Most of the club’s fundraising efforts are put toward a bigger-scale trip to a place with an avid paranormal history. The next site they hope to visit is Salem, Mass., the location of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.
“Some people [in the club] haven’t been there,” said Wade. “We’ll probably look at cemeteries [and] go to old sites that people say are haunted. [I don’t] know if we’ll investigate them, but it’ll be nice to go.”
The club has gained a bit of a stigma as a breeding ground for people who are “really crazy,” but Wade says the club is open to all sorts of people, including non-believers in the paranormal.
“Some of us are the complete opposite of [the believers] and are going there because we want to hear the other person’s side, or they want to see what other people think.” Wade said. “If anyone’s ever interested in going, whether they believe in that stuff or not, they’re welcome to come. It helps the discussions. If everyone agrees, the club meeting ends in like 15 minutes, but if people are going back and forth, it brings a lot of thoughts out that wouldn’t have come out otherwise.”
Wade says the club isn’t always centered on trying to find peculiarities, occasionally taking time to have movie nights filled with horror films, especially around Halloween.
The Paranormal Investigation Club meets on Wednesdays at 7 p.m. in Room 201 of Winslow Hall. Anyone from devout believers to skeptics with a healthy curiosity are encouraged to check it out.
