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Spirit-ual Business
by Karen West

As a young child, Jody Cassady used to see strangers walking around her house. THEY weren’t imaginary friends.

When she was a teenager, she recalls seeing her neighbor standing in the middle of the street staring at her through the window. She ran to get her mother and when they returned, they saw the flashing lights of an ambulance and paramedics wheeling their neighbor’s covered body out on a gurney. He had died inside his home of a heart attack.

And as an adult, during a recent ghost-hunting expedition at a Tacoma cemetery, Cassady says she was drawn to the graves of two children where she heard young voices. She quickly snapped pictures with her digital camera and discovered an orb (a ball of light believed to represent ghosts) over one of the graves.

Her experiences might sound crazy to some, but to Cassady, they are just a few of the paranormal adventures that have followed her throughout her life. She is not afraid of ghosts – she prefers to call them spirits – and, in fact, welcomes the unexpected “visits.” As a full-fledged ghost hunter, she even seeks them out.

Vice president of Advanced Ghost Hunters of Seattle-Tacoma (AGHOST), one of the largest and most active ghost-hunting groups in the Northwest, Cassady is not alone in her paranormal (beyond normal) quests. There are dozens of ghost-hunting groups, many formed by women, throughout Washington. About 10 exist in the Seattle area alone.
“I do not recall a time when I haven’t been aware of spirits,” Cassady says, adding that she began ghost hunting at age 11. “The spirits that congregated at my parents’ home and those who visit me at my own are as much a part of my life as those people who are part of this physical world. I consider this a gift that I carry with me at all times.”

Like Cassady, ghost hunters are devoted to investigating and researching the history of places where unexplained events have occurred. They are constantly honing their abilities to communicate with spirits and serve as sounding boards for those seeking answers to phenomena that defy scientific explanations.

Kristie Murphy sought out ghost-hunting groups six years ago when she literally heard things go bump in the night at her Longview, Wash., farmhouse. Since then, she has formed her own group, West Coast Ghost Hunters, and has invested in high-tech digital cameras and listening devices to help her track and document ghosts. “We try to bring fact and understanding to something that has had neither,” Murphy says.

Shortly after moving to her six-acre farm in 2000, she started hearing noises and voices when no one was around. She saw shadows out of the corner of her eye, only to look and find nobody there. Her 17-year-old daughter once felt her bed shaking at night. Her husband noticed that the kitchen cabinets kept opening after he had closed them. Her 13- and 15-year-old sons felt cold spots when there was no breeze or had the feeling someone was watching them.

A friend once stayed in her house and was awakened in the middle of the night by a radio that came on full-blast. The same thing happened at the same time the second night. On the third night, her friend was awakened by the music again, but this time it was much softer. (Before going to bed that night, Murphy and her friend had asked the ghost to please turn down the volume.) Each time ghost-hunting groups investigated her farm, she was told there was paranormal activity in the house and on the property, part of which had been a cemetery in the 1800s.

Most people dismiss these types of experiences as the products of a vivid imagination. “We know it’s not always imagination,” Murphy says, adding that her group helps people understand what might be happening in their homes or businesses. “We tend to be fearful of things we don’t understand, largely because there is somewhat of a stigma placed on the paranormal and anyone who is open to it.”

Cassady knows that stigma well. She was raised in Southern California by parents who recognized and even integrated the paranormal and metaphysical into their daily lives. As a result, she endured years of being teased about living in the “Addams Family.”

“Most people thought we were off-kilter,” Cassady says of her sister, who is “psychic sensitive” and her parents, who still practice healing and paranormal research in Anaheim. As a teenager when she first began working as a healer and reading Tarot, she remembers being met with fear, ridicule and outrage by her friends. “I lost nine out of every 10 friends during that time.”

Despite the skeptics, Cassady remains passionate about ghost hunting and encourages people not to be afraid to share their beliefs. “Death is not the end of our existence,” she says. She advises people to “think with your mind, know in your soul and speak with your heart. Those who are open and wanting or needing to hear what you have to share will come to you.”

Ghost hunters come from all walks of life and all have their own methods for communicating with the other side. While ghost hunting has no gender gap, the percentage of women joining paranormal groups appears to be growing. “Women are more intuitive,” says Jake, owner of Private Eye Tours and a member of Washington State Paranormal Investigations and Research, or WSPIR. (She requests that her last name not be used because she makes a living taking strangers on late-night murder mystery and ghost-hunting trips throughout Seattle.)

“Some people think that if you believe in ghosts you are a nutcase,” but Jake prefers to think of herself as quirky or eccentric. Unlike the ghosts she hunts, Jake – with her face painted white and red blood trickling down her cheek – is easy to spot, especially during the month of October when her three-hour “Haunted Happenings” tours are booked solid every day. Usually wearing a witch or vampire costume, she drives her guests around Seattle’s most haunted areas in a 15-seat ghostly-white van. While the month of October brings out the thrill-seekers who want to be spooked, she says “the truth is the ghosts could care less whether it’s Halloween. They come out at all times, all year long.”

As the field of paranormal research has become more widely known and accepted around the world, ghost-hunting enthusiasts all across Washington have literally come out of the woodwork over the last few years, says Ross Allison, founder and president of AGHOST. “Ghosts are the new rock ’n’ roll,” says Allison, who teaches “Ghostology 101” (based on his book of the same title) at Tacoma Community College.

Allison, who blames his mother’s ghost stories for his 15-year pursuit of otherworldly experiences, says that when he first formed his ghost-hunting organization, there were no similar groups in the Seattle area. Today, his group has more than 100 members and he has conducted dozens of expeditions and paranormal investigations in Seattle and all across the country. Ghost-hunting popularity also has been spurred by the media and an increase in movies and television shows focusing on the paranormal.

While Seattle is young compared with most East Coast cities, it has gained the reputation of being a hotbed of haunted happenings. Ghostly legends include the dead soldier who still guards Fort Worden in Port Townsend; Chief Seattle’s eldest daughter, known as Princess Angeline, who still strolls through the Pike Place Market; and the spirits who continue to enjoy the ambiance of Capitol Hill’s Harvard Exit Theatre.

During a recent Spooked in Seattle tour of the waterfront, Pike Place Market and the downtown area, Dani Davis, also a member of AGHOST, pointed out at least 20 sites that are believed to be frequented by ghosts or “energy sources.” “We get some funky things happening here,” Davis says.

Sure enough, during a stop at the old Commodore Hotel on Second Avenue, which has been boarded up for months, a light was shining from one of the second-floor rooms. The front entryway was padlocked and Davis indicated that there was no other known entry to the hotel, which is slated to become a parking lot. “Every time we come here, we notice something different,” Davis says, adding that some people have seen the curtains being drawn in some rooms and lights flickering in others.

Before each tour, Davis asks her guests if they get spooked easily and warns them that what they might see over the next two hours is not for the faint of heart. Her two-hour tour ends at the Market Theatre at the end of Post Alley, where patrons and employees have said they sometimes hear children crying in the “crying room” when it’s empty.

Ghost hunting may sound scary to some, but Davis and others say that most of their investigations are far from spooky. Instead, they are time-consuming research trips that involve the use of high-tech, electronic detection equipment such as electro-magnetic field (EMF) devices, motion detectors, radiation monitors and temperature sensors. Because orbs and other sources of energy are usually only visible on photographs, researchers also spend hours taking dozens of pictures with digital cameras.

Ross Allison admits to being afraid on a few of his expeditions – like the time he felt a firm, invisible hand pushing against his shoulder while he was investigating the former morgue on Alcatraz Island – but for the most part, he takes a more scientific approach to ghost hunting. “I’ve always taught people that it’s only our imagination that scares us,’’ Allison says. “We scare ourselves more than the ghosts.”

Karen West is a Bainbridge Island-based freelance writer and frequent contributor to Seattle Woman.

©2006 Caliope Publishing Company