We go in with the idea that it may or may not be paranormal activity, as opposed to, say, easily explained other stuff,” says Jamin “J” Jones, who founded C.A.P.S. with his wife Kristie many years ago. “Ninety-nine percent of the time, we’re able to prove it’s other stuff.” This process, called debunking, takes hours of time using observation, highly specialized equipment, tedious reviewing of film and sound, and careful, repeated experience.

Jones and his crew, though, live for the possibility that they will be able to witness — and record, with their special equipment, irrefutable scientific evidence — every possible dimension of a ghost’s actual existence.

“The most convincing, for me, would have to be seeing a ghost — and by that I mean the visible manifestation, in human form, of someone who used to be alive. An apparition, right in front of me.”

To that end, he has assembled his team on a recent Friday night to investigate the house, grounds, and cemetery of the former Buswell estate, known for decades as Stillington Hall.

We drive slowly up a narrow, winding, unpaved road with unforgiving twists and turns, deep into acres of unlit woods, through a cast iron gate that opens — slowly — to deeper, darker woods and a sharp turn downward. There, looming against a chilly October sky and the faint distant sweep of Eastern Point Light, is the outline of a Tudor-style mansion with towers and turrets, imported stone archways and leaded bottle-glass windows, as haunting in the image it cuts against the off-white clouds and moon as in anything spectral it might contain.

As horror movies go, it’s straight from central casting. But no one cops to being worried about this.

In fact, not only do we go all the way into the ancient-feeling structure, against every human impulse of caution; we go in, and, after a breathtaking tour of a virtual 1920s museum led by Evans, three of us — two trained ghost-investigators and a wide-eyed reporter — proceed well into the house by flashlight, climb three spooky, unheated flights of stairs to the servants quarters, and step into a sealed cedar closet, where the unclaimed belongings of the original owners, Leslie and Mary Buswell and their son, Peter, are carefully preserved.

As we settle in to wait for any signs of ghosts that might manifest — a sound, an apparition, a touch, a smell — lead investigator Jones explains that the house was sold at auction in 1997, following the death of Peter, the only heir, and no one came forward to claim either the house or its contents. The designer-architect who bought the house at auction bought it all—down to and including the personal effects of the original family: clothing, keepsakes, toys. It all sits here in this tiny closet, in perpetuity, and we are starting the investigation here because it is likely the most invested with emotion and meaning to any spirits that may linger.

While we sit and wait in the cedar closet — Jones has brought recording equipment meant to capture sounds and images not visible to the naked ear and eye — three other teams of investigators, one accompanied by a Beacon photographer, have dispersed throughout the rest of the house, each carrying similar equipment. The plan is to rotate investigators to each so-called “hot spot” — an area reported by the caretaker over the last decade as feeling particularly haunted — over several hours, hoping to entice spirits forward, on the one hand, and set aside more plausible explanations for the sights, sounds and sensations experienced by the caretaker, on the other.

Jones, whose web site details encounters with some rather frightening phenomena over the last several years, describes himself as a science-based skeptic who does not accept that the world we see is all there is to our surroundings. Smart, funny, easygoing, and willing to explore any household, yard, location or object for paranormal activity, free of charge, he works for a plumbing company and comes across as the most reasonable, grounded-in-reality guy around. Married to Kristie, a stay-at-home mom who designs jewelry along with her paranormal investigative skills, Jones is strict about who may and may not join them to be trained to do this work, and which paranormal groups, TV shows, and psychics are trustworthy and which are just all melodramatic show.

“I take what we do seriously,” he says. “People are putting their trust in us. We owe them.”

Asked to explain how the detection equipment works, and what exactly such natural energy phenomena as electromagnetic fields (which many of the devices are meant to detect) have to do with ghosts, Jones is patient and thorough in his answers. He is also quick to look for other causes besides ghosts as this or that machine beeps or whines in response to something in the environment.

Nevertheless, it is jolting to hear him and others talking quietly and gently to spirits who might be present in the cedar closet, assorted bedrooms, the library, the Great Room, the grounds. Spirits are coaxed to come forward and speak to us, touch us, move something; knock something over; respond to a knock; express an opinion.

“Are you here, Peter? Mr. Buswell? Mrs. Buswell? What do you think of what the new owner has done with the restoration?” Jones asks, in each room we enter. Dark, silent, unheated, restored to the original paint and décor that marked the 1929 completion of Stillington Hall, no room feels empty, and yet no room feels, to this newcomer at least, haunted.

Indeed, though some equipment is picking up phenomena that will be looked at closely for paranormal evidence over the next several days of editing, even the most experienced investigators on this C.A.P.S. assignment are impressed with how quiet, and how at peace, such a big old haunted-seeming mansion is feeling, in contrast to all expectations for a juicy paranormal find.

“If it’s a ghost,” says Jones at one point, “it’s Casper.”

At least one of us has been hoping for just such a pronouncement since the last street light was left behind, but it is hard not to hear the disappointment in the C.A.P.S. investigators that we have not yet encountered, on this most unusual assignment into a local treasure of a landmark, clear, irrefutable evidence of active spirits that might be photographed and reported in the local paper.

“I’ve been knocked on the head, in one house,” Jones says. “I’ve been pushed. When it happens to you—it’s amazing. There’s not a doubt in my mind.”

Spectral speculation: defining the term ghost

By Pamela Campbell/capeann@cnc.com

Fri Oct 31, 2008, 02:12 PM EDT

CAPE ANN BEACON NEWSPAPER  - OCTOBER 31 2008

Gloucester -

So what, exactly, is a ghost?

For those who believe in ghosts as the lingering spectral evidence of a human being who is no longer alive, there are as many answers to that question as images to go with them. Many believers in spirits are religious Christians whose belief in life after death follows Catholic or Protestant teaching, which has its roots both in the Biblical record of God’s word about the kingdom of heaven and in the cultural and mythological history of eastern and western Europe, from ancient, pre-Biblical times through the many upheavals in doctrine and dogma, superstition and science, that occurred over hundreds of years beyond the coming of Christianity.

Chief among these is the image of God’s army of angels always at war with Satan’s army of demons, made lastingly memorable by John Milton in his epic poem, Paradise Lost, which in fact wasn’t written until the 17th century. This constant struggle between good spirits and bad spirits continues to be the narrative of many ghost stories, and most believers in ghosts are careful to distinguish between spirits who linger for a variety of unfinished-business-type reasons but mean no harm, and spirits whose energy and purpose is unequivocally evil and bears ill will toward those living beings they seek attachment to. (Attachment to living beings increases the energy and power of one of these spirits, according to believers in this kind of spectral phenomena).

Both good and evil spirits can cause a “haunting,” which is described by Jamin Jones as “consistent intelligent contact with the purpose of trying to communicate something” by a spirit toward the living. It can be in the form of an apparition that keeps appearing, sounds or voices, movement of objects, slamming of doors or windows, or even a smell or the sudden experience of extreme cold (warmth is absorbed by spirits as a means of increasing their own energy), and the sensation of being physically touched.

Theories also abound as to why some spirits seem to be “caught” between this life and the next, unable to cross over. Some investigators will assist these spirits by urging them to “go toward the light” and complete their journey over. Some need something attended to, and special skills are needed to assist in determining what that might be (psychics, for example). Jones recounts the most haunting sound his equipment seems to have recorded so far: a very clear voice, when played back slowly, saying “Help me.” Jones says it was only heard days later, during review (the equipment picks up sounds beyond the hearing capacity of the human ear, except when played back it is then audible).