The Ghost Hunt 

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A cleaning crew comes to the offices a few nights per week. Typically, a man named Shane cleans alone. He has seen the apparition on two occasions. The profile Shane gives for the Henry specter is as follows: the ghost is in his 40s with dark brown hair. He wears a long frock coat characteristic of the early 20th century, fancy shoes but no hat. When Shane spots him, Henry stares back for several seconds before dematerializing.

The copy machines and other electrical devices inside the CL office will often power up and run by themselves when Shane is cleaning. Other times, he hears footsteps on the wooden floors. "Sometimes when I come here I don't really feel nervous. Sometimes when I'm in here, I just want to hurry up and get done because it doesn't feel right," says Shane's aunt who helps him clean.

"You get cold chills," adds another member of the cleaning crew. Both say they've never experienced anything like the N.C. Music Factory at other businesses they've cleaned.

An architect, whose office is also in the Music Factory, joined our investigation because of unexplained encounters he's had in the space. While trying to unlock his office in the dark one night, he saw a white orb light up and dart across his field of vision. He looked around for a surface that could have possibly reflected light in such a manner but found none.

Creepier still, on more than one occasion, the architect has walked down the long runway-like hallway and heard chattering voices when he's reached the part of the corridor that is the original concrete floor of the old asbestos factory. He first assumed that some CL staffers were in the loading dock around the corner playing ping-pong. But when he rounded the corner, the loading dock -- as well as the rest of the building -- was empty.

Kaleena Peck, an employee of Limelight Events located across the hall from CL, says that the company's espresso machine turned on by itself one day and shot water all over the place -- a malfunction that had never before occurred with the machine when turned on normally.

The cleaning crew was so spooked that they brought in a Ouija board after hours to ask the spirit its name. The dark forces of the board guided them to "Henry."

Incidentally, N.C. Paranormal does not condone the use of Ouija boards. One reason is that any evidence found by the board can't be scientifically proven. Julie does, however, acknowledge its effectiveness in contacting spirits, as she writes in an editorial on her Web site: "I tend to look at using the Ouija in the same aspect as a séance, automatic writing or any other form of open spirit communication. You are giving spirits an easy means to reach you and anyone else in the room, oftentimes with disastrous results." Julie once knew a preacher whose daughter summoned spirits with the Ouija Board. After a glass screen door suddenly and mysteriously shattered, the preacher fled and sold his house.

Julie and Tony roll in two double-stacked plastic trunks and spend the first hour setting up thousand of dollars' worth of equipment. They place three infrared cameras at various points around the office and set up a desktop computer with a security program that can pick up and display as many 16 camera feeds. (The most they've ever used is eight.) A beach ball lying around the office is placed as a prop in the center of a stretch of flooring. If any activity or force passes by, the camera can track the movement of the ball. In some investigations, their fully charged video cameras have drained of power, which when coinciding with other paranormal occurrences, is about as much proof as they can hope for.

click to enlarge

• Jared Neumark
• Papers dating back to the 1940s are sprawled across a desk inside the N.C. Music Factory.

Paranormal activity is typically accompanied by an acute temperature drop, so most investigators carry an infrared thermometer that shoots out a red led laser beam to measure surface temperatures. "A spirit needs to have energy to manifest, so to get that energy it pulls from the air around it," says Julie. "You'll feel an overwhelming numbness. It's nothing like the cold you feel from an air conditioner. There's no mistaking it." While investigating a bed and breakfast in York, S.C., Julie felt a paranormal presence behind her. Tony recorded a temperature of 75 degrees at her feet and 60 degrees directly behind her.

Another tool in the ghost investigator's utility belt is a handheld electromagnetic field meter that beeps like a gold-panning detector as it takes readings. The EMF device operates on the same theory as the infrared thermometer: spirits draw energy to appear. While conducting a private investigation in the kitchen of an old home in Staley, N.C., Julie says she felt a strong male presence in the corner. Anything over a 4 is rare, and the EMF spiked from a baseline reading of .2 to a whopping 6 in the corner where she suspected activity. Once she felt that it was gone, she took another measurement and the reading had returned to the low baseline.