Ghost Hunt

Ghost Hunt

  12:52 AM    Unknown

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Photo: Pictured is a page from The Ocilla Star from 2001 that announces the Miss Tifton pageant and shows Tara Grinstead, who was Miss Tifton in 1999.

Ghost Hunt

Tara Grinstead was last seen on the night of October 22, 2005.

But for me, the story actually began in the 1800s.

You see, I spent the evening of October 22 in a facsimile of a 19th century village.

The Georgia Agrirama was established in 1976 in Tifton, Georgia as a living history museum to rural, agricultural life in the late 1800s. During the day, tourists and grade schoolers visited the place, now wordily renamed the Georgia Museum of Agriculture & Historic Village, to get a glimpse of South Georgia's past.

As to why I spent an October night in 2005 there, I will have to take you back a year earlier, to October 2004. That is when the paranormal "reality" television show Ghost Hunters premiered. The show featured a pair of plumbers who decided to battle ghosts. It was like some weird amalgamation of Pac-Man and Super Mario Brothers.

Anyway, this show started a minor ghost hunting craze throughout America, and although I had only seen the show as I flipped through the channels looking for Chappelle Show reruns, I somehow got swept up in the ghost hunting hysteria.

I shouldn't make it sound so mysterious. I know exactly how it happened. I worked with a lady named Holly Catanzarita, who was, and I think even she would admit this, a bit weird. I say this as someone who is also weird. Weird people are good people.

Holly wore many hats, and some of them were spooky. Although she worked in the circulation department of the daily newspaper in Tifton, The Tifton Gazette, she also published her own horror magazine, and I contributed some illustrations to it. She was also the author of a horror novel, "Dreamkeeper," and has since published another, "Deep Freeze." At night, leading up to Halloween in 2005, she gave guided ghost tours of the Agrirama.

On Friday, October 21, I attended one of the ghost tours to write a story about them and her team of paranormal investigators for The Gazette. On Saturday, October 22, I agreed to join Holly and her team on a ghost hunt.

Now, you may be thinking, how can you remember what you were doing on a specific night over a decade ago. I can remember, because the next week when Tara went missing, I mused that if anyone ever accused me of having something to do with it, I would have the world's weirdest alibi. Of course, I never thought anyone would actually consider me a suspect.

Unfortunately, I was wrong about that.

So, was the Agrirama haunted? If it was, it means that ghosts are tied to buildings and not locations, because all of the buildings at the Agrirama were moved there from other locales. I'm a skeptic, so I'm gonna say "No."

But I went into the ghost hunt at least a little open-minded. What happened on the hunt managed to close it shut.

I joined the extremely specifically named Southern Ghost Hunters Paranormal Investigations on their after-hours ghost hunt. I don't know what you would expect a group like that to look like, but I was a bit surprised. This wasn't a bunch of Dungeons & Dragons playing, four-eyed, mouth-breathing geeks, I mean, other than me.

Although none of these ghost hunters probably won homecoming king or queen, they were a diverse group of people of varying ages and expertise.

There was Holly, and her son, a likable guy who worked as a prison guard, and even a pair of police detectives from a nearby town. One member of the group was even an attractive lady college professor, but she might've been the daffiest of them all.

Don't get me wrong, most of the people out there were serious, intelligent folks. People of all faiths, backgrounds and degrees believe in ghosts, but some of the things some of the people took to be evidence left me dazzled.

The professor, who reminded me of a long-haired version of Scooby Doo's Velma in everything except deductive ability, told me how, on the last ghost hunt, they got some really compelling evidence using long exposure photography.

Jinkies!

The thing is, long exposure photography makes things look ghostly, and that's normal, not paranormal. When you take a long exposure photograph, the shutter stays open longer, allowing light to be recorded on the image for longer. Instead of taking a picture of an instant, you might take a photo of several seconds. The result is a smeared looking image in which any movement makes people appear as translucent phantoms.

I used that exact technique the night before to make a ghostly photograph to go along with my article about the ghost tours.

We stalked around the rickety old buildings in the Agrirama with sound amplifying devices that would have looked hi-tech if I didn't know they were kid's toys. They looked like a toy gun with a radar dish for a barrel and a pair of head phones connected to it. My parents bought me one when I was 12 to play spy.

We listened for fluctuations in the white noise, which otherwise might sound like static crackling. We used mini-cassette recorders to capture every sound, and then ignore all the sounds that happened when we rewound the tape to listen to them over again. And we waved our hands around to check for cold spots, and that was when I realized ghosts probably don't exist.

Now, I don't know why ghosts are supposed to be cold, as I would think that they would at least be room temperature, but we looked for cold spots. And I found one, and I announced it to everyone, and I was excited.

This was late in the night, and as perverse as it was, we were ghost hunting in what was once a slave house. But as everyone oohed and ahhed over the cold spot I found, the gray cells in my brain started to warm up.

This was a spot just a few inches from the floor. And it was late October and growing chilly deep into the night. And that building was about 150 years old, so I reached down and checked.

Yes. There was a hole in the floor and the cold air from outside was wafting in.

I informed the others that what we were feeling was just natural phenomena, but some still thought it was "evidence." I decided then and there that people would believe whatever they wanted, and that ghosts probably didn't exist.

But ghosts do exist, the kind that haunt people for years with unsettling thoughts, unanswered questions and ever-present heartache. These types of ghosts are not phantoms or poltergeists, but the memories of loved ones parted, and the terrors they cause leave one far colder than any spirit.

I learned about those types of ghosts in the years that came after that infamous Saturday night, because on Tuesday, October 25, 2005 someone called The Tifton Gazette to ask us to announce that a school teacher named Tara Grinstead was missing from the neighboring town of Ocilla.

And for more than 11 years after, law enforcement officers, friends and family, neighbors and co-workers, and even I did what I was doing the night Tara went missing.

We hunted a ghost.

Note: The link to The Tifton Gazette article about the private investigators gives a date of December 7 2005, but many Gazette articles give that specific date erroneously, so it must be a system glitch.