When it comes to all things paranormal, like ghosts, spirits and haunted buildings, Halloween-time is usually what people are reminded of.
For co-founders of Ghost Contact Paranormal, a paranormal investigations team based in Lansing, Ben Strongwolf Rodriguez and Beth Rodriguez, paranormal investigations and occurrences aren’t just limited to the fall.
The couple first started their team as a hobby in 2019, after becoming interested in the paranormal investigation show, "Ghost Hunters" a few years prior. However, their interest in the paranormal didn’t stem from just the show.
For Rodriguez, her own personal paranormal experiences sparked questions regarding the existence of the supernatural.
One of Rodriguez's first encounters with the paranormal was on a trip to Key West, Florida. Rodriguez said she and her friend were taking pictures around town, and one happened to be of a stairwell they thought looked unique.
"...We were looking at our pictures later, on our camera, I immediately picked up that there was some kind of figure standing at the top of the stairs that we didn't see when we were taking the picture," Rodriguez said. "(It) kind of shocked the heck out of me, and kind of scared her half to death too."
But, Strongwolf Rodriguez started out as a skeptic.
“I was like, one of those die-hard skeptics," Strongwolf Rodriguez said. "It's like, I need this proof before I can fully say that the afterlife exists."
An occurrence in a nearby walking trail changed Strongwolf Rodriguez’s mind.
On a walk in the River Bend Natural Area in Holt, Strongwolf Rodriguez said he wanted to test out a new camera. He was very familiar with the trail, as he and his mother had walked on it for many years prior.
On this very trail, the murder of Jeanette Kirby occurred in 1986, going unsolved for years. Strongwolf Rodriguez said while filming on his camera, he decided to take out his K2 meter, an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector that helps reveal paranormal activity.
"...I go, ‘Jeanette, is there a spirit out here?’ Nothing, didn't expect to see anything, hear anything, and I really didn't feel anything," Strongwolf Rodriguez said.
Upon seeing no results, Strongwolf Rodriguez headed back home to review the footage to observe the visual and audio quality.
"The moment I asked that, you can hear a female voice come through my camera, and go, ‘yeah,’" Strongwolf Rodriguez said. "And literally, right where I'm sitting, I fell out of my chair, like, ‘Okay, this shocked me.' And then (a) few hours after that, Beth comes home, and I'm like, ‘Beth, you gotta hear this.'"
The team's paranormal investigations originally started in public places they could find through research. But now, The Ghost Contact Paranormal team conducts paranormal investigations in both private and public residences.
"We use Facebook a lot for networking and things like that," Strongwolf Rodriguez said. "People would post, ‘Oh, we just investigated this place, crazy activity.' I'm like, ‘Okay, let me reach out to that place (and) see if we can get similar activity.'"
Creating a website allowed their investigations of private residences to start picking up.
"I created a page on Google for Ghost Contact Paranormal, and oh my god, people started calling me left and right," Strongwolf Rodriguez said.
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Rodriguez particularly likes getting to go to private residences for investigations. "It's a really good feeling when we're able to give people a peace of mind that, you know, they're okay in their home and they're not crazy," Rodriguez said.
Additionally, the team has also been invited to investigate buildings by owners.
"We've gotten some of our bigger investigations by people reaching out to us and saying, you know, ‘Hey, we've got this building, would you guys like to come and check it out at some point?'" Rodriguez said.
Once at the site, the members gather together and run through their plan, including where to set up cameras and the dos and don’ts, especially when they have guests come along.
"We want to make sure that they're respecting people's homes, you know, because at the end of the day, we're going into people's homes or businesses, and we need to respect their property," Strongwolf Rodriguez said.
Building owners or hosts also give walking tours of the property, while the team jots down notes. On the walk through they determine what rooms need attention, "just feeling the place out."
Sometimes, Rodriguez said, the team requests that the owner not share much background information with them, in order to avoid "preconceived notions."
The investigation itself takes a few hours, including equipment set up, which Strongwolf Rodriguez is in charge of. They determine where to set up equipment based on info gathered from the walk through. They also use their feelings to determine areas to look at. Strongwold Rodriguez said the members can usually notice changes in the energy around them.
"I can pick up on some pretty heavy energy, and I'm pretty sure a lot of us can over the course of investigating," Strongwolf Rodriguez said. "We could kind of just know when we're crossing into an area with heavy energy, and any one of us on our team now can feel it."
The feeling that the team members rely on, Strongwolf Rodriguez said, is "like an extra sense." It’s something that the members picked up on after years of experience.
"If we don't know what to look for or feel, it's gonna just, kind of, go by. So it's one of those things you have to, I guess you can say, develop, but it's more of a knowledge that you get," Strongwolf Rodriguez said. "I could take you to a location that's super haunted, and you may not get any activity visibly, but you have that personal experience where you go into an area where (you’re like), ‘Okay, this is heavy’. You can feel it."
During these investigations, the team members are looking out for a variety of different factors that point to paranormal activity, temperature changes and smells being just a few. The crew has even picked up the smell of a deceased individual's cologne while investigating a residental haunting.
"...Every now and again, when we were walking through, we can get a faint scent of cologne. One of the guys on our team mentioned, I think, like an Old Spice sort of cologne, something that an older person would use," Strongwolf Rodriguez said. "And so we'd mentioned that, and the homeowner goes, ‘That's exactly the scent that he is known for, that he used.' We were like, ‘Okay, we just smelled that upstairs.'"
Temperature changes can usually be detected on thermal imaging cameras. Strongwolf Rodriguez described how spirits draw energy from the air around. When drawing energy from the air, Strongwolf Rodriguez said it creates cold pockets and also manipulates the EMF.
"Especially the really, really heavy, dark presences, you know, go into a room and it may be 10 degrees colder than the other room beside you. And then, you know, ‘Okay, there might be a spirit in here, and it may be getting ready to do something,'" Strongwolf Rodriguez said.
For the safety of the members during the investigations, there are some protective measures that the individuals adhere to.
Rodriguez personally carries crystals and different types of stones to protect her, as well as sage.
"If we're starting to feel some negative energy, we also carry sage with us too, and we'll smudge and sage ourselves afterwards, especially if the environment feels negative at all… (and) some of us will pray, too," Rodriguez said.
Additionally, Rodriguez said, mediums are also members of the team that help with protection. One of these mediums is Jennifer Dachler, who has had an interest in the paranormal since an experience in her childhood.
"I believe in, like, the archangels and stuff, so I will call upon them to protect the team," Dachtler said. "And I, you know, will help the other mediums for sensing things, and I haven't got there yet, but like, you know, communing with the spirits and stuff too, that's still what I'm learning and growing as to get to that point."
Ghost Contact Paranormal uses a variety of equipment in their investigations, ranging from REM pods, which are proximity sensors that spirits can set off, to the Ovilus 5, a word generator that catches certain words from spirits. The team also uses a BooBuddy, a stuffed teddy bear that speaks and lights up, aiming to draw out child spirits.
Once the investigation has concluded, the team heads back, and Strongwolf Rodriguez reviews all of the footage captured, a process that "takes almost a month."
One goal that the team tries to achieve during their investigations is to confirm what is true and what needs to be debunked.
"...So we can try to be like, you know, think, ‘Okay, did this really happen? Or are there electrical boxes around here that's making the equipment go off?’" Rodriguez said.
The process to debunk consists of multiple steps. First, Strongwolf Rodriguez said he reviews all of the footage, writing down everything he sees. Then, he tries to determine if it was paranormal activity or not.
"And then after that, our second step is to go through, ‘Okay, what could have caused this? How can we debunk this? What's going on here?’ And then if we can't write it off as anything, (like) ‘Oh, I thought somebody was coming in, somebody walking around’...then we call it paranormal," Strongwolf Rodriguez said.
Lastly, he recruits another opinion to finally either confirm or deny paranormal activity.
Just a short drive away, another business that’s all about the paranormal resides in REO Town Marketplace in Lansing.
John and Jenifer Harris, owners of Voodoo's World of Oddtiques and Otherside Paranormal & Mortuary Science Museum, keep in touch with Strongwolf Rodriguez and Rodriguez.
The Harris’s Voodoo’s World of Oddtiques is an antique store filled with oddities, where guests are encouraged to explore different kinds of souvenirs. The Otherside Paranormal & Mortuary Science Museum displays mortuary science relics, along with items that were investigated for paranormal activity.
For both John and Jenifer Harris, the interest in horror-themed entertainment and the paranormal started during childhood.
"I've always been interested in dark, scary things, you know, just growing up as a kid, even into adulthood," John Harris said.
Running both businesses means selling and displaying lots of unique and odd items, that some might deem "weird."
"It's kind of fun to have those things that people think are weird, and then they think you're weird, and then I think that's wonderful," Jenifer Harris said. "It just works."
The decorations were items that the Harrises didn’t have room to put in their house, and the objects in the shop consist of exploring and "looking at the strangest places to find strange and weird things." The museum items were found similarly and show years of collecting.
Even though the museum displays objects investigated for paranormal activity, the Harrises approach the paranormal as skeptics.
"...We tell people as skeptics, so that basically what that means is we don't believe everything's a ghost, not everything's haunted, so we tell them the difference of things that are paranormal," John Harris said. "Just because something's paranormal does not mean it's haunted, (it) just means it's doing something that's not normal, it's paranormal. So again, we're educating them on that."
The Harrises do accept items that were given to them by individuals who suspect them of having some sort of paranormal activity. Even Ghost Contact Paranormal is one of their past donors. However, the Harrises reinvestigate every item before putting it up on display.
"We got teams from all over the country that come in here, and they might bring an object from a place they investigated, or somebody got something from grandma's house when she passed on, and they don't want it in their house, and they say it's horribly haunted," John Harris said. "We document those claims, we reinvestigate everything before it goes in here. Once we're satisfied, it meets our criteria, then we put it in the museum."
To reinvestigate, the Harrises follow a process. First, they document any claims the individuals have expressed. Next, the Harrises place the items in the museum, and don’t bring them up at all, unless guests prompt the conversation.
"...When you come in to go through the museum and you pick up on that particular item and you start asking me about it, like, you know, ‘I'm feeling something from this object,' I want to hear those things because now I'm going to document what you felt on that item," John Harris said. "And then when somebody else comes a week later and they have the same feeling you did (like), ‘Okay, now I got two people that had the same exact experience,' so that starts the investigation."
However, the museum itself doesn’t harbor any jump scares and isn’t a haunted attraction.
"We're not in there to, you know, tell people things that aren't true, we just can't do that," John Harris said. "I've had several things happen in there where I could have played that off as something so haunting that it would have been legendary for this building, and I literally tell them, ‘No, that's the building, (it) does this’ or, ‘This made that sound,’ so we are very, very honest when it comes to that stuff."
In general, the Harrises aim to provide an unforgettable experience for guests.
"My goal is, one, knowledge. They're learning. It's a guided tour, which makes it different," Jenifer Harris. "So you're getting the stories of the items, but you get to make that decision because again, seeing is believing. So if you're in there and you have an experience while you're in there, great, you know. So that's kind of the goal, (which) is for people to have an experience when they come here, and in there, importantly, because there are things in there that people could feel stuff from."
In the future, Jenifer Harris said the museum will be expanded to provide an even stronger experience for guests.
"So it is going to almost double in size, which is going to make the experience a little bit even more," Jenifer Harris said. "Right now, all the energies like in this small space, so we're going to be able to spread it out a little bit."
So the question remains, does the paranormal exist or not? Rodriguez and Strongwolf Rodriguez are full believers of the other side, but the Harrises are skeptics, not believing any claims unless it happens to them.
Others are convinced that the paranormal doesn't exist at all… but could it?
