About a dozen brave souls met outside of the Big Rapids Community Library on Friday, Oct. 22, to see and hear the evidence of paranormal activity in Big Rapids, presented by Daniel and Stephanie Mackin, of Michigan Area Paranormal Investigative Team.
Paranormal University: Ghost Hunting 101, sponsored by the Big Rapids Community Library, introduced the basics of ghost hunting, along with ghost stories from the Mackins during their time in the business.
"As ghost hunters, I started doing this just over 15 years ago … which makes me the old man of the paranormal, at least in this area,” Daniel Mackin said. “Fifteen years is a long time, in dog years and in paranormal years.”
He equated hunting ghosts to hunting the white whale from Herman Melville’s 1851 novel, Moby Dick.
“And a lot of people don’t last at it,” he said. “Legitimately, it can be very boring.
“If you’ve seen any of the TV shows, you know, they’ll show you the investigation is all cool, stuff is happening, stuff is happening, and then it’s like, ‘Okay, now we’re going to analyze the evidence. Oh look, we’ve analyzed the evidence, and now it’s ready.’ No, it doesn’t work like that.”
He explained that shows, such as Ghost Hunters, can shoot from two or three days to a week’s worth of footage that they then have to go over. For his team of eight, they will gather five to six hours of evidence from four DVR cameras, a handheld camera and two to six audio recorders that Stephanie — “I try to help. We do it pretty much together.” — will have to go over.
“That’s the most tedious part, but it’s also the most rewarding part.”
He said once you find something, it spurs you on to find more evidence.
It is that evidence, and how to find that evidence, that the Mackins focused on Friday evening.
“For me, the easiest way to catch any evidence is on a recorder,” Daniel Mackin said. “Vocal evidence is the easiest to come by. Videos much harder. Cameras much harder.”
When analyzing an audio recording, he said, ghost hunters look for a voice or sounds — known as an electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP — that can't be heard by ear because it’s at a frequency that humans can’t hear.
And while his team has upgraded its equipment throughout the years, the most useful tool has become the smartphone.
“I can take better pictures on this than any camera I’ve had in the last 15 years,” Mackin said. “It’s amazing.”
HAUNTED BIG RAPIDS
While the Michigan Area Paranormal Investigative Team has investigated paranormal activity from all over Michigan (Traverse City Opera House and Mackinac Island) and the country (West Virginia Penitentiary), the event’s big draw was the stories, and the recorded evidence they presented, of investigations they did in Big Rapids and Ferris State University.
“We had an incidence, quite a few years back here, where we got to come down here and investigate some places in Big Rapids,” Daniel Mackin said.
The first place was a personal investigation of lake house in 2011, which he just referred to as “Rene’s House.”
“We didn’t know quite what to expect, but I know the first thing that we ran into that was kind of mind blowing for me — and this goes back to the EVP kind of thing — I was down in the basement and I heard something with my ears that we did not catch on the recorder, but it was a pretty scary moment,” he said. “Basically, what I heard with my ears was, and I remember it was right in my left ear, “I’m behind you.”
Another EVP event that happened wasn’t discovered until they analyzed the evidence later.
“One of the clips we caught was actually up in the dining room" he said. "They threw a nice, tremendous spread for us. We had potato chips. We had all kinds of stuff. We had coffee, we had soda. We had everything. So, we go up in the kitchen, we’re just kind of relaxing."
When they played back the recording, they heard a little laugh in the background.
“A little girl laughed at us between having potato chips and soda,” he said. “She thought we were pretty amusing.”
A year later, they investigated the Palmer House, at 422. S. Warren Ave., just off of Ferris State’s campus.
Before buying the house in 1874, Lewis Palmer served as a drummer boy in the Civil War — he was only 11. He moved to Big Rapids, where he had a series of jobs, including a teacher, a school superintendent, an attorney, a state senator, and a circuit court judge, according to the Mackins’ research. He lived in the house until his death in 1911.
Now student housing, the Michigan Area Paranormal Investigative Team were called in to investigate claims of paranormal activity.
One of the coolest things they found, Mackin said, was the sound of a drum beat that appeared in their audio recordings.
“Was this how he communicates? We’re not sure,” Mackin said.
Another thing they caught was with electromagnetic frequency detectors, or EFDs.
“We were picking up on these detectors what seemed to be like a trail where (the EFDs) would go off, we would have this pathway” he said.
A few months later, Mackin said, “A girl reached out to me and told me that she had lived in that same apartment, and that when she was there, she could, on a regular basis watch a shadow move through that apartment and follow that exact same trail.”
The final investigation in Big Rapids took place at the Alumni Building on the Ferris State campus, where students reported hearing high heels in empty hallways, voices in empty rooms, empty chairs sliding across the floor and communication with a spirit named Michael, who said he just liked hanging out there.
Stephanie Mackin recounted one story where “one of the library associates, Mary, said she was talking with someone, and was like ‘I don’t know. I don’t believe that any of this is real.’ Not long after that, her desk was infested with bugs, in the middle of winter. And no matter what they did — they took the complete desk apart and cleaned it and put it back together — and the bugs came back. And she was talking to someone about it, and she said, ‘Well, I guess this proves that it’s real’ and the infestation stopped.”
“So, we got called in,” Daniel Mackin finished.
The team investigated the Alumni Building, as well as the Prakken Building next door. While down in the “Scary Room,” as the students called it, they saw the door handle vibrating.
“We tried to debunk it as best we could, tried to figure it out,” Daniel Mackin said. “All the walls are concrete. The ceiling, concrete. The door, concrete. There’s not like the walls should flex and give in any way, shape or form.”
Later that night, after they returned, they decided to turn all the equipment off, letting any spirits or ghosts present know nothing would be recording. One of the team members, Roger, was holding the camera down at his side, swinging it around, Mackin said, but he never turned it off.
“So, we get back down to the other end (of the room). Roger is just kind of swinging the camera, and we’re towards the end and we hear some things happen and we caught them on audio,” he said.
They heard a strange noise, right before a door slammed and some heavy footsteps. Roger said he thought he brushed against the wall or something, so they focused on the source of the footstep sounds.
“But again, Roger was swinging around that camera and he actually caught on camera what we heard slide.”
The camera recorded a chair sliding about 4 inches.
“It was just complete luck that we caught it.”
Later, they returned to Ferris to present their findings, and 500 people showed up.
“It blew our minds because we’re like up on this little stage and there’s 500 kids out there waiting to find out if they have a ghost or not.”
After playing the evidence they had gathered, they put a picture of Ferris State on the screen and put a stamp over top that said “haunted.”
“Five hundred people jumped up and were like ‘Yeah!’ It was like it was a big party, I guess, for Ferris because they had their validation.”
Mackin said the Michigan Area Paranormal Investigative Team isn’t done with Big Rapids yet. They hope to investigate other haunted buildings, such as Big Rapids 4 Cinema, the Rapids Apartments and the Mecosta County Historical Museum, which is home to “Abigail.”
They are just waiting for an invitation.
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