Photo by Ben Fant
Memphis paranormal investigators lead byMichael David allow locals to participate in their own ghost hunting experience.
On a dimly lit back street, outside an abandoned cemetery, Michael David corralled 10 people around the red glow of his head lamp.
Shivering from cold and anticipation, most of the group had only just met their guide at the Pancake Shop on Summer Avenue to caravan over to the hidden Old Raleigh Cemetery.
But they all had come for the same reason: to see dead people. “Respect. Always keep that in your head,” David told the gathering, as he pulled an arsenal of ghost-detecting equipment from his trunk. “If you step on a grave, apologize. Always show them respect as if they’re still here.”
From his white car, which elicits thoughts of the movie “Ghost Busters” with its dashboard emergency light and a sign in the back saying “Got ghosts? Call Memphis Paranormal Investigators,” he handed out electromagnetic sensors, a temperature reader, a parabolic microphone and a dated tape recorder.
“Digital equipment is too easily manipulated,” he explained.
David, 38, founder of Memphis Paranormal Investigations LLC, known better as Memphis Ghost Hunters, has been archiving audio and visual recordings of ghosts around the Bluff City since 2001.
Along with his small team of investigators, he has spent years camping out in abandoned buildings, inspecting spooky houses and heading into cemeteries in the wee hours of the morning.
His conclusion? There are a lot of ghosts in Memphis.
“This is one haunted town,” he says.
Ushering the group through the creaky cemetery gate on a recent Saturday night, David sent them off in groups among the moonlit headstones.
He reminded them: “Just keep your minds open. Enjoy it.”
On Memphisghost.com, David and his team offer to clean houses of unwanted spirits free of charge.
Last year, however, he expanded his services to include encounters with ghosts for anyone looking for a paranormal experience.
He can now be found each weekend trekking into one of his favorite local cemeteries followed by an entourage of ghost enthusiasts and skeptics.
He weeds out the crazies through brief bios sent to him online from people interested in taking part in the class.
So far, it has drawn a mix of physicians, teachers, stay-at-home moms, artists, flight attendants and bankers.
The retired counselor is adamant about not charging a penny for his services.
“If someone is charging you to have a paranormal experience, you are being ripped off,” he says. “Ghosts are everywhere.”
Hope Walker and her adult daughter, Kristen Diaz, were surfing for haunted houses to visit for Halloween when they stumbled across the Memphis Ghost Hunters Web site.
“We always watch (ghost-hunting shows) on TV and say, ‘We want to do something like that,'” Walker says, as they beamed with excitement before entering the cemetery with David.
Lenny Bullard, an Oakland hairdresser who came to converse with the dead, called David years ago when a ghost was haunting his mother’s house, he says.
But Bullard was quick to add, “It’s not a bad thing.”
When it was determined the ghost was a little girl, turning on the TV to watch Nickelodeon, they began to build an affection for their pint-sized poltergeist, he explained.
David recalls having numerous paranormal encounters around Memphis, including a home where footsteps are heard at the same time each night and a male ghost carrying a candle at Earnestine and Hazel’s bar Downtown.
But it was when the ghost hunter was awakened at 3 a.m. by a slightly translucent woman at the foot of his bed that he began making it a rule when leaving a haunted area to always ask the lingering spirits not to follow him home.
And for those who aren’t looking for a paranormal experience in their personal dwellings, he advises not to bring a Ouija Board into your home.
“A Ouija Board is the easiest, quickest and best way to get a house haunted. It’s the act of opening yourself up as a portal,” David explained.
Three of his clients have had negative consequences from using the child’s board game, he says.
At the age of 30, David suffered a heart attack, and describes seeing his deceased grandmother.
“She said she wasn’t ready for me yet,” he recalled.
It was that near-death experience, he says, that opened his senses to the spirit world.
Ever since, it has been his hobby and obsession to prove there is life after death.
His group has been featured on the Travel Channel’s “Weird Travels,” the BBC and ABC Family.
The ubiquity of ghost-hunting shows on television has recently earned David’s group more attention but also more grief, he says.
He’s particularly disturbed, he says, by the overacting and doctoring of film.
“One of the things we stress to people is we are the opposite of what you see on television,” he says. “It’s not a roller-coaster type thrill. It’s the thrill of being in contact with the other side.”
David takes great pride in having respect for the dead. Earlier this month, he and a handful of team investigators cleared the overgrowth that swallowed the seven acres of Old Raleigh Cemetery on Raleigh-LaGrange.
Since then, David says, they’ve had multiple sightings and paranormal experiences in the old graveyard that dates to the 1800s.
“When you show them respect and human kindness, you’re repaid with the same,” he says.
Full Source: The Commercial Appeal
