Group members recount their previous supernatural experiences
Lee McKinstry
Editor in Chief
Megan Smeznik ’14 doesn’t know if she believes in ghosts. She’s never run into anything particularly otherworldly and describes her general interest in the supernatural as “really analytical and historical.” But despite being skeptical of all things spectral, Smeznik is the president of the Paranormal Group, a new club that hopes to investigate what really goes bump in the night.
“I’ve always been a skeptic about these kinds of things,” said Smeznik, “[But] I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I don’t believe in paranormal activity. I have always been fascinated by why people believe in certain ideologies. I thought this was a perfect way to look at my interest in this.”
The club is currently planning its first ghost hunting expedition for this fall, which will take place at either the historic Relief Company No. 4 firehouse or the Old Jaol Steak House. Group members have also expressed interest in checking campus buildings for paranormal incidents. Each of these sites will be tested with scientific equipment, including electromagnetic field detectors, digital temperature readers and digital voice recorders. All of the club’s devices are brand new, provided by funding from Campus Council.
Other upcoming events include a “ghost stories round table” co-sponsored by the Culture Club and a historical presentation by Doug Myers, a local historian and expert on Wayne County hauntings. Myers hosted an on-campus forum on paranormal activity last year, and was profiled by “The Daily Record” in 2010 for his ghost hunting and interest in historical oddities.
A previous incarnation of the Paranormal Group was founded in 2010, but the group eventually disbanded. Smeznik had attended the club’s meetings regularly and decided to revamp the Paranormal Group with the help of Jensen Buchanan ’14. The group’s charter and budget proposal was approved last spring.
“It has been a two year process to get the club to a point in which we can actively participate,” said Smeznik.
The Paranormal Group has some skeptics, some of whom might think there is a better chance of disproving the existence of supernatural phenomena than catching a spirit on tape. But for every person who’s unsure, there’s a supernatural supporter. Buchanan, an avid horror film fan, is one such person.
“I full-heartedly believe that there are supernatural beings,” said Buchanan, “I also feel like there are legitimate paranormal activities anywhere we go in the world.”
Buchanan traces her own belief in the paranormal back to a ghost hunt she participated in during her freshman year of high school. While walking through a local cemetery, she recorded voices near a headstone. No one could explain where they came from.
The group’s advisor, anthropology professor Abigail Adams, also had a brush with the paranormal. Her father was a Presbyterian minister at an old church in western Pennsylvania. The building had been built on top of an old cemetery, and one day in the basement, she and her father saw an apparition of a man, seemingly made of mist, who glided past them down the hall.
When her father told the church’s custodian about it, he was unfazed.
“He said, ‘Oh yea, that’s Mr. Smokey.’ Apparently he had seen him regularly enough to name him,” said Adams.
The experience is one that’s stayed fresh in Adams mind for years.
“It still makes my hair stand on end when I think about it,” said Prof. Adams, an alumna who also partially attributes her interest in the occult to Prof. Pamela Freese’s anthropology course “Magic, Witchcraft and Religion.” “Honestly, I don’t know what we saw, but it has made me curious, that is certain.”
Adams will accompany the students on their ghost hunting investigations. As a cultural anthropologist who studies belief systems, she hopes that the experiences might offer her some answers.
“It was very telling to me that so many ‘rational’ people had some type of experience that could not be explained through our current scientific paradigms,” Adams said, recalling her time in Prof. Freese’s course. “This is the supernatural. Almost all human groups have some belief about ghosts or ancestor spirits. The fact that this belief is a human universal is quite intriguing to me from an anthropological perspective. I would call myself a skeptical believer. I hold that there are certain phenomena experienced by living people that warrant an alternative explanation beyond the perception that people are simply gone after they die … I know there are the naysayers out there, but there is clearly something about the human condition that incites us to connect to and seek out those who have gone before us.”
The Paranormal Group meets on Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. in Lowry 119.