Far left: Top, alice hopper is reflected in a mirror during a paranormal investigation by DCMag. Bottom, John Warfield points at the monitor, which he uses to simultaneously watch video feeds from multiple infrared cameras installed throughout the house.


Left: Warfield, kneeling, and medium Tony Cox prepare monitoring equipment.


rooms as Hopper described the ghost’s antics. When he and Alice, 53, were first dating, he said, they were sitting in the living room while from the kitchen came a cacophony of “crashing plates and dishes.” “Doesn’t that bother you?” he re-


called Alice asking him. So he got up and went into the kitchen. “Knock it off, you’re scaring her,” he said, and the crashing stopped. Alice, a slight woman with glasses


and long brown hair, said that one night after getting into bed, she watched an invisible pair of hands tucking the sheets around her legs. In the dining room, candles would relight after she had left the room. “At first, I thought I just hadn’t put them out all the way, but then it happened while I was standing there looking at them,” she said glumly. “So, I don’t leave candles in that room anymore. I’m afraid they’ll light when I’m away.” The couple seemed less like ghost enthusiasts with overactive imag-


inations than like the beleaguered owners of a badly trained dog. Back at the town hall, the event had begun to take on the feel of a slightly


madcap barn raising. A small knot of onlookers, attracted by the activity, had gathered on the lawn. Warfield was greeted by Claremont’s vice mayor, George Lee Edwards, a lanky man in a green shirt whose family had lived in the area since 1642 and who called the story of the little girl being murdered “genuine accepted folklore” in Claremont. “Paranormal activity is kind of an accepted thing around town,” he told us.


“It happens on such a regular basis, no one pays much attention to it anymore.” It was Edwards who had heard the voice in the mayor’s office, as he had helped himself to one of the candies they kept in a bowl on the desk. “Someone whis- pered in my ear, ‘Can I have some?’ ” he said. “It was a small child’s voice. It was plain as day — it made the hair stand up on my arms.” It took Warfield and his team almost an hour to set up, unspooling reams of


cable through the cavernous building and its labyrinthine basement for their six in- frared cameras. In the big room at the back of the building where the town holds its city council meetings, Warfield set up a giant monitor that broadcast the view from each camera simultaneously, each off-kilter scene awash in an eerie luminous gray. Setting up the cameras had been the bulk of the evening’s work so far, and I won- dered what types of things the team generally captured on camera. “We’ve never gotten anything on camera,” Logan Reed said. He and Schlosser were munching on the candy bars Warfield had set out. “You guys are welcome to have some of those; just leave some for my trigger object,” Warfield said. “Once you start your investigation, I can put this place on lockdown,” Labenz told Warfield, “so you don’t have people meandering around causing a distur-


June 20, 2010 | The WashingTon PosT Magazine 15


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170