{ tHE HAUN t ED}
bance in the force.” When the last of the onlookers had been ushered
outside — a few set up lawn chairs in the parking lot to keep an eye on the action — it was after 10 p.m. Warfield turned out the lights, and we proceeded by flashlight to the upstairs room where the supposed apparition had appeared in the photograph. We were accompanied by the vice mayor’s girlfriend, whom Warfield had allowed to join us, although he usually limits investigations to team members. Warfield started his recorder, warning the team to speak in regular voices rather than whisper, lest it be confused for EVPs on the recordings. “I’d like to start off — my name is John,” he said.
“Is there anyone in this room that would like to speak to us? It’s okay, you can come out and talk to us; we’re friendly. We just want to know why you’re here.” The building was pitch black and still, but so far
the investigation felt about as frightening as a slumber party. After 20 or 30 minutes of trying to contact the spirit in various ways — complimenting the pretty dress she was wearing in the picture, guessing her name (“Susie?”), asking whether she needed help “finding the light” — with no discernible response, Warfield and the team moved down to the mayor’s of- fice, a tiny interior room off a long hallway. The mayor’s office was too small for all of us, so the
vice mayor’s girlfriend and I stood in the doorway. After more pleasantries, Warfield took a different tack, pressing the spirit on what had happened to her. “Did you know the janitor? Was he a nice man or a mean man?” he asked. “We definitely want your story to be told; you just have to find a way to tell it to us. Tap on an object, turn on a light, speak to us!” Warfield exhorted. “Why are you still here?” There was a pause. “If you are here,” said Reed, “could you knock twice, like
this?” He rapped sharply on the mayor’s desk, once, twice. A few yards behind me in the hallway, faintly but distinctly, I heard another two taps: once, twice. I opened my mouth to say something, but, just like in the movies, nothing came out.
Like virtually every other investigator i spoke with, Warfield attributes his interest in ghosts to strange experiences he had as a child, in his family’s old house in Lansdowne, Md. “We heard hammering sounds in the basement, and when we would get to the top of the stairs, it would stop,” he told me. Once, lying in bed, “I heard a crashing sound and the sound of glass breaking all over the place.” A neighbor told him that the home’s previous owner was a carpenter who died of a heart attack in the basement. Warfield enlisted in the Navy at 17, went to boot camp at 18 and trained to
become a medic. He spent the next decade performing rescue missions, many by helicopter, including, he says, pulling 17 people out of a burning 747 that had crashed into a mountainside in Guam. He married a woman who also was in the military, and they had a daughter, Courtney. Along the way, spurred by his child- hood memories, he read extensively on ghost hunting and the paranormal. After surviving a helicopter crash, Warfield decided it was time to explore other career options, and he began training to be an occupational therapist. When he retired from the Navy after 20 years and took a job as a therapist, he found he had enough free time to pursue ghost hunting in earnest. Since Warfield took over DCMAG, he has assembled a team of seven volunteer
investigators from the legions of interested wannabes whose e-mails flood his in- box. Previous experience is not a requirement, nor, necessarily, is fervor; the ones who profess their obsession with ghosts are rarely the ones who work out, he says.
16 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | June 20, 2010 Warfield and his crew investigate
private residences for homeowners as well as public buildings that are thought to be haunted, as a way for the team to hone its skills. Like many investigators, Warfield does not charge for his ser- vices. “When you start putting money into the equation, people start expect- ing answers,” he says; he also thinks that charging a fee would lessen the team’s credibility, as people would think it was fabricating results simply to have something to show. Along with his team members, he has performed more than 50 investigations, including a case in a private residence in which people were being scratched and pulled from their beds. He has heard what he considers to be a malevolent spirit speak to him while he was on the phone — “I heard a voice say, ‘You’re going to die in 30 days’ ” — and has seen the top half of a man in a leather jacket passing through a closed door. The issue at the core of paranormal
investigation — how to prove (or dis- prove) what one perceives — can be ticklish for investigators, who would like their findings to be accepted by mainstream science but often pride themselves on their openness to non-
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