gathered from the investigation. In one of the rooms in the basement, Warfield said, a little voice had repeat- edly answered “uh-huh” when a team member asked whether the spirit wanted candy. “It was so perfect, I started to question it,” said Warfield, who thought it might have been an owl or other animal, and sat outside for half an hour to see whether he could hear it, to no avail. The vice mayor’s girlfriend left the investigation early, and, after she left, the activity “sort of died down,” so Warfield theorized that the little girl might have felt close to the woman and retreated when she departed, or even that the woman might have brought the spirit with her — people, he said, can be haunted too. And, he said, “there’s always a way [the girl] could possibly fool me. You’ve always got to think of that.” Warfield’s apartment is neat and cozy and decorated,


somewhat jarringly, with a collection of “haunted art.” There is a small, colorful abstract done by a man who committed suicide, the ghost of whom Warfield says “acts up” every December and opens Warfield’s refrig- erator, and a large painting of a shotgun through which another painting, the portrait of a woman, shows faintly through, reputedly done by a man who killed his wife. The team had caught nothing on video, but Warfield


scientific methods. Warfield uses a me- dium in Virginia, for example, whom he consults by phone when starting a case, and he is studying to become a medium himself. He says that his communica- tion with spirits, including the quality of the EVPs he records, has improved as he has become “psychically more open to them. I sort of describe it as a radio; you have to tune into a certain station to listen.” The fact that research is still being


done to disprove what one feels to be true speaks, at the least, to the willing- ness to trust the senses: Even the most skeptical researchers in these fields are still spending time and money to disprove what has never really been sat- isfactorily proved in the first place. For Warfield, his experiences in the


field have been convincing enough. “You realize there’s another world out there; maybe there’s more to life than just life itself,” he told me.


some weeks after the investigation in Claremont, I visited Warfield at the apartment he shares with Courtney, now 13 — he and his wife split up when Courtney was very young — in Colum- bia, to take a look at the data he had


Warfield and medium Tony Cox check to see whether they feel energy in another room of the hopper house.


said he had gotten some interesting EVPs on his audio recording, and he called them up on his laptop. On one, made in the basement, Warfield asked, “What is your purpose for being here?” He and I strained for the re- sponse. “That was pretty clear,” he said, of the resulting static. “I think it said, ‘Get out of here.’ You hear it?” Now that he had mentioned it, I could make out the shape of the words, but it was like seeing faces in clouds. The “uh-huh”s that he and the team had heard so clearly had


shown up only faintly on the recordings, which he said was not unusual: Some- times the recorder caught words the team had not heard, and vice versa. And anyway, Warfield said, “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” In the time since the investigation, I had replayed the scene in the mayor’s


office a hundred times in my mind, and always, in my mind, there they were: two taps, behind me in the hallway, the same rhythm as Reed’s taps on the desktop. Like an echo, only too delayed to be an echo. Like an answer. I was fascinated to find, as I toggled the scene back and forth in my mind, that the moment was like a line I had crossed: On one side, I was utterly skeptical, and on the other side, I believed. What else could it have been? The building was empty. No one was behind me. I knew what I had heard. And yet, I could see, from the looks on the faces of my family and friends as I


had described it to them later, how it sounded to them. To heck with the absence of evidence; I wanted proof. Would it be possible, I asked Warfield, to find the place on the recording where I had heard the taps? Warfield had not flagged that spot in the data, but he obligingly clicked through dozens of files until suddenly there we were in the mayor’s office, Warfield and Reed asking about the jani- tor, their voices close in the cramped room. “If you are here,” Reed was saying, “Could you knock twice, like this?” He rapped on the table, and I held my breath. The static unspooled past my memory of the moment, uninterrupted, as steady as rain. There was nothing there at all.


Lauren Wilcox is a writer living in New Jersey and a frequent contributor to the Magazine. She can be reached at wpmagazine@washpost.com.


June 20, 2010| The WashingTon PosT Magazine 17


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