Georgia Ghost Hunters

Graveyard Shift
October 26, 2006

It doesn’t matter if you believe in ghosts. At midnight in a cemetery in the middle of Nowhere, S.C., shadows, breezes and soft sounds take on supernatural shape.

The woods are pockmarked with tombstones. It’s so dark I can see galaxies whirling overhead. I trip over graves. A vision of mummified hands reaching out of the ground overwhelms me. Perhaps they shouldn’t have sent the only reporter with a zombie evacuation plan, although, to be honest, the plan involves mostly running and shrieking.

Yet my guide is calm.

“We’re here to debunk this,” declares Ginger Yarbrough, organizer of Georgia Ghost Hunters. “We rule out all the man-made and natural explanations first before we try to say there’s spirits.”

Ginger and seven other members have brought me to a 200-year-old Huguenot graveyard an hour from Augusta, down a one-lane dirt path through a thick forest where trees bend like frightful fingers reaching for prey.

This group doesn’t look for the paranormal. They look for the normal. If lights in a home flicker, they blame the tree branch or a power line. They check for vermin, leaky pipes, gaps in insulation and other earthly explanations for unearthly sensations.

In the graveyard, the ghost hunters set up candles to provide a little light plus video cameras and voice recorders to document the hunt. They calibrate EMF meters to detect the presence of electromagnetic fields, infrared thermometers to spot temperature differentials and tri-field meters to detect magnetic fields, electrical fields and microwave emissions. When manmade and natural causes have been eliminated, Ginger says, it is generally believed that ghosts generate these fields and temperature changes.

“The most common energy form that a ghost uses is simple heat,” Ginger says. “A ghost will absorb heat to help it manifest, which is why people feel cold when a ghost passes them.”

These are true believers. Ginger is completing a certification from the Stratford Career Institute in parapsychology and astrology. She and her mother have seen enough unusual phenomena in their lives to scare legions of schoolchildren. They’ve been hunting ghosts for three years, in public and for private homeowners.

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