Archived Jamesburg Articles
‘Explaining unexplainable events'
Trenton Times
Thursday, October 27, 2005
By Beth E. Fand
Staff Writer
When Ron Becker was a boy, he knew better than to go near the Lakeview Mansion Museum, a sprawling 23-room house that once belonged to the founder of Jamesburg.
"As a kid, I remember when we walked by the house you were always told to stay away by older kids because the house was haunted," Becker says.
Now, as president of the Jamesburg Historical Association, Becker can attest to the fact that the rumors have lived on.
"It wasn't until I really became involved with this association that I started hearing about these legends from the old timers," he says.
And coming from them, he says, the claims are even more horrifying.
"There's a story that a guy was dragged up to the third floor by some guys who beat him up and cut his tongue out and left him in the room to die," says Tom Bodall, the association's second vice president and a history major at Rowan University. "Then there are stories of Mrs. Buckelew dying in the house. She supposedly died on the third floor in one of the bedrooms and still walks around the house. We have a rocking chair in the downstairs parlor, and people see it rocking back and forth inside if we're giving a tour."
For people like Bodall, who believe in ghosts, the tales are fascinating enough to warrant some attention - and even, perhaps, after all these years, some proof.
Which is exactly where South Jersey Ghost Research comes in.
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The Delaware Valley-area group, which has been investigating otherworldly occurrences for 50 years, has visited the museum - often referred to as "Buckelew House" - twice in recent months to look into the unusual activities there.
It's what the group does for building owners both public and private just about every weekend, under cover of night and with lots of special equipment on hand.
Dispatching at least four team members per house, the investigators are typically called in after property owners or visitors have heard footsteps or voices, seen shadows or items moving around on their own, been mysteriously touched, felt cold spots in a room or smelled perfume or cigar smoke that wasn't their own, says Nicole Steward, a team leader with South Jersey Ghost Research.
"Most of the time they have things going on and want to make sure they're not going crazy," says Steward, a 26-year-old Bordentown resident who works for the state Department of Agriculture and is studying marketing at Thomas Edison State College. "They want validation."
In many cases, she says, the group can provide some.
Using digital cameras, video cameras with night vision, thermal scanners, motion detectors, electromagnetic field meters and voice recorders, the teams often find evidence of spirit presences, Steward says.
It comes in the forms of sudden, short temperature drops in specific spots, disturbances in the electromagnetic field that cannot be attributed to team members or electronic equipment like TVs, unexplained white orbs that show up in photos and unidentified voices not heard until tapes are played back later, she says.
"We have software and we can analyze voices," Steward says. "Anything below 300 hertz is nonhuman. So if you have someone saying `hello' and it's below 300 hertz, it can't be human."
The teams capture such recordings on a regular basis, Steward says.
"My favorite is a little girl saying `hello' (in a home the group investigated)," she says. "It's clear as a bell. No child lived there. They did an analysis and it was around 150 hertz."
Less tangible but just as important to the investigations are the impressions of group members like Steward and SJGR president Dave Juliano, who say they are "sensitive" to spirit presences.
"I tend to see things (rather than) feel them," Juliano says. "Others just pick up emotions or information about the person. We use that in conjunction with the scientific stuff. Together, it helps build a more credible picture."
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But just how scientific is the group's work?
Steward admits that she can't explain why a ghost would interrupt an electromagnetic field, and she understands that orbs can appear in photographs or on video because of dust or reflected light - and that they're more likely to occur in pictures taken on cheaper 35mm cameras than on expensive digital ones.
She and her cohorts are convinced that they pick up more orbs when spirits are present, a signal that energy is being pulled toward the ghost presence. Still, they can't prove it's a meaningful sign.
"This is all theory," Steward says. "Until I can capture the ghost and talk to him, I do the best I can at helping to explain unexplainable events."
The issue of the voice recordings, though, may be harder for some skeptics to dismiss.
Frank Certo, chief audio engineer for radio station New Jersey 101.5, says the claim that human voices never register below about 300 hertz sounds accurate.
Of course, without seeing the way the ghost researchers are recording and listening to the sounds they pick up on jobs, Certo says, he can't vouch for the validity of their work.
But he admits he's hard-pressed to explain how a voice that sounds human could register on a recording at 150 hertz.
"Maybe if somebody's speaking and they record a reflection off a wall, some weird filtering that makes a harmonic," he said. "It could be possible, I suppose."
If you ask Don Benhardt, though, that kind of explanation isn't needed. What he and others have seen and felt inside the Buckelew House, he says, has left him firmly convinced that spirits exist.
The historical association member has accompanied plenty of people on tours of the mansion, and he's seen several of them react with discomfort upon stepping into a certain room on the third floor - a room said to be home to an unhappy spirit who gets angry when his privacy is invaded.
On other tours, Benhardt says, his girlfriend - walking at the very back of the group - felt a tap on her shoulder, and his mother was slapped in the back of the head by something she couldn't see.
"After they're here," he says, "skeptics are often not so sure that ghosts don't exist. They're willing to accept the possibility."
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It's a question SJGR has been exploring since 1955, when a precursor to the group, Ghost Hunters of America, was founded, Steward says. That organization merged with two others in 1998, she says, to become SJGR.
The nonprofit, all-volunteer group takes cases - all for free - within a two-hour radius of the Deptford area.
One of its visits to the Burlington County Prison museum in Mount Holly was featured on `MSNBC Investigates' in 1999 or 2000, she recalls, and the group appeared on the History Channel's "Weird U.S." last month.
Its members - 28, in addition to 10 trainees - are men and women in their 20s through 60s, Steward says.
"We get a lot of people who were in the police force, nurses, EMTs, some military and even teachers," she says. "They're in the service area - social workers, human resources - with a general need and want to help people."
And they accomplish that, sometimes even reassuring clients to the point where they remove for-sale signs from their front lawns.
But they don't all boast the kind of sensitivity Steward believes she has.
She's grown used to hearing footsteps running down hallways in her house and witnessing strange green lights or electric toothbrushes going on and off unbidden, she says. Yet those experiences don't shake her in the slightest - possibly because she feels certain that ghosts won't hurt her.
"I've never seen a situation where a spirit was violent or mean," she says. "It's so extremely rare. We do find there are spirits that are nasty, but they don't have the physical capability of hurting you."
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Steward focused those abilities on the Buckelew House when she and a large troupe of other SJGR members arrived there to investigate on Sept. 10.
They cut the electricity in the creaky old building, set up their equipment and got to work, tramping up and down uneven stairwells and snaking between antique furniture as they took videos, kept watch over the tiny red and green lights on electromagnetic field monitors and made startling cuts through the darkness with bright flashes from their cameras.
Originally owned by James Buckelew, the building started off as a bedroom, kitchen and pantry 320 years ago and grew, over time, to its current size. It was bought in 1900 by the Paxton family, who used it as a boarding house until the late 1970s, Becker says.
The historical association, he says, has spent the past 26 years restoring the home. And, in some cases, telling its spooky stories.
Members tell tales of a servant boy who haunts the back bedrooms on the second floor, playing mischievous tricks like turning lights on and off and pulling people's hair, and they relate a legend about someone being murdered in the conservatory, says the association's Bodall.
Finally, after years of spinning the tales, association members called in SJGR on Friday, May 13, to do an initial investigation. The ghostbusters returned in September for a second look.
On the first go, Steward says, the teams collected photos that included orbs, voice readings and electromagnetic field evidence.
"The majority of psychic impressions were obtained on the third floor of the building," she adds. "There were female spirits that were felt in various parts of the building, as well as a dog."
Four months later, Steward also felt something on the third floor.
"I had an impression of a man and also an impression of a woman in the Buckelew bedroom," she recalls. "Down in the original part of the house, in the kitchen, I had picked up an impression of a man, as well, in there."
For Bodall, the findings bring a certain level of satisfaction since they echo what he already suspected.
"I believe it," he says of the claims that the house is haunted. "I don't think they're making it up. It's old and I'm a believer of ghosts and I believe there are spirits still lingering around."
NOTE: Contact Beth E. Fand at bfand@njtimes.com or (609) 989-5668.