Paranormal investigators probe bar
Posted by the Ocean County Observer 

BY CHRIS LUNDY
STAFF WRITER

POINT PLEASANT — "When you have eliminated all which is impossible,
then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth," Sherlock
Holmes said.
Holmes is fiction, and so are ghost stories. Aren't they?
If so, how do some places become the setting for so many? For instance,
Magee's West Side Tavern on Route 88 is the stuff of local legend.
General Manager Jeremy Margolias has heard or seen it all. Items
disappear off orders. The blinds in an attic window are open every
morning, no matter what happens the night before. A barstool flies
through the air and shatters a window.

He admits to disbelieving a lot of it until he spoke with psychic Sylvia
Browne on "The Montel Williams Show" recently. She told him to tell the
ghost to leave.
"After I told him to leave, I had one of the busiest Fridays and the
busiest Saturdays ever," he said.
"It could be a coincidence," he admits.

The stories tell of a "Captain John" who locked his daughter in the
attic. Browne had said the captain story was very romantic, but that the
ghost's name is Louis Carter.
Before its previous incarnation, the restaurant was a hotel and a
brothel. It was also a one-time morgue for 39 victims of the John
Minturn shipwreck in 1846.
Denise Piper of Brick is a frequent customer. She's heard the legends,
and once was a part of them.

As she was driving up to the restaurant, her son, Ben, who was 3 at the
time, saw something from the back seat.
"Who's that creep looking at me?" he asked her.
She and her husband, Colin, looked into the restaurant's windows and
told him no one was there.

"Yeah, Mom. There's a creep up there," he said, refering to the attic.
"It was very freaky," she said.
Not everybody has a tale to tell. Employee Pam Green said all she's
heard are stories.
"I've worked here six years and I've never seen anything," she said.

But it was the local legends in this restaurant that prompted local
paranormal researchers to hunt for the ghosts early Thursday morning
just after it closed.
"I've heard rumors since I've been born," said Hannah Knueppel of Brick,
one of the founders of Paranormal Visions.
They set up video cameras and audio recorders. First they went room to
room, recording control conditions such as temperature and
electromagnetic readings.

All the lights were off, so no glares could be mistaken for anything
else. Six staff members explored the area, lighting up the darkness with
camera flashes.
Random photographs are more likely to find something, Knueppel said.
Targeting a specific spot doesn't always work.

When the lights go out, other senses come out to play. Every sounds
seems louder. Flashlights cut white lines into the darkness.
The first floor is the only one patrons visit. With the glow of arcade
games, the gentle hum of registers and the rattle of the air
conditioner, it doesn't give off a frightening vibe.

Then, like in a horror movie, the group split into two teams. One hit
the second floor and attic; the other took to the basement. They later
switched. The teams were instructed not to share information with each
other. That way, one's team's findings would not influence the other.
A narrow flight of stairs leads to the basement, where it was noticeably
warmer. There were no unusual readings, although a cobweb-strewn
crawlspace set the scene.

The second floor unfolds into small rooms on either side of a thin hall.
They must have been busy in the hotel room days.
Leftovers from all of the building's incarnations were present, from old
portraits to a "Superman Returns" poster. One room had several floor
coverings, one overlapping the other.
The attic is filled with decorations that could be found in any bar or
restaurant, but the team wasn't interested in them.

The chair the ghost supposedly inhabits sat untouched in the middle of
the attic, a short distance from the lone window. The team, trying to
draw the ghost out, pulled the chair out of it's normal home, sat in it,
and closed the blinds.
"Did you hurt your daughter?" asked Desirae Wojtanowski of Brick, a
co-founder. She was speaking over the silence, holding out a digital
recorder to catch any response not audible to the human ear.

"Why are you making it so cold in here?" she asked.
The average temperature readings were at about 63 degrees, much cooler
than the other floors, though the attic wasn't insulated. Witness
accounts of hauntings link the dropping of temperature with paranormal
activity, she said.

"We're not getting anything off this at all," Knueppel said, measuring
the electromagnetic radiation in the area of the chair and window. That
kind of energy is supposed to spike when something happens.
She sat in the chair as the teams spoke quietly, waiting for any
reaction. They were instructed not to whisper. If a voice is picked up
on one of the recorders, it can be attributed to one of them. If a
whisper is picked up, they can't tell who is whispering.

Suddenly, Knueppel shot out of the chair and ran across the attic,
creaking the floorboards.
"Did you hear that? There was something breathing behind me. That was
not cool! That was not cool!" she said, laughing nervously.
The video camera was trained on her the whole time and the digital
cameras fired away.
"There's something in the picture," she said later. "It looks like a
hand right around my hand."

The crew from Paranormal Visions are still poring over the footage.
Several hours of video and audio tape and dozens of photographs and
readings were used. The trick now is to determine what is real.
Several photographs picked up small, glowing orbs that could be seen in
the digital viewscreen. However, they were either taken in complete
darkness or with one small beam from a flashlight.

The lights were off, so they couldn't have refracted and created the
orbs. No one was standing behind Knueppel as she sat in the chair and
heard breathing.

If the impossible is taken out of the equation, then are the improbable
ghost stories true? The answer is something people can only learn
themselves.