Lori Cox hasn't been in town long, but her name probably will get around fast as a paranormal investigator poking around some creepy old houses and buildings throughout the Shenandoah Valley and Northern Virginia.
Schiffer Publishing, based near Lancaster, Pa., has contracted Cox to write a book about the area's ghostly legends, hauntings and paranormal activity.
Cox, 38, has been interested in the strange and unusual since she was a young child growing up in Erlanger, Ky.
"I've always been fascinated with ghosts and cemeteries and all the history that goes with it," she said.
Cox began researching ghostly legends after taking a picture at a cemetery years ago and seeing something strange in the photograph.
"It was a cemetery in Hilton Head," she said. "After developing it, there was a figure, an apparition in the picture that wasn't there when I shot it."
After visiting husband Claude Tinsley's family in Waynesboro and falling in love with the area, she convinced him they should move here. They arrived three months ago from Tallahassee, Fla., with their six youngest children.
Meanwhile, she shopped her book proposal at several publishing companies and finally got a response from Schiffer, a small-to-midsized family company that has been branching out from antiques and collectibles books to other genres, including gardening, architecture and the paranormal.
The company recently published "Haunted Richmond" by Pamela K. Kinney.
"Our lifestyles catalogue has a section dealing with astrology," said Josh Stabler, sales and marketing manager. "This is an extension of that. It's a new way to expand that part of our business."
Added Stabler: "We have writers pursuing these activities in different states such as California, Texas, Georgia and Virginia."
Popular reality shows like the Sci-fi Channel's "Ghost Hunters" and Travel Channel's "Most Haunted" reflect widespread public interest in ghosts and hauntings.
Cox's research involves Internet searches, library archives, newspaper clippings, interviewing local historians and testimonials from people who've experienced paranormal activity. She investigates sites of interest by using an EMF, or electromagnetic field, detector, which she and other paranormal observers feel is capable of detecting otherworldly activity, and also takes digital photographs when feels a spirit is present.
Leads she's currently following include the old Obenschain house on Selma Boulevard and the DeJarnette buildings. Cox recently received permission to enter the former Staunton Correctional Center property, which is to be redeveloped for upscale townhomes and shops.
She said workers in one of the buildings on the property, the original site of Western State Hospital, have told her they've seen an apparition.
"I think it might be a former patient who may have died there," she said.
While researching the 1850 manse on Selma Boulevard, Cox came across information explaining a previous ghost haunting there.
She read that a sensitive — one who is receptive to paranormal activity — from Charlottesville was called in to the home in the 1980s. "She saw the apparition, a murdered Confederate soldier, and interacted with him and helped him find his way," Cox said.
The book is scheduled to be released in late spring and will be sold in local independent book stores, retail book chains in the area and specialty and gift shops, Stabler said.
If the book does well, Cox will continue to write two more books on hauntings in Virginia, one covering the southern and west areas of the state and a final book on activity in the Tidewater area.
