Jones, police officer turned paranormal investigator, told ghost stories to students.
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October 17, 2006
Last Thursday, students from the University of Michigan-Dearborn filed into the Henry Ford Estate around 7 p.m., just as it was getting dark outside. The cold and windy night was the perfect setting for hearing a couple of ghost stories in the estate's high-ceilinged music room. As attendees sat and ate hors d'oeuvres and drank punch, Stacey Jones, a police officer turned paranormal investigator, was the story teller.
Jones, who hails from Syracuse, New York, has known from the beginning that paranormal activity would be a part of her life. "I remember begging my mother to please, please let me buy at least one book on the paranormal," she recalls of the Scholastic Books fairs at the school when she was a child. At age six, she questioned members of her family about their experiences with paranormal activity. She found that several of them, including her mother, had seen ghosts.
While most children answered the infamous "What do you want to be when you grow up?" question with things like doctor, teacher or nurse, Jones would defiantly reply, "I don't want to be a nurse, I want to be a parapsychologist."
Unfortunately for her, professional degrees in parapsychology or anything dealing with the paranormal were unheard of. At age 21, she gave up her dream and decided to become a police officer instead.
Jones worked for the Federal Government, investigating criminal acts within the Department of Defense, but then she decided to go back to Syracuse and work as a police officer there. All the while, she never forgot her dream of working with the paranormal and spent most of her free time studying it on the side. She did in secret, for fear of her coworkers making fun of her. "I always kept it to myself," she said.
At one point, Jones and her partner went to investigate a call from a woman who complained that she was hearing footsteps and seeing shadows in her house, and that the TV was turning on by itself. Jones and her partner found nothing and later laughed at the woman, saying she had too much time on her hands. "I couldn't say anything to her," Jones remembers. "I really felt that the house was haunted."
It was then that she decided that she needed to follow what she believed to be her true calling. Jones turned in her badge and became a full time paranormal investigator-or, as she was known by UM-D students last Thursday night, "ghost cop."
Jones' explanation to students and other attendees of the presentation about how she came upon her current profession was followed by a PowerPoint show of spooky evidence.
Several pictures showed what are commonly referred to as "orbs;" little patches of light that show up in pictures that some believe to be the souls of the deceased. In a series of pictures taken by Jones in a Syracuse home, an orb appears to come through the wall of a couple's basement, fly around the room and go out the door. A video of the room showed the same event.
Another unexplainable phenomenon was shown in a Polaroid taken of a little girl on her first day of school. Superimposed over the picture are the faces of two little boys. Jones sent the picture to the makers of the film, who could offer no explanation for the faces.
Jones had many stories to tell, such as one of a New York Bed and Breakfast where occupants often cut their visits short because of paranormal experiences. The owner showed Jones gouges in the closet floor and said she often heard growls from the closet and a tapping on the window. Jones recommended that she get the place exorcised, but the owner refused. Months later, she gave up her Bed and Breakfast because she couldn't make any money; people who came to stay kept leaving in the middle of the night.
After showing many pictures and telling stories to the crowd, Jones explained that her specialty was electronic voice phenomenon (EVP). Some believe that EVPs, which are recorded on simple voice recorders, are the voices of the deceased.
Jones played several EVPs for the crowd and explained that voices would say things like "I'm here" or answer questions asked by Jones and others who came with her. Skeptics, she then explained, say that EVPs are either radio waves, the person recording's own thoughts or UFOs. Jones explained that she has heard the recordings herself and knows that they are none of those things.
She went on to explain some of the tools she uses for doing her investigations, which include an EMF detector, a voice recorder with a microphone and an infrared camera.
"The technology is getting cheaper," she said, "and I think we're going to get more and more evidence."
After the presentation, students asked Jones questions about her experience. They were then invited to go on a ghost hunt around the Henry Ford Estate around 9 p.m.
To learn more about Stacey Jones and her work, visit her on MySpace at myspace.com/staceyjonesghostcop or check out "The Haunting," which is about a place that Jones has investigated, this Thursday at 9 p.m. on the Discovery Channel.
