International Society for Paranormal Research

Clairvoyant. Cognizant. Medium. Scientist. Call Dr. Larry Montz just about anything, but please resist the word “Ghostbuster.” He holds a Ph.D. in Parapsychologsuby, “which is a science like biology and chemistry: the scientific study of phenomena using scientific methods, utilizing certain equipment to prove that these phenomena are taking place,” he explains. Montz and his team of investigators at the International Society for Paranormal Research (ISPR), founded in 1972, use typical scientific equipment to measure temperature changes, wind speed, and electromagnetic fields generated by “earthbound entities,” or dead humans. Montz is also the first parapsychologist to employ clairvoyants, people with the supposed ability to see objects or events that are imperceptible to the senses, in his field research, and he is the first to study paranormal science outside of controlled environments.

Montz’s methods have proven quite successful, considering that ISPR has been featured on everything from the Discovery Channel and National Geographic to E! True Hollywood Story, and that some hotels pay upwards of $10,000 to have their “entity activity” studied. Montz and his colleagues have also assisted numerous murder investigations, celebrities, authors, and government agencies on quests of the unknown. After six years of intensive study of actively haunted properties in New Orleans, the ISPR headed to Los Angeles, leasing the dilapidated Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard as their new office space in the late ‘90s. While renovating the reportedly haunted building, the team discovered nine active entities in the theater itself.

“An older man with a receding hairline and glasses, stocky and jollylooking, appeared to me one day,” says Montz. “He asked, ‘So what are you doing here?’ I told him we wanted to renovate, and he said, ‘Oh,’ and disappeared. It turned out this older man was a projectionist there for 40 years and died in the projection booth during a matinee.” The team later met a pair of twins who “were upset all the time,” a drug addict named Danny who overdosed in the theater in the ‘70s, and a teacher named Miss Elizabeth and four children, all of whom had perished in a fire in 1901, when a schoolhouse stood on the theater’s grounds. When the lease expired and black mold was found thriving within the walls, the ISPR team helped the remaining entities to “cross over” to the land of the dead. The clearing of this particular property is the subject of the documentary film Exorcism of Hollywood’s Most Haunted: Vogue Theater 1901 – 2001, though Montz isn’t a fan of the term “exorcism” either. “It’s a religious term, and some of us on the team are and some aren’t, so we don’t use it,” he says.

Unlike the Sci-Fi Channel show Crossing Over, which allows merely communication with the deceased (though Montz dismisses the host John Edward as “just an actor”), several members of Montz’s team claim to have the ability to open up “dimensional doorways,” having led many earthbound entities away from here and into the world of the dead. They say that dead people who remain earthbound are often those with unfinished business, or small children or people who died unexpectedly and didn’t have time to comprehend what was happening (ala The Sixth Sense). Once it is explained to them that they are dead, and belong in the world of the dead, most usually want to leave. “Crossing an entity, at this time, is still completely a clairvoyant matter,” says Daena Smoller, an empath and cognizant medium who joined the ISPR team in 1995. “[It] cannot be done scientifically, and cannot really be substantiated scientifically except by noting that activity has ceased,” she explains.

Smoller met Dr. Montz as an unbelieving tourist vacationing in New Orleans from Ohio in January of 1995. She and her best friend paid for one of his earlier Ghost Expeditions, a tourism venture that allowed tourists to dig and use scientific equipment. Smoller left disappointed, copping what she says was a major attitude and leaving drunken messages on Montz’s voicemail throughout the rest of her holiday week. Montz had been away on a nearby island investigating other properties, but ran into Smoller the day before she and her girlfriend were to leave, offering them the opportunity to tag along on some of his unpublicized projects.

Their first stop was at “The 1850 House,” which is now a museum. Though it was not open early in the morning, the security guards knew Dr. Montz and let them in. “While walking up the stairs, something cold passed through me and my best friend,” Smoller says. “Larry never turned around or stopped walking, just says, ‘Did she walk through you?’ with his back turned to us. That freaked us both out. We didn’t know which was worse, what just happened or that he knew, so we started calling him Scary Larry. He told us ‘she’ was a 6-year-old girl who died of a respiratory illness and was still there.”

Scary Larry then took the two women to Le Petite Theater on Jackson Square, the oldest continuously running community playhouse in the United States. “He’d already documented thirteen entities there, seven of which were children,” says Smoller. “He knew all of them by name; had been working on the property for two years. We were walking out when he turned to the corner and said, ‘Hey, this is Sigmund. Sigmund was a stagehand from the early 1900s and he likes to play a lot of tricks. Do you see him? He’s looking at us.’ My friend.