http://www.sheboygan-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080211/SHE0101/802110458/1973

Great Lakes Area Spirit Society leader Michael Henrickson, center, goes over the plan for a spirit search in Sheboygan. Press photo/Gary C. Klein

Ghost hunters: Local group investigates reports of paranormal

By Janet Ortegon
Sheboygan Press staff

Reach Janet Ortegon at 453-5121 or jortegon@sheboygan-press.com.

When Adrienne Doutillier bought her north-side Sheboygan home in 1999, she knew right away there was something special about it.

There was the frigid, clammy feeling across her neck and shoulders whenever she went inside. There was the intense, inexplicable surge of allergy symptoms. There was the puzzling refusal of anything she hung up or added to the house to stay where she put it.

She mentioned it to the tenants who lived on the first floor of the house at the time, and learned something startling.

"They said 'Well, that's Jamie,'" Doutillier said.

"Jamie" was a young man who is said to have died under suspicious circumstances while working on a car in the garage, Doutillier said. She couldn't find any record of him, but she researched the original owners of the house, who also owned the creamery building next door and another house on the block.

Doutillier said she learned that George Hoekstra, the son of the man who started the Hoekstra Dairy in the early 1900s and took over the company, eventually lost it all after an argument over a debt left a man dead and Hoekstra out of business.

Put it all together, and Doutillier thought she might have unseen visitors.

"I just decided to talk to it," said Doutillier, who didn't so much talk to the spirits as sass them. "I'm like, 'Look, I don't know who you are or what your problem is, but I bought the house and I really intend to fix it up. I'm not gonna put up with a lot of this.' I didn't seem to have a lot of problems after that."

Her curiosity continued to grow, however, particularly after she bought the creamery building next door in 2005 and thought the same things might be happening there.

Then she spotted an advertisement for the Great Lakes Area Spirit Society and decided to find out for sure.

Great Lakes Area Spirit Society is a paranormal research and investigation organization based in Sheboygan. The 10 members of the organization, led by Steven De Spain, 29, and his brother Michael Henrickson, 30, investigate homes and buildings to determine whether there is evidence of ghostly activity.

The group got together last spring, after the two brothers were talking about all the supposedly haunted places in the state.

"Wisconsin is listed as one of the most paranormal states in America," De Spain said. "(We thought) wouldn't it be cool to get a list?"

Instead of a list of haunted houses, they put together a group of local people — both believers and skeptics — who use science to prove or debunk the presence of spirits.

Using a variety of still and video cameras, microcassette recorders and digital recorders, the group sets up shop wherever its invited to capture proof of paranormal activity.

"To this day, we don't have anything on video," De Spain said. "We have one thing on audio. I need something someone can't dispute."

They're not trying to convince anyone that their home is haunted, and don't charge for their services. They just want to know, either way, the truth.

"We don't want to go into somebody's house and say 'OK, this place is haunted, this is what we're looking for, let's see something happen'," Henrickson said. "It's not that we don't believe that something could be haunted, it's just if it is, we want to have that solid concrete evidence."

To do that, they use an electromagnetic field meter to gauge the source electric impulses. Often, what can seem like a presence or a feeling of alarm to a sensitive person could just be the presence of overhead wiring, De Spain said.

"If you walk in expecting … this place is haunted, and you have that mindset that whatever you experience in here is paranormal, you don't look for a logical causes for it," he said. "If you have flickering lights in there … is it possible the wiring is bad? Or maybe the bulb is bad?"

At Doutillier's property, the group set up at the end of January and spent more than five hours walking around the dark, unheated storage facility, inviting any spirits that might be there to make themselves known.

Days after the investigation, De Spain said the videotapes of the investigation didn't yield anything, but the audio recordings were another story.

After a member of G.L.A.S.S. asked "Did anything bad happen here?" in the dark, unheated creamery building, an answer that no one heard at the time was clear on a microcasette recording of the investigation.

"Yes."

Other sounds were clearly audible in a digital recording made in the garage later in the evening, De Spain said.

But it doesn't mean Doutillier's property is haunted.

"We want to see if any of these noises they've been hearing can be rationalized," he said.

De Spain said he would sit down with Doutillier and show her the evidence without telling her what he thinks it is, so she can draw her own conclusions — the idea is to find the truth, not persuade anyone to see something that isn't there.

"I don't ever want to tell anybody what I think I'm hearing because then I'm leading them," De Spain said.

Henrickson said the members of G.L.A.S.S. try to find rational explanations for seemingly paranormal happenings, always hoping there won't be any.

"Even though our view is to go in and try to disprove it, I think we all are a little bit curious and hoping we'll find something that will give us the idea that there is something more," he said.