II. The rebirth of ghoul

In the mid 1970s, New England investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren found themselves at the center of one of the most ballyhooed hauntings in US history: the case of the Lutz family and their brief, action-packed stay in Amityville, New York. Amityville had everything a good haunting should have: faces at the window, voices, blood oozing from the walls, flies infesting the bedrooms, a fiery pit in the basement, even a spectral, levitating pig. Better yet, the spirits who haunted the Lutz family were only laid to rest when the Archbishop of Canterbury himself stepped in to perform an exorcism.

This was heady stuff for the ghost-hunting community. Amityville quickly became synonymous with haunted houses, and served as the inspiration for the wildly cheesy film The Amityville Horror. When the ectoplasm had settled, Ed and Lorraine Warren were famous. They also became role models for a whole generation of fledgling investigators. As one skeptical observer puts it, the Warrens "left a trail of ghost hunters behind them."

One of those eager acolytes was John Zaffis, the Warrens’ nephew, who went on to found the Paranormal Research Society of New England. Sadly, as Zaffis quickly discovered, the Amityville haunting marked the peak of the public’s appetite for ghost stories, and soon the paranormal industry began to decline. Indeed, by Zaffis’s own account, the last 25 years have been lean times for ghost hunters.

Lately, though, things have started to pick up again. For starters, creepy films like The Sixth Sense and The Blair Witch Project have injected an element of true horror into the ghost genre, which helped exorcize the campy Ghostbusters image that long, er, haunted the paranormal field. Meanwhile, the cult TV show Crossing Over, in which hunky medium John Edwards "contacts" the dead relatives of audience members, has provided a high-profile source of validation for believers. And then, of course, came the millennium, which caused a spike in irrational behavior of all types.

"We’ve been getting calls more and more frequently," says Johnson. "People seem to be more open about asking for help."

As with most fringe activities, gains in the ghost-hunting field are being driven in large part by the Internet. Paranormal chat rooms hum with tales of otherworldly persecution ("I have got to the point where I won’t even get out of bed to use the bathroom"), which in turn fosters reams of advice, ranging from sleeping with bay leaves under the pillow to suing any realtor who sells a house without explaining that it comes equipped with restless spirits ("It’s called nondisclosure"). You could fill a library with this stuff.

With increased demand comes an increase in services. Over the last few years, online paranormal investigators have been popping up faster than pustules on Linda Blair’s forehead. Locally, South Shore Paranormal Investigators vie for trade with Paranormal Research Investigators, the New England Society for Psychic Research, the Paranormal Research Center of New England, the Whitelight Society for Paranormal Research, the Massachusetts Haunting Society, the Phantom Realm Society, and many, many more.

"Quite honestly," says John Zaffis, "in the last few years I’ve seen more investigators pop out of the woodwork than I have in my life. In Connecticut alone we have 22 organizations." And, to hear these guys talk, they are busy. "The TAPS Web site gets a thousand hits a day," says Jason Hawes, the company’s founder. "We go all over the world."

Derek Bartlett, who established the Cape and Islands Paranormal Research Society last year, has encountered such a vigorous demand for his services that he recently placed an ad on his Web site looking for additional staff. "I need six investigators total," he says, but adds that he could probably find work for 60.

"In times of economic slowdown, there is always more interest in the paranormal," says Paul Eno, author of Faces at the Window: First-Hand Accounts of the Paranormal in Southern New England (New River Press, 1998). "It gives us something to think about outside our own problems." Keith Johnson agrees. "I think right now things are happening that are out of our control," he says, "especially since September 11. People feel overwhelmed by all this, so they want to feel that there’s something more, something other than this physical life."

Hawes, meanwhile, takes a Malthusian approach, attributing the rise in paranormal activity to shifts in otherworldly demographics. "There are more people on the planet," he says, "so more death occurs, which opens up a chance for more human spirits to be out there. I believe that as more people pass on, this will keep growing. Look at England: it’s so old, it has so much history; no wonder it’s got some of the most haunted places in the world."

Even die-hard disbelievers like Stephen Novella, a Yale professor of medicine and founder of the New England Skeptics Society, agree that these are boom times for the paranormal field. "These things tend to cycle up and down," Novella says. "It seems that right now we’re on an upswing. Many people speculate that we’re in the middle of a countercultural, anti-scientific backlash, and that’s being put forward as an explanation of why people are suggesting that [paranormal research] is the greatest thing since sliced bread."

Novella is not happy about this. "It’ll wane again," he says. "We’re already seeing the beginnings of disillusionment with the paranormal. You can only argue that a major breakthrough is right around the corner for so long. The new generation will get disillusioned with the false promises. Every generation has to rediscover this for themselves — they’ll get bored and move on to the next thing."