A look at NH’s paranormal investigators

Up a slope called Mystery Hill, amidst stone tunnels and megaliths with eerie names like Oracle Chamber, Tomb of Lost Souls, and a flat rock that most call The Sacrificial Table, on a site carbon-dated to 4,000 years old, a group of dedicated spirit hunters are on a quest to speak with the dead.

America’s Stonehenge in Salem has a history of visitors from beyond.

“There are too many strange occurrences to ignore,” Ron Kolek of the New England Ghost Project wrote in 2005. That’s why Paranormal Investigators of New England, PI-NE for short, booked a private twilight tour on a recent Saturday. They came to explore, bringing tools of the trade for detecting electromagnetic field disturbances and translating ghostly messages. Some had plans to stargaze in search of UFOs.

The sun had barely set when PI-NE appeared to make initial contact with the spirit world.

First, however, they checked the dirt floor for spiders. The Tomb of Lost Souls is a narrow curving tunnel with a dirt floor, and while PI-NE New Hampshire Assistant Director Deb Dutcher ain’t afraid of no ghosts, creepy crawlers in dark caves are another thing entirely.

As an investigator laid out an array of devices, including something called a REMPOD that lights up when it detects activity, a few other team members launched an app on their cell phones called Necrometer.

“What would you like us to know?” Melissa Roberge of the New Hampshire PI-NE chapter queried into the darkness.

Her phone lit up. “Her name is Michelle,” she reported to the group. “She said, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’”

At the next stop, everyone in the group introduced themselves to any and all spirits. Roberge said she was excited to visit America’s Stonehenge at night, having spent many days there during her New Hampshire childhood. All were deferential, though some told their invisible hosts, “It’s OK to touch me, but please don’t follow me home.”

Another New Hampshire investigator, Samantha Bravoco, said, “I’m hoping that you’re comfortable with us, and whoever’s here wants to communicate a little bit.” Bravoco studied psychology at Salem State University, choosing the school, her bio on the pi-ne.org website explained, “strictly because of witches, ghosts and goblins.”

What followed was a conversation carried out with EMF bells and glowing lights from a REMPOD operated by PI-NE team members. They said the spirit belonged to a young man who was around when Mystery Hill was a stop on the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people to freedom.

The content of the exchange proceeded with fits and stops, but engaging with a spirit isn’t ever easy or predictable, investigators say. Ultimately, at least a small belief that there’s something out there and it wants to talk is what brought the group together and keeps them questing.

A reassuring voice

Deb Dutcher’s path into the spirit world was guided by someone she knew and loved.

After her mother died unexpectedly, Dutcher left Vermont and moved to Colebrook, her childhood home in New Hampshire. That’s when her mom became a presence.

“I started seeing things, hearing things,” she said in a phone interview. “She visited me. I heard her voice.”

Ghost Hunters was on TV at the time, and Dutcher found herself quickly hooked.

“It just really piqued my interest,” she said, adding that she’d always wanted to belong to a team of investigators. About three years ago, she saw an ad seeking investigators for PI-NE’s New Hampshire division. She applied and passed interviews, along with a background check. A year later, Dutcher was running the chapter.

PI-NE was founded in 2004 and is based in Essex Junction, Vermont. It’s Vermont’s member of the TAPS Family, the network of teams affiliated with The Atlantic Paranormal Society, the group behind the same Ghost Hunters series that hooked Dutcher. Its brief covers hauntings, UFO sightings and even cryptozoology.

The service is free, and most clients are homeowners, with some businesses in the mix. The work commences with a background check on whoever is asking for help.

“We don’t want to send investigators into a bad situation,” Dutcher said. “There have been a couple times we’ve actually said no.”

The most common query is a simple one. “I just received a request that I need to call later on this afternoon, and it says right in it, ‘I just need to know I’m not crazy,’” she said. “We hear that a lot.”

Often, Dutcher believes, once the answer is found, it isn’t frightening at all. Children especially are scared by what they don’t understand. “It is so nice to be able to … make the connection that, hey, this is Grandpa or Grandma, just looking out for you,” she said. “It makes them feel so much better.”

Learning the poltergeist is mice under the floorboards can be just as comforting, even if it introduces a new problem.

“If you can easily debunk something, that takes away the fear as well,” Dutcher said, pointing to orbs as an example. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, it’s bugs or dust.”

TV investigators Dustin Pari and Brian Cano helped fuel her skepticism. She’s learned to avoid devices with built-in word banks, saying, “I want whatever’s coming through to be legitimate.”

The team often travels beyond New England. At the Hinsdale House in New York a few weeks ago she tested whether spirit-box listeners are just fitting random radio fragments to the questions. Two listeners wore separate headphones while questions were asked from another room, and the answers didn’t match the questions.

“However,” she said, “they both wrote down the same exact words.”

Closer to home, some of her most memorable experiences happened in public libraries. She saw things “frequently” in the basement of the New Hampshire State Library during seven years working there.

In the basement of the Woodsville Free Library, a teammate who is a medium described a World War I soldier and a talking teddy bear began responding on camera. Upstairs was a display honoring a young local man who served in that war. “When Kathy went over to look at the display, she goes, ‘That’s him,’” Dutcher said.

The work has changed her, too. “Sometimes I’m facing something that I’m kind of daunted by, and I’m like, ‘hey, look, I can walk in all by myself in a dark asylum,’” she said. “I can do this.”

A veteran ghost hunter

With more than 25 years of chasing ghosts, Ron Kolek has learned to not sell certainty. The founder of New England Ghost Project in Dracut, Mass., lets the work speak for itself.

“We never tell people whether their house is haunted or not,” he said in a recent Zoom interview. “We just give them whatever we find.”

Kolek, who has a degree in environmental science, came to the subject grounded in science. In 2000, however, an accident cost him several fingers. A pulmonary embolism that followed put him in intensive care — and gave him a vision. “While I was there, I was somewhere else,” he said. “It was a place that was very, very white.”

There were figures, and what he describes as angelic music. “I always refer to the Madonna song ‘Like a Prayer,’” he said. “There’s a line in it that says, ‘It feels like home.’ That’s what it felt like.” Then it all fell together, “like the closing of an iris,” leaving only the hospital room and his heartbeat on the monitor.

Recovering, he took a TV production course through Media One that required a final project. Inspired by his near-death experience — “I don’t know if it was the drugs they gave me or not,” he said — and a manufacturing company he owned that employees, including his son, swore was haunted, he made a decision.

“I said, ‘You know what, I’ll do it on ghosts.’”

Rounding up a couple of collaborators, he quickly got to work, investigating his own “walk to the light” experience with all the objectivity he could muster. Before he knew it, Kolek was in deep. “I couldn’t explain some of the stuff that I experienced there,” he said. “That’s how I got hooked.”

He set up New England Ghost Project to prove or disprove the paranormal, but soon decided he couldn’t.

“Some people, every light that flickers is a ghost,” he said, while with others, “If a spirit slapped them across the face, they’d rationalize the whole thing away.” So he documents and lets people decide. Beyond that, he’s talked about the paranormal on the radio for 23 years, including a podcast with British parapsychologist Steve Parsons.

Like many investigators, Kolek does most of his work in private homes, where he says he’s encountered more than a few affirmations that the spirit world is real. At one Lakes Region house, a former speakeasy, a camera on a stairway landing somehow ended up at the bottom of the stairs; the footage showed nothing.

At another home about to be foreclosed on, medium Maureen Wood sensed a little boy. As midnight neared, Kolek followed his EMF meter out of the house and into the woods, to a small cemetery with two tiny graves. The names on them matched the ones Wood had picked up.

Kolek has had further encounters of his own in Portsmouth, at the now-shuttered Molly Malone’s Irish Steakhouse, and Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse, where Kolek sits on the board. During a fundraising ghost tour in the adjoining fort, he watched a woman pass from window to window toward the door. No one came in.

“I saw whatever I saw as clear as day,” he recalled, noting the Coast Guard, whose base the lighthouse sits on, has long reported a woman on the wall. Historian Jeremy D’Entremont later learned that a woman died in an explosion at the fort; all that was ever found was a scrap of her dress.

Kolek’s skepticism persists. He’s not easily fooled by fantastic stories, like a Pembroke homeowner who once told him a medium had sent “400 Revolutionary soldiers” into the light.

“The idea that … you can go in there, wave your magic wand and you send them on to the happy hunting ground is a big misconception,” he said. This logic applies to the practice of burning sage to ward off bad energy. “I’ve gone on exorcisms with the Catholic Church, and trust me, it ain’t so easy.”

His advice for the curious is simple. “Don’t do anything that you’re not comfortable with,” he said, while adding with a laugh that visiting the house in Pembroke did yield his favorite-ever recording, an EVP he heard during setup: “It’s the Ghostbusters.”

Young guns

Alan Guin used to be the guy rolling his eyes when someone raised the subject of paranormal activity.

“I used to think it was all fake. I never once believed in it,” Guin said in a recent phone interview. He spent 10 years as an Air Force combat medic. “I thought everything had an explanation.”

Then one night he tagged along with a former partner to a Christian-themed park in Connecticut with a dark past.

Sitting in a cave with only a flashlight, he saw what he calls a giant black smog cloud. “It just kind of showed up in front of me, kind of hung out for a second, went over to my partner at the time, and then just dissipated into the wall as clear as day,” he said. He recalled thinking, “Science cannot explain what I just saw.”

In 2021, Guin formed SoulSeekers Paranormal NE with Austin Harley and Corey Marshall, friends he met exploring abandoned buildings. Harley and Marshall had both dabbled in the paranormal recreationally, while Guin added scientific method to the mix, along with “the nerdiness of all my tools and editing skills.”

The group started with five members, and came back from a pandemic-induced break as a rebranded trio.

“We were more intention-driven,” Guin said of their return, noting that five early episodes from their YouTube channel “will never see the light of day again.”

Harley now lives in Rhode Island and Marshall in Tennessee. How do they get together? “Cars and planes, man.”

The self-taught Guin shoots and edits everything, but the finished work doesn’t look it, rivaling Ghost Hunters for production values. But he draws a line between paranormal research and entertainment, eschewing reality fare for in-depth investigation work. “We’re not over-the-top screaming and provoking, none of that cringy TV garbage.”

The team carries more than $10,000 in gear, including repurposed tools like an electricians’ EMF meter and a SLS camera that he says reveals ghostly apparitions as stick figures, a device normally used for Xbox gaming.

Like most groups, SoulSeekers usually answers calls from people unnerved in their own homes, and works for free.

“One of the most rewarding things is bringing validation to people who … get looked at kind of with a stink eye that they’re crazy,” he said.

Sometimes the validation is that nothing is there. At a location in Massachusetts, reports of wailing and loud bangs in the basement turned out to be wind-driven garage doors. “The owner was very relieved to know that it wasn’t somebody in the basement.”

One of the group’s most striking cases was at a restaurant in Milford. Their autumn 2025 investigation centered on a basement well and an odd little closet. On two visits, the team got the name Elizabeth and a plea: “I can’t find my baby.”

They were stumped until they learned an important detail tied to a centuries-old tragedy.

The restaurant had bought furniture from Country Tavern before it was torn down in late 2021. That Nashua pub was said to be haunted by Elizabeth Ford, who in 1797 was locked in a closet by her sailor husband after he’d learned she had an out of wedlock child while he was at sea. He killed her baby, then murdered her and threw her body down a well.

“The same name, the same fate, the same story came with the furniture,” Guin said, adding that the well and closet at the Milford restaurant were eerily similar enough to confuse the spirits into hitching a ride to a new home. A two-part episode about the investigation is called Whispers from the Well.

The team recently completed an investigation on a site in Epsom, now a private home that Guin called “incredibly active.” They also explored a location in Temple, where equipment was knocked off shelves. He has a theory about why.

“These energies, whatever they are, exist in a matter that our brains don’t have the software to process correctly.”

A theory loses steam

Everyone involved in paranormal investigations is mindful of false positives; skepticism is in their blood. That’s despite an obsession with finding things a lot of people view the same way Guin did before his first visitation. A good case in point can be found at Endicott Furniture in Concord.

For years, a mischievous spirit was said to throw pillows around the showroom at night in this business that’s been around since 1925, but lately not so much. Owner Eric Reingold, also a member of JamAntics, a band that played many Halloween Howls back in the day (and will reunite Nov. 6 at BNH Stage), says the reason’s kind of prosaic.

“Back when steam heat was the way downtown heated their businesses, there was much more paranormal activity,” he said recently. “Banging and clanging, weird hisses … we can’t fall back on that any longer so there’s not much more to report.”

What’s in the bag: The ghost hunter’s toolkit

Alan Guin of SoulSeekers Paranormal NE says his team brings “well over $10,000” worth of equipment to a site. Deb Dutcher of Paranormal Investigators of New England (PI-NE) owns “four cases plus.” Much of it was built for electricians, contractors or gamers, not ghost hunters.

Here’s what investigators carry and how they say they use it.

Electromagnetic Frequency (EMF) detector. Measures fluctuations in electromagnetic fields. “It wasn’t made for ghost hunting,” Guin said. “It was made for electricians.” Investigators look closer at sudden spikes with no wiring nearby.

EMF bell. An EMF detector built into a bell. It rings only when the reading hits red, the top of its scale. Teams set a code, such as one ring for yes and two for no, and then ask questions. Guin’s team uses one called the Dead-Bell. “If you figure out how to use it, show us,” he tells whatever might be listening.

REMPOD. Puts out its own small magnetic field and sounds an alarm when anything disturbs it. A similar but not identical piece of equipment called the Omnipod v2 works the same way, while also logging touch, temperature, vibration, barometric pressure and magnetic changes, and sends them to a phone app.

Thermal camera. Shows a room by temperature alone, from cold in blue to hot in red. People show up orange-red. Guin says spirits can register blue-green.

SLS camera. A structured-light sensor first built for Xbox gaming. It reads depth and draws any human shape as a stick figure on screen, even when the room looks empty. Dutcher uses a phone-app version when she travels.

Infrared cameras and audio recorders. These do most of the work. Dutcher says PI-NE has switched from wired cameras tethered to a monitor at “home base” to wireless infrared units on battery packs that can go almost anywhere. Ron Kolek of the New England Ghost Project picks gear to fit the complaint: footsteps on the stairs call for a recorder, not just a camera. Recorders listen for EVPs (electronic voice phenomena), voices nobody heard in the room that turn up on playback.

Spirit box. A radio that sweeps AM and FM stations in rapid bursts while investigators listen for words that seem to answer questions. In the Estes method, one investigator wears a blindfold and headphones and calls out whatever they hear. The rest of the team asks questions the listener can’t hear. “It gives the spirit a method to talk to you if they want to,” Dutcher said.

Envoy. Dutcher’s go-to talking device answers yes or no or spells out words. She avoids gadgets that pull from a built-in word bank. “It just seems like they’re always saying, oh, the devil or death.”

Local haunts?

Here’s a list of some area spots that have a reputation for strange occurrences.

• Concord Public Library (45 Green St., Concord) According to an Around Concord story from Sept. 17, 2019, Concord Public Library director Todd Fabian told a tour group: “Personally, I don’t like to be in this building alone late at night after we close.” “I feel like at 7 a.m., if I’m alone, the ghosts are sleeping in. In the evening … well, I’ve heard all kinds of strange sounds that I cannot explain,” he said in the article.

• Gilson Road Cemetery (Gilson Road & Tanglewood Drive, Nashua) According to a The Cabinet Press story from Oct. 24, 2013, the cemetery “has a considerable reputation in paranormal investigation circles.”

• Island Path Road (Off Route 1A, Hampton Beach) Eunice “Goody” Cole was twice accused of witchcraft — in 1656 and 1671, according to hamptonhistoricalsociety.org. “On March 8, 1938 at the 300th Town Meeting the citizens passed a resolution restoring Eunice ‘Goody’ Cole to her rightful place as a citizen of Hampton,” the website said. According to HauntedPlaces.org: “… reports say Goody Cole’s ghost haunts the residents of Island Path Road. Folks see apparitions, flickering lights, objects that move around, and mysterious vanishing of neighborhood cats.”

• Lorden Plaza (586 Nashua St., Milford) At this modern shopping plaza, witnesses have described an apparition of a man wearing blue jeans, a plaid flannel shirt, and a tape measure on his belt walking along the property and disappearing into a plywood wall, according to hauntedplaces.org/milford-nh.

• Margaritas Mexican Restaurant (1 Bicentennial Sq., Concord) According to Atlas Obscura (atlasobscura.com), from 1890 to 1975, the spot was the home of the Concord Police Department, hence the jail cells that are still part of the dining area. “… [L]ocal legend holds that the restaurant is haunted by a spirit named George, and ghost hunters, including the Paranormal Research Society, have visited…,” the website said.

• The Music Hall (28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth) One of the state’s oldest theaters and a stop on more than a few ghost tours. According to an NHPR story in 2018, cold spots, twinkling lights, music coming from an empty stage, footsteps on an empty staircase and audience members wearing clothing from other eras are among the eerie sightings there.

• Tilton Inn (255 Main St., Tilton) Built in 1875, the building has burned down three times, according to the Inn’s website at thetiltoninn.com. “One of these … fires is said to have claimed the life of a 12-year-old girl, named Laura, who is suspected to have never left…. There have been many encounters with her both upstairs in the rooms, and downstairs in the pub and restaurant,” the website said. The Inn was featured on television’s Ghost Hunters.
• Vale End Cemetery (772 Isaac Frye Hwy., Wilton) The story goes that the ghost of Mary Ritter Spaulding, who died in 1808, appears as a blue light over her headstone, according to a 2017 story in The Cabinet Press.

• Windham Restaurant (59 Range Road, Windham) The restaurant embraces its spectral history, with events like an afternoon with medium Patricia Griffin and a recent seance. According to its website, windhamrestaurant.com, “Long before it became a restaurant, this property was part of a working farm in 1729. The Colonial-style house that stands today was built in 1812, carrying over two centuries of history within its walls.” A New England Ghost Project, neghostproject.com, post about the location talks about two visits the group made to the site and the odd occurrences people reported.