Ghost Stories

When you hear bumps and creaks in the night, Haunted New Jersey is the one you're gonna call.

By Elise Young

We're looking for ghosts. And although we certainly don't expect them to leap out and welcome us to the basement of the 250-year-old Cranbury Inn, what we'd like is a message of some kind. A door opening by itself, for instance, or the sound of hurried footsteps. Or a glimpse of the disappearing dog so often spotted by the servers and busboys. Maybe even a brush with a deceased boarder, her voice cutting through the gloom.

Illustration: Jack Hornady

What we'd settle for is the sudden appearance of Gay or Tom Ingegneri, the very-much-alive owners of the inn, with a tip on where, exactly, we might find the light switch. No matter. Garrett Husveth and Al Rauber, the founders of Haunted New Jersey, are accustomed to wandering through the darkness armed only with open minds and a cache of electronic equipment that, they surmise, can capture evidence that spirits exist. Besides, they tell their jittery friend from New Jersey Monthly, it's only a dirt-floor cellar (that happens to be in a Revolutionary War–era building with a history of eerie goings-on). Any spirits in the place certainly mean no harm (despite an unexplained report of the sound of glass breaking). And with all of Haunted New Jersey's inventory scattered throughout the inn—video monitors, digital cameras, tape recorders, temperature gauges, energy-field meters—anything out of the ordinary likely will be captured and can be examined later (if we make it out of here to see a later).

When it comes right down to it, Husveth and Rauber are saying, there's nothing to fear, right? Sure. Right.

Haunted New Jersey is a two-man operation with a site on the Internet. It operates at an annual loss of several thousand dollars because, as far as its founders know, there's no paranormal foundation to underwrite what turns out to be very expensive volunteer work.

Yet Husveth and Rauber stick together, bound by their curious nature and an earnest mission to apply scientific principles to the unexplained. They've gotten their best results, by far, with recording what parapsychologists call electronic voice phenomena, or EVP. Proponents suspect that when humans die, they leave behind a kind of energy, or consciousness, often in the form of voice-like sounds. A standard cassette player can record them. Skeptics suggest that the voices—which can't be heard until a recording of them is played back—are merely random radio transmissions or stray bits of sound left when tapes are recycled. The reply from the 225-member International Association of Electronic Voice Phenomena is this: Diligent investigators use only factory-sealed tapes. Rauber has been unable to attribute to anything but EVP the ghostly singing, whispering, or other noises that can appear on his recordings.

You've probably heard of people who are excited by the notion of receiving communication from the dead. They've formed interest groups all over the Internet, their Web sites loaded with snapshots and audio recordings from midnight traipses through cemeteries and abandoned houses. Many tout their very own "training" programs, so that anyone with a trunkful of gizmos from Radio Shack and the ability to stay up until four in the morning can become a "certified" ghost hunter. What makes Haunted New Jersey stand out is its founders' extreme skepticism. After Husveth and Rauber's combined 45 years or so of research, they've found plenty of rational explanations for spooky circumstances. "This woman e-mailed me pictures at night in the cemetery," Husveth says. "She says, ‘Look at this, it's an angel on the film.' Well, what she caught was a moth. Insects, dust particles, the pollen that's floating around—that's what they're getting. We get a lot of people talking about ‘orbs,' these translucent hovering blobs in photographs. Al and I get orbs all the time. You know what? It's flash bounce or raindrops or dew on the lens."

A New Brunswick–area transplant now living in Pittsburgh, Rauber has been investigating places like the Cranbury Inn for 32 years. He launched his Haunted Cape May tour seventeen years ago and continues to offer visitors samples of EVP recordings. His research has led him to consult for such television programs as Unsolved Mysteries, Encounters, and The Other Side, and he's appeared many times on Sightings. Husveth, a Somerset County native, started doing his own paranormal experiments in his late teens. He met Rauber more than ten years ago when Rauber gave a Halloween lecture in Madison. Both have full-time jobs in fields other than ghost research—Rauber is director of quality service for an international marketing company and Husveth is an information-technology consultant—and neither is ever paid for giving up weekends to pursue their hobby. They don't claim to rid houses of spirits or to put relatives in touch with dead loved ones. So what's their draw? Simple answer. If anyplace stands to be haunted, it's New Jersey—home to some of the country's oldest housing stock, much of which resonates with generations of life, death, and rebirth. And an awful lot of what goes on in these old buildings can't be explained.

Elise Young is a reporter at the Record of Hackensack.

See the newsstand issue for more "Ghost Stories."